Joanna Levesque, Managing Director, FT StrategiesFT Strategies, the specialist consulting firm owned by the Financial Times, helps organisations transform that attention into relevance and lasting value in a noisy digital world.
“We often say that every company is now, in some way, a media company,” says Joanna Levesque, FT Strategies’ managing director. “What we mean by that is every organisation produces content to reach its audience and build credibility.”
The idea is rooted in observation. Technology has transformed not only how people consume information, but how they form trust. Financial institutions that once competed on performance or product innovation now compete on how effectively they connect with clients, investors and the broader market. A report from an investment firm, a white paper from an insurer or a video from a private equity house are all part of the same attention economy. Yet, too often, they remain static outputs rather than dynamic channels of engagement.
The integration of strategy, storytelling and data allows us to bridge the logic of the newsroom with the discipline of the boardroom.
Designing for the Attention Economy
The starting point is always the audience. The question is no longer “who is the audience” but “what earns their time.”
FT Strategies helps research teams meet that expectation by translating dense analysis into formats that fit real behaviour through interactive reports, modular summaries, dashboards that allow users to explore raw data and formats that move as quickly as the questions they are trying to answer. It is a deliberate way to turn institutional knowledge into experiences that deepen engagement and signal which content is truly premium.
Data closes the loop by showing firms what is truly happening within their content ecosystem. Drawing on the practices that shaped the Financial Times’ subscriber strategy, FT Strategies uses natural language processing to tag and map an organisation’s full content output. It establishes a baseline view—which themes attract readers, how far users scroll, where they disengage and what prompts repeat visits. Combined with web analytics and first-party data, this diagnostic layer reveals which topics carry weight, which formats underperform and where untapped demand sits. It is the factual foundation behind the create-distribute-monetise logic, giving financial institutions a clear view of what they produce and how audiences respond.
What follows is turning that behavioural insight into commercial clarity. FT Strategies helps clients decide how content should work for the business; which material earns a subscriber gate, which deserves open distribution and which formats should be retired or redesigned. AI-generated tagging shows where attention peaks or fades, allowing organisations to tailor access, pricing and lead-generation strategies around real patterns rather than editorial instinct. This shifts the creative process from assumption to evidence. Each decision—story selection, structure, tone—flows from a clear understanding of what the audience values and how that attention can support growth.
“Our financial institution clients are increasingly realising that the attention economy isn’t just a communications issue; it’s a business issue,” says Levesque. “We help them thrive by showing them how to use their voice with purpose.”
Making Messages Move
Once a company knows what to say and why, the next challenge is how to make that message move. This is where distribute comes into play. It helps clients rebuild the way they plan, produce and publish, embedding newsroom agility inside corporate systems. That doesn’t mean turning bankers into journalists. It's just applying the same editorial discipline to complex corporate communication.
The goal is to make content flow as naturally as communication itself—fast, collaborative and audience-aware.
To achieve that, FT Strategies designs new workflows and decision frameworks that treat content as a continuous asset. Editorial, marketing and strategy teams learn to work from shared dashboards and aligned timelines, allowing every new release to build on what came before. Financial institutions learn to operate as leading media organisations, responsive to data, disciplined in process and creative in execution.
-
We often say that every company is now, in some way, a media company. What we mean by that is every organisation produces content to reach its audience and build credibility.
That operational clarity is reinforced at the strategic level, where FT Strategies helps organisations define their North Star—a shared vision that guides decisions and aligns teams around measurable outcomes.
Proof is in the Practice
The integration of strategy, storytelling and data allows FT Strategies to bridge the logic of the newsroom with the discipline of the boardroom. Financial institutions start making creative choices with commercial precision and strategic decisions with clarity of purpose. The impact soon follows.
In a recent engagement, FT Strategies collaborated with a global publisher whose business heavily relied on advertising. The challenge was to build a new revenue stream from first-party data without disrupting the open-access model that attracted large audiences. The process began with an analysis of how readers navigated the site, including how often they visited, how many articles they read before leaving and where interest dropped off. The team used that data to introduce registration prompts after specific engagement thresholds, testing where users were most willing to share information without feeling blocked.
The approach struck a balance between reach and retention. Audiences continued to engage freely, while the publisher collected valuable user data. New commercial pathways opened, including targeted newsletters and events, as well as improved advertising and subscription opportunities.
Within six months, the client added more than half a million registered users and increased digital revenue by 370 percent. The numbers proved that audience insight could power growth without compromising visibility, and it can turn communication from a cost centre into a measurable, self-sustaining system.
Where Strategy Meets Storytelling
FT Strategies draws its strength from people who understand both the economics of storytelling and the science of strategy. Among them are former consultants from McKinsey, Deloitte and Accenture working alongside business leaders and practitioners from leading media institutions, including Financial Times, The Times, The Guardian and Condé Nast. They bring analytical precision and editorial intuition into the same room, helping clients act like publishers while thinking like strategists. That mix has enabled FT Strategies to deliver more than 1,000 projects across 70 countries, providing it with a front-row view of how attention, trust and technology converge in global business.
Although FT Strategies has delivered several successful projects to private equity houses, investment managers and insurance companies, it believes significant room remains for expansion. The biggest opportunity lies in transforming how financial services businesses create, distribute and monetise content. Much of what exists today is single-format, limited in reach and rarely backed by audience insights. FT Strategies closes that gap.
Lessons from Journalism for a New Economy
Founded just five years ago, FT Strategies was created to help media organisations navigate digital disruption by applying the Financial Times’ own proven experience. What began as an effort to share the FT’s insights into building a sustainable digital subscription model has evolved into a broader commitment to guiding organisations through every stage of transformation.
Over time, as the team worked with hundreds of organisations worldwide and built a dataset that now spans more than 1,000 clients, it became clear that the same questions were emerging outside the media industry too. It showed that the core principles of journalism—rigorous fact-finding, clarity in explanation and respect for the reader’s time—apply as powerfully to financial institutions as they do to media brands.
That’s why today, for banks, insurers and investment firms looking to compete in an attention economy, FT Strategies’ story serves as a reminder that the next edge in finance may come not from a new product, but from telling the right story in the right way to the right audience.
