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More than half of brands plan to manage more of their data in-house amid a growing reluctance to share it with agencies and digital media owners.

Taking greater control over their data is more of a priority for marketers than bringing media and creative in-house, which has not risen markedly despite interest from brands.

Marketers are also increasingly worried about media measurement, with 70% fearing it has become "too corrupted" and "inconsistent".

These are some key findings from Media 2020: Refresh, a report by consultancy MediaSense and ISBA, which surveyed 250 marketers current attitudes two years after the first Media 2020 survey.

Marketers can often be critical of their agencies but this study should ring alarm bells.

Brands are "taking more control", using fewer agencies and "customising" their approach to media and marketing, according to Andy Pearch, co-founder of MediaSense.

"Rapid developments in technology and customer data" are driving "a profound and sustained shift", he said in the report.

In addition, 80% of respondents believe that organisational change is required "if they are going to develop and deliver dynamic creative".

The research warns that the "elephant in the room" is the rise of management consultants such as Accenture, Deloitte, EY and PwC, which are moving into digital marketing and challenging the role of agencies.

Data analytics and insight are considered "the critical media capability" for marketers, with 78% of respondents citing it as the most important capability, up from 67% in 2015.

"Brands have decided they should in-source capabilities which are critical for delivering competitive advantage," the report says. "Most of our respondents want to own their technology stacks [that bring together data from many sources], even if they dont ultimately want to manage them."

This explains why 54% of marketers said they will rely most on their in-house team "for strategic advice on data management" up from 42% who said that two years ago.

One unnamed marketer is quoted as saying: "If you have a data management platform, you need a strategy and you need to own it."

As data and customer relationship management assume greater importance, marketers are becoming more reluctant to share this information with agencies and tech platforms, particularly as the European Union General Data Protection Regulation will enforce tougher rules from next year.

"For the first time, we heard some clients openly talking about not sharing their data with their agencies," the report notes.

One marketer said: "I do not want an agency telling me whats working and whats not working. I want the agency providing me with insights with the small data they see and then I want to use that in conjunction with a much richer view that I have to get a sense of whether its been successful or not."

The study warns that the role of agencies is "becoming more exe-cutional" and risks "being gradually disintermediated".

One of the biggest forces of disintermediation has been the rise of Google and Facebook, which have been striking direct relationships with advertisers. However, the survey found that there is a growing wariness about these tech Goliaths. "We need to be very careful we dont create a system where all the data sits within the big digital companies," one marketer said.

Marketers need to be more agile, which is why they are bringing some digital skills in-house and using fewer agencies to ensure a more integrated approach and to save money.

The survey found that 62% of marketers plan to use fewer agencies, up from 58% in 2015. While brands are taking data in-house, they recognise that other disciplines such as content and programmatic require expertise from external agencies.

According to the study, 44% of marketers look to a creative agency for content development, up from 41% in 2015. By contrast, only 28% of marketers expect to do it in-house compared with 33% two years ago. Media agencies are seen to have little role in content creation.

There is better news for media agencies on programmatic buying, as only 19% of brands plan to manage it in-house, while 48% think programmatic is best handled by media agencies, up from 42% in 2015.

Some big brands are turning to one agency holding company to provide a range of services, as WPP is doing for Walgreens Boots Alliance. One marketer joked: "Having one throat to choke really works!"

There is also a growing trend for an "on-site" agency that can be based inside the clients office, as Oliver and Engines NuFu are offering brands.

When asked what aspect of the media industry they would like to fix, transparency was the biggest issue for 47% of marketers surveyed.

However, when asked what kept them awake at night, 24% of marketers cited brand safety and 23% said measurement, while transparency barely registered.

The report suggests transparency issues are "fixable" in the wake of scrutiny by ISBA and the US Association of National Advertisers. As one marketer said: "There needs to be honesty about where the money is made on the agency side and recognition about the importance of paying fairly by the advertisers. We have created a ghastly chicken-and-egg situation."

However, fears around brand safety and independent measurement are more systemic. Most respondents felt there has been little or no progress in industry measurement since 2015, with 70% agreeing that "media measurement currencies are increasingly becoming too corrupted and inconsistent for our purposes".

One other finding is a shift back in favour of paid media over earned and owned channels. In 2015, 71% of respondents agreed that there would be a significant shift in investment and focus from paid to earned and owned media. Now, only 44% think that is the case. Paid media is trusted, particularly in more traditional channels, at a time when doubts about the digital media supply chain have increased.

One marketer said: "From a brand side, Im yet to see really convincing evidence that budgets should be flooding into digital at quite the rate they seem to have done."

Looking ahead to 2020, Pearch believes brands will have more varied, agile and customised relationships with their agencies. "The rate of progress and change, however, will be frustrated by legacy attitudes, systems and processes as well as, unfortunately, vested interests," he said.

WPPs decision to merge MEC and Maxus, which was announced after the completion of this report, is proof that a lot of "legacy attitudes" could be swept away sooner than 2020.

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Brands take control from agencies - CampaignLive

JUNE 11 Aside from the political ramifications of this weeks UK General Election, the results also lead to another significant conclusion: large chunks of the mainstream media are increasingly out of touch with popular opinion.

For decade upon decade, it has been widely taken as a simple truth that the media possesses two important powers: the ability to know what the general public is thinking about any given matter, and the ability to influence or even control those opinions and beliefs.

Major newspapers, television networks and radio stations have always been portrayed often self-portrayed as a great, sprawling, pernicious and all-knowing entity, granted with almost sinister powers to manipulate the minds of normal people.

Whatever the media said, the nave masses would lap it up. And precisely because people would believe anything they read, saw and heard, the medias owners, editors and prominent journalists were able to more or less tell people what to think.

In British politics, these magic powers reached their peak in the 1992 General Election, when Labour party candidate Neil Kinnock was expected to win and end 13 years of Conservative rule under Margaret Thatcher and then John Major.

But on the morning of the vote, the countrys top-selling and staunchly Conservative newspaper, The Sun, lambasted Kinnocks plans to increase taxes by publishing a front page which dramatically stated: If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.

Suddenly, the tide turned in Majors favour and he claimed an unexpected majority, with millions of voters apparently induced to change their minds by The Suns impactful headline to the extent that the newspaper subsequently claimed sole responsibility for the outcome with another grammatically challenged headline: Its The Sun Wot Won It.

Twenty-five years later, recent elections suggest the power of the media to predict and control political events appears to have evaporated.

Britains Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May returns to 10 Downing Street in central London on June 9, 2017 after making a statement following the as results of a snap general election. Newspapers like The Sun supported her campaign and predicted wrongly as it turns out that she would win by a landslide. Picture by AFPThat became very evident this time last year, when the UKs European Union referendum shocked absolutely everybody by resulting in a victory for Brexit, leaving the entire range of the British media and opinion poll companies scratching their heads and wondering how they had got it so wrong.

This week has been similar, albeit less dramatic, as bungling Prime Minister Theresa May suffered the humiliation of losing her majority in an election she had been tipped to win very easily.

The media certainly tried to help her. Both The Sun and the countrys second-biggest selling newspaper, The Daily Mail, both strongly supported May during the build-up to the election and also launched a series of smear attacks against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who had been dismissed as a no-hoper even by many members of his own party.

But Corbyn confounded expectations by gaining more votes than any Labour leader since Tony Blair in 1997, increasing his partys share of the vote by 9.8 per cent their biggest increase from one election to the next in more than 70 years.

And so The Daily Mail, which greeted Theresa Mays call for the election by predicting a whitewash with the boisterous headline Crush The Saboteurs, was forced to meet this weeks results with an almost apologetic back-track, admitting the election was Mays Gamble That Backfired.

Once again, the UKs two top-selling newspapers got it horribly wrong. Whats going on? Why has the medias power dissipated?

The answer is social media. Until recently, traditional media provided the only widely-available means of finding out about the wider world. If you wanted to know what was happening outside your immediate environment, you had to read a newspaper, watch television or listen to the radio.

In the last 15 years, however, those methods for the dissemination of information have been utterly dismantled and replaced by personalised channels such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Twitter and the result is communicative chaos.

Now, nobody knows what the people think because the people can think whatever they like and share those thoughts with whoever they like, and it all takes place completely under the radar of mainstream media, who have quite simply lost control.

Last year it was revealed that Facebook and WhatsApp process more than 60 BILLION messages per day. Thats an impossible amount of data to keep track of, never mind to attempt to control or influence.

Concurrently, media sales are dropping through the floor. Many local newspapers have been forced out of business, and even long-established national titles are fighting for survival: The Sun, for example, has seen its sales nearly halved from more than 3 million daily copies to 1.6 million in just seven years.

The industry is having to evolve rapidly, but even the biggest and best media organisations are struggling to keep up. Earlier this year, Americas top-selling paper, The New York Times, addressed its own crisis by publishing an extensive report into its plans for surviving the digital revolution, admitting: We must change the way we work.

Despite the transformation, there is still a place for quality journalism because the greatest strength of social media the fact that anyone can say anything is also its greatest weakness.

Facebook et al are tremendously democratising methods of communication, giving a voice to people who previously did not have one.

But they also provide so much content it is just impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff: with so many opinions and analyses and predictions out there in cyberspace, how do we know which are well-informed and reliable, and which should be ignored?

This is where traditional media can take the lead, but not simply by pushing any narrative and expecting the public to buy it.

As this weeks UK elections again showed, the media world has changed. And unless agenda-driven newspapers like The Sun and The Daily Mail change with it, they probably dont have any future at all.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.

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UK media misses highlight changing world - Malay Mail Online

The man convicted last year of trying to kill George Zimmerman will be back in a Florida courtroom next week.

>> Read more trending news

Matthew Apperson filed a motion in Seminole County, asking the judge to correct errors he claims were made with the sentence he received.

The motion asks the judge to correct the sentence on the count for aggravated assault with a firearm.

Even if Apperson wins, it will have no effect on his prison sentence unless his case is overturned on appeal.

Apperson was sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in prison in October on a charge of second-degree attempted murder stemming from a 2015 road rage incident with Zimmerman.

Apperson claimed throughout the trial that he was defending himself. He is also serving 15 years on a charge of shooting into an occupied vehicle and aggravated assault with a firearm.

According to a 77-page motion, Apperson accused the court of sentencing errors in regard to those two charges.

"It's important in any prosecution that the court gets it right," WFTV legal analyst Bill Sheaffer said.

Sheaffer said that even if the judge corrects Apperson's sentencing guidelines, it will have little impact on his overall sentencing, because his sentences are running concurrently.

"The only way this is going to make any difference is if he wins his appeal on the attempted murder charge. Otherwise he is going to be serving that mandatory 20-year sentence on that charge," Sheaffer said.

The case is still pending.

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Man who shot at George Zimmerman says judge made errors in sentencing - MyPalmBeachPost

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) Florida became the first state with a law that spells out that prosecutors, and not defendants, have the burden of proof in pretrial stand your ground hearings when Republican Gov. Rick Scott signed a bill Friday.

The measure was among 16 bills that Scott signed, including a bill that gives students and school employees a broader right to express their religious viewpoint in schools.

The stand your ground bill was fought by prosecutors who say it will make their job more difficult to convict people who commit acts of violence and claim self-defense.

The Florida Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that defendants have to prove in pretrial hearings that they were defending themselves in order to avoid prosecution on charges for a violent act.

That led Republicans to seek to shift that burden. They argued that it protects a defendants constitutional right that presumes they are innocent until proven guilty. But opponents said it will embolden people to shoot to kill, and then claim self-defense knowing that the only witness against them can no longer testify.

Only four of the other 21 states with stand your ground laws mention burden of proof Alabama, Colorado, Georgia and South Carolina and all place it on defendants.

Many states have long invoked the castle doctrine, allowing people to use deadly force to defend themselves in their own homes.

Florida changed that in 2005, so that even outside a home, a person has no duty to retreat and can stand his or her ground anywhere they are legally allowed to be. Other states followed suit, and stand your ground defenses became much more common in pre-trial immunity hearings and during trials.

The 2012 killing of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman opened a debate about the limits of self-defense, and it hasnt let up since Zimmerman was acquitted of second-degree murder after jurors received instructions on Floridas stand your ground law.

VIDEO FROMAFP news agency CHECK OUT THEIR SITE.

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Florida law shifts burden of proof in 'stand your ground' - News Talk Florida

Her family calls Reality Leigh Winner a patriot who may have made some mistakes but acted with conviction for the good of her country. The federal government portrays her as something more sinister a threat to national security.

Those contrasting portraits, first unveiled last week in a bond hearing in an Augusta federal court, will likely emerge in the months ahead as the central themes in the first leak prosecution under the Trump administration.

Each side has much at stake.

Legal experts say prosecutors will want to make an example of someone who allegedly shared secrets in an era where rampant leaks have angered President Donald Trump and damaged his presidency. Winner, meanwhile, will be fighting for her freedom.

Winner, an intelligence contractor who worked at Fort Gordon near Augusta, pleaded not guilty to a single count of willful retention and transmission of national defense information. She is charged under the Espionage Act with leaking a top secret NSA document on Russian attempts to hack U.S. election systems to the news media.

Prosecutors won the first sortie on Thursday, convincing U.S. Magistrate Judge Brian Epps that Winner is too great a risk to be released on bond. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Solari said the government is concerned Winner might have compromised other secrets, and that she had a persistent desire to travel to Afghanistan and researched technology that could be used to cover her digital tracks.

Winner allegedly wrote that she wanted to burn the White House down and in notes appeared sympathetic to the Taliban.

Winners lawyer, Titus Nichols, said his client isnt a flight risk nor a threat.

Friends and her family have described her as an animal lover, a fitness buff and a decorated Air Force veteran. Her stepfather, Gary Davis, said her youth, her liberal views and her high security clearance make her a perfect patsy.

Thats what our biggest fear is political persecution to drive home a political point, Davis said. Thats the unwritten message. If you go against the government, then were going to shut you down. And were going to throw you into prison and throw away the key.

Record might engender sympathy

President Barack Obama prosecuted more leakers than all other presidents before him combined, and though the Winner case is the first under Trump, the new president has demanded the Department of Justice find and prosecute more.

Under Trump, even the definition of leaker has expanded. On Friday, the president called James Comey, the FBI director he fired amid probes into Russia election meddling, a leaker, although the contents of the memo Comey told Congress he had distributed to the press do not appear to qualify as classified information.

Joshua Lowther, a criminal defense attorney in Atlanta, said Winner could make a sympathetic defendant. Shes a six-year veteran of the Air Force awarded a commendation for her intelligence work, which helped kill and capture hundreds of enemy combatants.

One of Winners potential defenses is to highlight that history of service to her country, including in the decision whether misguided or principled to leak material about Russian influence on the 2016 presidential election that she believed the public needed to know, Lowther said.

In court Thursday, prosecutors sought to shoot down that line of defense with explosive allegations she expressed sympathies to American enemies and wanted to burn the White House, Lowther said.

The government thinks this is someone who deserves to be prosecuted severely, Lowther said.

So far, though, the prosecutions picture of Winner as a danger to the nation doesnt fully square with the material she is alleged to have leaked, said Kenneth Geers, a senior fellow at international affairs think tank Atlantic Council.

Geers, a former NSA and Defense Department analyst, said what Winner allegedly leaked and where she sent the information to the whistleblower website, The Intercept makes it appear she acted out of conscience.

When I read the (original Intercept) article I thought this is a person who might be a Bernie supporter, said Geers, referring to Bernie Sanders, the U.S. senator from Vermont and former Democratic presidential candidate.

Unless prosecutors uncover that Winner compromised more sensitive information, something that would aide an adversary or wound U.S. interests abroad, the case doesnt seem to support the argument that shes a jihadist, Geers said.

I dont know her state of mind or logic, but it seems like if she were a jihadist, only releasing information about the election doesnt make a lot of sense, Geers said.

Prosecutors do not have to prove harm

Not all leak cases are treated equally.

Former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus and Marine Gen. James Cartwright avoided lengthy prison sentences by pleading to lesser charges. Winner fits into the pattern of the Justice Department throwing the book at lower level employees, said Edward MacMahon, a veteran criminal defense lawyer versed in national security cases.

MacMahon was part of the defense team for Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA operative who was convicted of espionage and sent to prison for leaking details of a secret U.S. operation to sabotage Irans nuclear program to a New York Times reporter.

Though the Winner case is slated to be tried in federal court in Augusta, it will be directed from Washington by the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section of the Justice Departments National Security Division.

The government will put enormous resources into trying this case, MacMahon said.

Prosecutors will attempt to prove that Winner had access to the classified material, gave it to persons without that access and that they can exclude other possible suspects.

The salacious allegations of sympathizing with enemies only ups the ante.

Prosecutors also have a significant advantage: they do not have to prove the leak caused harm to the nation.

They dont have to prove actual harm, they only have to prove the possibility of harm, he said. Its been challenged in court as vague but no court has ever overturned a conviction from it.

Staff writers Johnny Edwards and Jeremy Redmon contributed to this report.

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Accused NSA leaker may be treated harshly as an example, experts say - MyAJC