Trust is the product: What the FT knows that most brands don't

I work in one of the most unpredictable sectors there is. Every six months, there seems to be a new way for people to find and consume news. It’s either a new platform, a new AI tool, or a new billionaire buying a newspaper. If you'd told me 20 years ago that I'd be thinking about ChatGPT as a distribution channel for the Financial Times, I'd have laughed. And yet here we are.

So when people ask me what resilience looks like inside a 140-year-old media brand, I don't think about bouncing back from a hit. I think about something closer to consistency.

It's like being in a storm: the wind is going to throw you around no matter what, but if you've got strong foundations, you can sway without losing your footing. That's the job. That's the whole job, really.

Read on as I share how the Financial Times (FT) stays relevant in an era defined by AI, platform disruption, and shifting audience behaviour.

[You can also listen to me sharing these insights on this episode of CMO Convo or watch the video below]

Trust isn’t a value statement, but the strategy

Here's a distinction I come back to constantly: truth and trust are not the same thing. Truth is something you produce, and it’s relational. It's something your audience has to feel and keep feeling, over and over again.

That trust runs in a few directions at once:

My readers need to trust that what they see in the FT is credible and accurate enough that they can make decisions off the back of it.
My advertisers need to trust that I'm selling them what I say I'm selling.
Anyone who hands over their data needs to trust that I'll use it properly.

That whole web of trust is what lets a subscription business exist at all.

It sounds a bit old-fashioned, maybe even a bit mundane, to say that trust is your differentiator. But it's never been truer.

Our readers are professional, decision-making people who genuinely don't have time to sift through noise to find something reliable. That's precisely what separates us from an endless scroll of social content, where (and I say this without any snobbery) you genuinely can’t tell what's trustworthy and what isn't. There's just too much of it, and it’s all moving too fast.

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My advice to any CMO is to stop treating trust as a value on a slide in your onboarding deck. Treat it as the actual product. Everything else (your channels, campaigns, content formats, etc.) sits on top of it.

We take it seriously enough that it shows up in how we hire, not just how we market. In every interview, whether it's for a journalist, someone building our products and platforms, or someone joining my own marketing team, we probe for whether they're genuinely bought into the mission.

You can't fake that kind of alignment for long, and it's a lot cheaper to check for it at the door than to try to repair it later.

We use AI, we just won’t drive it off a cliff

AI is a strange, double-edged thing for a company like Financial Times. On one hand, it's genuinely useful. We use large language models for what we call story discovery. For example, we use it to help go through huge piles of documents to spot patterns a human would take far too long to find. It's a real, practical time-saver.

On the other hand, AI is also a threat to the entire trustworthy ecosystem we rely on. AI companies scrape our journalism, which costs real money and real people to produce. From there, the AI repackages it (often inaccurately) for free. That's a genuine problem, not just for us but for anyone trying to build something built on accuracy.

Our answer has been to hold two things at once.

We adopt AI where it makes us faster and better. But every single thing that appears on our site has had human editorial oversight. We don’t use shortcuts or unsupervised output. I like to describe it as owning a good sports car: we're not afraid to drive it, we're just not going to drive it off a cliff. We'll go fast, but always within limits our readers can rely on.

That balance (lean in, but don't lose control) is something every brand navigating AI right now needs to find for itself. There's no universal formula. But if you let the tool make promises to your customers that you can't stand behind, you've lost the thing that made you valuable in the first place.

Brand isn’t decoration. It's the reason people don't want to leave.

For a long time, brand has been treated as the "nice to have" in a marketing budget. It’s the intangible thing a CEO is reluctant to fund compared to a performance campaign with a clean, attributable return. I understand why. Trust and brand are harder to put a number on than a click-through rate.

But here's how I think about it. My actual job is to make people feel like they've joined something they don't want to leave. A club of intelligent peers and people who think like they do, or who they aspire to think like.

That has to hold across some genuinely different experiences of the same brand, too. Plenty of my readers log in as themselves and read their own personalised FT every day. But a large part of our audience are corporate customers, accessing us through an enterprise license with a completely different interface and journey.

The product looks different depending on who's using it, but the promise underneath (trustworthy, credible, and worth your time) has to feel identical no matter which door someone walks through.

That's why our comm the feeling of being somewhere special is the actual product experience. And that's true whether you're selling news, trainers, or software. Ask yourself: when someone opens your app among the dozen others competing for their attention, what actually pulls them in? It's rarely just the core utility. It's the feeling that they're somewhere they belong.

Brand isn't the opposite of revenue. Done properly, it's what makes people stay long enough to become revenue.

One brand across many businesses

Something people often don't realise about the FT: we're not just the pink newspaper and FT.com. We're a group, and the portfolio is bigger than most people expect:

A range of specialist publications that go deeper into specific industries
A large events business
A production studio
A B2B research company

That means my job isn't just protecting the brand of one product. It's making sure that same "FT-ness" (that same feeling of trust and quality) shows up consistently whether someone is reading a specialist newsletter, sitting in the room at one of our live events, or working with our research team.

That's a harder problem than it sounds, and I think a lot of CMOs underestimate how much deliberate work it takes to keep a portfolio feeling like one coherent thing, rather than a loose federation of products that happen to share a logo.

Where do you even find your audience now?

I'd like to share a small but very real example of how much distribution has shifted under our feet.

Not long before the pandemic, I was still putting up billboards in Canary Wharf, because I knew exactly where our business audience physically stood every morning. I barely do that anymore.

Once the world went digital, we ended up in a completely different game: working out how to reach younger readers who might discover us through a conversation with ChatGPT rather than typing FT.com into a browser. They're not seeing a billboard, making a mental note, and going to look us up later. The entire journey to becoming a reader looks different now, and it keeps changing.

That's the tension every marketer is living with. You have to stay anchored in your principles, or you've got nothing to hold onto in a storm. But you also have to stay genuinely alert to where and how people are actually finding you, because that part shifts every single year.

Leading change without losing your people

I don't think anyone actually loves change. I certainly don't. If someone moves a chair in my own house, it throws me for a minute. So imagine asking hundreds of people, across different offices, cultures and time zones, to change how they work. That's genuinely hard, and pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.

What I've learned is that you have to paint a clear picture of where the change leads and why it will actually make things better, not just different. During the shift to working from home, we thought we'd need a week to test whether our systems could cope. In the end, we went almost overnight, because there was a clear, urgent reason to do it. People can move remarkably fast when they understand why.

The other thing I've learned is that you can't spend all your energy trying to convert the people who are dead set against change. Spend it on the people willing to be ambassadors. Those are the ones who'll try things, give you honest feedback, and show others it can be done.

Build local relationships in every office and region, because change lands very differently depending on how close people feel to head office and how much context they have. Change isn't a one-off event for us. It's a permanent condition of the industry. The goal isn't to get through one change. It's to build a culture that expects it.

My advice for CMOs in 2026

If you asked me for one piece of advice heading into 2026, it's this: resist the urge to chase every fad.

I say this as someone who is, by nature, a bit of a magpie. I'll go to a conference, see something a competitor is doing, and think, "that's cool, I should do that too." But most of the time, that instinct is a distraction. It spreads your team thin and pulls focus away from the thing that actually built your brand in the first place.

We're in the middle of writing a new strategy for the FT right now, and the starting point isn't "what's everyone else doing." It's "what are our core strengths, and how do we build on them for a modern audience?"

That's a much better question.

Chase new audiences where it genuinely makes sense, but don't rebuild your entire identity around whoever is loudest in the room that week.

You do you. Do it well, do it consistently, and let that be the thing people can rely on, especially when everything around you refuses to sit still.

Trust is the product: What the Financial Times gets right (and most CMOs miss)