A new agenda for global business.

The FT is one of the most influential brands in the world. When it speaks, world leaders don’t just listen – they act. But it hadn’t repositioned since the financial crash and the world – rife with division – needed more than just advertising.

We worked with the senior editorial team at the FT to fundamentally reconsider what role the FT should play. The result wasn’t just a brand platform but a new editorial agenda that transformed how the FT and its readers can collectively drive progress in business, society and the wider world.

Galvanising the business from the inside, out.

The FT has a legacy of iconic advertising, articulated in lines including ‘No FT No Comment’ and ‘We Live in Financial Times’. However, these spoke to an emerging global economy and the people in established positions of power who were driving it. Boardroom-based titans of industry.

But the world is changing and in the hands of a very different leader. More diverse, more progressive and more cognisant of the responsibility that business has to impact broader culture and society. We needed to appeal to this next generation of FT reader without alienating the existing core audience. Giving the brand a clear role for existing not just today, but in the future.

By doing this, our objective was to galvanise the brand – inside and out; earn it a new type of equity in culture and drive growth – primarily through new subscriptions.

Uniting audiences and the brand through shared mindset.

Audience research showed that our target audience perceived the brand to be ‘a middle-aged man in a grey suit with his back turned’. It was clear that whilst the FT is a globally-respected authority, its association with the suited elite runs so deep that non-subscribers saw it as part of the establishment and ultimately in service of corporate profit.

The challenge was that we couldn’t ignore existing readers. However, by interrogating the FT’s brand values, we realised that they could align with both old and new readers through the belief that success goes beyond the bottom line. That profit should come with purpose. And that companies must generate value in society and the wider world, as well as in shareholdings.

This change – of identifying the FT reader through a mindset not a demographic – was key to strategically unlocking this challenge.

Prospecting into culture with an agenda of progress.

We worked closely with the editorial team – including editor Lionel Barber and chief economics commentator Martin Wolf - identifying a unique inflection point at which capitalism is having a detrimental effect, politically and societally. Research showed conversation about capitalism was majorly (54%) negative in the last year, but 90% of FT readers think businesses behaving ethically in order to address this, is essential.

We then mapped the competitor ‘noise’ in category and found an assortment of editorial bias that only contributed to populist opinion and division. It became clear that our agenda should be one of forwarded momentum and progress.

Finally, our breakthrough moment came in realising that we could use this ambition to not just create a new brand platform, but to define a new editorial agenda that would unite the business, its journalists and the mindset of our audience.

The New Agenda: Capitalism. Time for a reset.

The New Agenda is a rallying cry to make business better. But the FT is a trusted guide, so we knew that the key to effective execution was to directly prospect out into culture with its world-class journalism.

We launched with an open letter from the editor, cover-wrapping the newspaper for the first time in its history, declaring that capitalism needed to be reset. We lowered the paywall on FT.com allowing Global audiences to immerse themselves in New Agenda content.

The platform has since been brought to life in executions across OOH, print and digital, featuring provocations from live editorial, inviting consumers to subscribe to the New Agenda via a dedicated online hub.

Beyond communications, the platform has continued to show how the FT behaves from events to service innovation – equipping business leaders everywhere to write a new agenda.

Driving the most successful chapter in the FT’s history.

Following launch, traffic to FT.com increased by 25% with 1 million new readers in the first week alone. We witnessed a +5% increase in consideration amongst our key growth audiences and a 9% increase in retail sales.

The New Agenda continues to transform every part of the FT’s business – generating more earned coverage (40+ countries) than any campaign in its history. It has influenced debate at events including the United Nations Summit and driven innovations such as a revolutionary new financial indexing system based on sustainability and societal purpose.

Finola McDonnell, CMO at the FT was voted Campaign’s Business Leader Of The Year. She said: ‘Looking back in history at change, it’s when business gets involved that you see real impact. Our readership are influential people and this is a call to action for them to lead on.’