There’s a lot of optimism in the air about the pandemic coming to an end, thanks to increasingly widespread vaccine deployment. People hope to resume normal lives at home and at work. But marketing executives already suspect there’s no going back to the way things were in 2019. Many CMOs saw huge budget cuts in 2020 and are wondering what comes next.

One thing seems certain: digital ad spending, which outpaced expenditures on non-digital forms of advertising for the first time...