Empowering media transformation: The unique story of FT Strategies

In 2023, the Financial Times celebrated 130 years of printing on pink paper. Although the pink paper is now an iconic part of the FT’s brand, originally it was used because it was cheaper to print on unbleached paper (unfortunately the same cannot be said today!).

The Financial Times is proud of its history and continues to be a trusted source of world-class journalism for business leaders. Our aspiration in FT Strategies is to emulate that success in a new vertical - by delivering world-class consulting and advisory to leaders of media organisations.

In this article, I want to reflect on the origination story of FT Strategies before my arrival, what makes us different and explain how I want to continue in the pursuit of a financially sustainable media industry and a new model for consulting.

In early 2018, the Financial Times board decided to leap into the unknown - commissioning internal research into how the FT might commercialise its own technology, data, or intellectual property.

After speaking to industry leaders, potential clients, and FT employees, the conclusion was that the FT’s experience and expertise are our most valuable asset. For many, this came as no great surprise - the FT was one of the first to break conventional wisdom in 2001 and charge for online content, it pioneered the metered paywall in 2007 and continues to be a leader in enterprise subscriptions. Also, advising other media organisations was not new - for years the FT had hosted other news organisations (including the New York Times) as they looked for support in their pivot to digital and launching subscription-based models.

So in late 2018, we put together a small experimental consulting team and ran our first project with a leading Nordic publisher. Soon we realised the uniqueness of our offering - we were able to draw upon the experiences of the FT and put FT employees (subject matter experts) in front of clients - allowing us to be practical and empathetic when providing advice.

In 2019, “FT Consulting” (as we were known then) started to make strong inroads as we won a number of clients in adjacent sectors - including the Tate and Penguin Books. We found that clients particularly valued our advice around long-term strategic planning and specifically the FT’s “North Star” Methodology. This methodology - still used today - was fundamental in the FT achieving one million subscribers and has proven core in helping our clients set and meet ambitious goals and improve internal alignment.

By the end of 2019, we were confident in our hypothesis that the FT could offer meaningful consulting services to the media industry. As a result, we formalised the business - creating the FT Strategies brand and hiring a scaled-up full-time team of consultants and media experts. This formalisation coincided with an opportunity to partner with the International News Media Association (INMA) and the Google News Initiative to launch the “GNI Subscriptions Lab” in Europe (a nine-month programme to help eight different publishers from Europe strengthen digital subscription capabilities and grow reader revenue).

Fast forward to 2024 and FT Strategies has become a leading specialist media consultancy:

• We have worked with over 700 media organisations from around the world (including El Pais, Corriere della Sera, Nation Media Group, Singapore Press Holdings, the National Theatre) in over 70 countries.
• We have helped our clients to achieve remarkable outcomes, helping to secure the future of news - either through our work with GNI Subscription Lab participants (we helped one acquire over 100,000 new subscribers and reduce churn by 6%) or helping a leading media organisation in Europe halve their churn rate and reach 500,000 subscribers.
• We have supported clients with a wide range of services - launching AI experiments (including a propensity to churn model), increasing conversion rates of marketing campaigns by 10x and growing known visitors to a site by 58%.
• We have partnered with the Google News Initiative to significantly expand a programme that supports publishers in their business and digital transformation - reaching over 500 publishers over a 3-year period.

Irrespective of these achievements, what makes us most proud is the feedback from our clients and the recurring projects that act as a stamp of approval.

Although I have touched on a number of factors, I want to summarise what (I feel) makes FT Strategies different:

1. We have deeply valuable lived experience and expertise from the FT as an institution, FT employees, and our team from across the industry - we know the key players, partners, and challenges within the ecosystem
2. We have worked with a large, diverse pool of media clients: 700+ media clients globally
3. We ground all our work in the use of data, analytics and artificial intelligence
4. We have a unique delivery model, capable of providing tailored engagements for clients or cohort-based consulting that multiplies impact across multiple brands at once
5. We enable our clients to get outstanding results, showing empathy and maintaining integrity

As we look forward to scaling the business further, we believe in the relevance of driving sustainable growth in news publishing across the wider media business and beyond. Specifically, we’ll be looking to:

1. Continue our industry leadership, known as the media’s trusted partner to navigate change sustainably
2. Be more than the sum of the FT’s parts - ramp up our combined experience with the rest of the FT to bring even more value to our clients
3. Maintain and deepen our relationship with our existing clients; providing high value services from strategy into implementation
4. Extend our sectors served more widely across media, relating our experience to a wider range of media challenges
5. Expand our offering, enabling us to support a wider range of clients across a bigger range of problems

It’s a very exciting time to be taking over as Managing Director of FT Strategies - I cannot wait to meet as many of you as possible and continue the business's remarkable story.