Financial Times

The FT is a globally iconic media brand, respected around the world for the fearless journalism that fills its distinctive pink pages. Despite its familiarity, the brand was seen as belonging to a particular kind of reader. Younger audiences, many of whom were forming their media habits elsewhere, weren’t seeing the FT as relevant to them. With 2024 designated as the FT’s ‘Year of Democracy’, the moment was uniquely charged and the stage set for the brand to behave differently.

The FT needs two things: a new way to think about who it is for and a burst of new ideas for how it could cut through with them. In our reframing, the FT is for future-shapers who need unbiased, independent information to make decisions that influence the world around them. Our brief: wake these future-shapers up to the relevance of the FT.

Working closely with the FT’s teams, we developed a playbook of brand activations and ideas designed to earn the attention of wider audiences without diluting what made the brand prestigious. These included ‘FT Me’, a mechanism for established readers to gift subscriptions to younger ones, turning loyal readers into the FT’s most powerful advocates.

The FT’s teams entered their ‘Year of Democracy’ with a sharper sense of who it was talking to and how they could activate the brand to reach them, across the UK, the US and priority growth markets. A brand that had always stood for the quality of its journalism now has a platform to recruit the next generation of future-shapers who need it most.