That younger audiences are more likely to watch highlights on Snapchat than they are full matches on Sky Sports is a moot point for the broadcaster, one it believes is less of a factor in its much-publicised drop in viewers. Yes, younger audiences are less likely to engage and thus view fewer full matches, but they have never been the broadcaster's predominant subscribers.

IBM has started to use its artificial intelligence programme, Watson, to plan and buy media in the UK. It's something the tech giant has been doing in the US for over 18 months and has thus far delivered massive gains in the performance of its online ad campaigns, according to the business.

Facebook is updating its "trending" feature that highlights hot topics on its social networking site -- part of its effort to root out the kind of "fake news" stories that critics contend helped Donald Trump become president. With the changes announced on Wednesday, Facebook's trending list will consist of topics being covered by several publishers.

The Great British Bake Off will return to television screens this year, it has been confirmed, after the BBC agreed to waive its right to force Channel 4 to hold off until 2018 at the earliest. The BBC, which lost the rights to the programme last September after its rival broadcaster bid a reported GBP25m per year, said it wished the show well.

Massive collections of fake accounts are lying dormant on Twitter, research suggests. The largest network ties together more than 350,000 accounts, and further work suggests that others may be even bigger. UK researchers accidentally uncovered the lurking networks while probing Twitter to see how people use it.

YouGov polling of adult UK Internet users carried out last week by UK-based privacy rights watchdog Privacy International found that 54% of respondents did not trust the Trump administration to use U.S. surveillance powers only for legitimate reasons, and 73% of respondents questioned what the UK government planned to do to protect their personal data from misuse by the new U.S. administration.

BT's market value has plunged by more than GBP7bn after it issued a profit warning while revising up the impact of an accounting scandal in its Italian business from GBP145m to GBP530m. Shares ended the day almost 21% lower. It represented the steepest one-day decline in the company's stock.

The publisher of Britain's "Guardian" newspaper plans to cut costs by 20% in a bid to break even within three years after its strategy of building one of the most popular Web sites in the world failed to make up for falling print sales. Guardian Media Group (GMG) said it needed to cut about 50 million pounds ($71 million) from its 268 million pound annual cost base to protect the future of the paper.

The Chartered Institute of Marketing has released research showing that a large majority of professional marketer respondents agree that ad blocking will help the industry. According to the research that consulted 255 marketing professionals, more than three-quarters of marketers (76%) "think ad-blocking will be positive for the industry, encouraging greater creativity."

Ad-tech outfit Adform has confirmed that it has made a significant number of redundancies with the exits understood to be across a number of departments in 15 territories, in what is the latest in a series of staff cuts in the fast-evolving sub-sector of the advertising industry.