How our Advisory Partners help build the capabilities that media leaders need

Turning data and AI capability into measurable impact

• Challenge: Data remains a clear capability gap across many publishers. Two-thirds of digital natives and organisations with less than $5m turnover have no data team or data warehouse. Even among larger organisations, data maturity varies widely. At the same time, AI is being widely piloted, yet many leadership teams struggle to demonstrate measurable commercial value or clear ROI from these initiatives.
  
  

• Advisor expertise: Karine Serfaty brings nearly two decades of experience leading data, AI and subscription transformation at The New York Times, ITV and The Economist Group. In senior strategy and data roles, she embedded data into commercial, product and newsroom decision-making and redesigned operating models to support digital growth. Her advisory work focuses on helping organisations move through critical stages of data and AI maturity, delivering step-change improvements in productivity, innovation and decision-making.
  
  

• What’s underestimated: “AI success is a strategy and human challenge as much as a technology one. AI is reshaping business models and consumer ecosystems. Internally, it shifts decision-making power and exposes operating model constraints. Unless organisations understand these market changes, redesign how humans and machines work together, and strengthen their underlying data structures, pilots remain expensive experiments. Sustainable value comes from systemic change.”
  
  

Attracting and monetising future audiences

• Challenge: Audience growth and loyalty are among the biggest blockers to sustainable growth, particularly in the $1m–$100m revenue segment. Weak audience understanding remains a challenge, particularly for legacy publishers, as does catering for the changing behaviours of younger consumers. 

   

• Advisor expertise: Jonathan Paterson is a digital news and video leader with senior newsroom experience at the BBC and The News Movement. He now works with publishers to help them meet audiences where they are, specialising in digital strategy, newsroom transformation, format innovation and storytelling designed to engage new audiences on emerging platforms.

   

• What’s underestimated: “The importance of understanding your audience. Knowing the needs, interests and behaviours of your audience will better inform everything from strategy to content production. The experience of social media — with its wealth of data at our fingertips —demonstrates the impact insight can have. Creating a culture where audience insight is at the heart of decision-making is key to a successful content business.”
  
  

Delivering sustainable subscription growth in highly competitive markets

• Challenge: Subscription growth remains a key strategic priority among a quarter of publishers, particularly national and global organisations. However, as revenues scale, we heard that priorities are shifting towards ARPU optimisation and cost efficiency — reflecting maturing markets and plateauing growth.
  
  

• Advisory expertise: Karen Nahum has led strategy and transformation across Il Sole 24 Ore, De Agostini, The Walt Disney Company and Humanitas. She delivered a turnaround at Il Sole 24 Ore from loss to profitability, driving subscription growth and cross-platform integration. Her work combines board-level governance, operating model redesign and rigorous, evidence-based strategy focused on long-term value creation.
  
  

• What’s underestimated: “The biggest misconception is that AI will unlock growth on its own. In reality, AI amplifies the strengths and weaknesses already embedded in an organisation’s data and commercial discipline. Without clear governance, value metrics and board-level ownership, AI becomes cost inflation rather than margin expansion. Subscription growth today is a function of intelligence embedded into every commercial decision”.
  
  

Optimising content distribution and discoverability

• Challenge: A quarter of digital publishers in our survey cite limitations with first-party data as key blockers to both advertising and subscription growth. Longstanding audience discoverability and engagement challenges persist, particularly as platform dynamics shift and AI reshapes search behaviour.

   

• Advisor expertise: Barry Adams is a news SEO specialist who has advised publishers including The Guardian, The New York Times, Fox News and Condé Nast. With a background in IT and in-house newsroom SEO, he has led major relaunches and site migrations, specialising in Google News, Discover and AI search optimisation for sustainable audience growth.

   

• What’s underestimated: “AI has accelerated change but is not the catastrophic disruptor of publishing that many claim it is. The ‘Google Zero’ panic that permeates the industry is not based on factual reality.  Organic channels such as search and Discover still have untapped potential for audience growth and will remain the largest sources of traffic for the foreseeable future.  Publishers that deny the data and believe the hype risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of decline.”
  
  

Advancing inorganic growth strategies

• Challenge: A third of publishers we heard from report no active inorganic growth plans, such as partnerships or acquisitions. Among digital nationals, almost half lack a strategy entirely. Meanwhile, larger organisations are actively consolidating, indicating that this remains is an important avenue for publisher growth.
  
  

• Advisor expertise: Dieter Haerens is a European publishing executive with leadership roles at Mediafin and Roularta Media Group, and chief executive officer experience at Saxo Bank Belgium. He has built new ventures from scratch and co-led major post-merger integration while scaling performance. His expertise centres on go-to-market strategy, consultative sales and customer-centric transformation.
  
  

• What’s underestimated: “Companies frequently treat acquisitions as pure financial consolidation plays, drastically underestimating the complexity of post-merger commercial integration. True value is not unlocked at signing, but by rapidly aligning disparate go-to-market strategies. Sustainable inorganic growth demands a unified, customer-centric operating model ready to scale and create recurring revenue from day one. That requires a clear strategy built around ‘the jobs to be done’ for target audiences.”
  
  

Creating an AI-enabled technology stack

• Challenge: One in four digital natives in our survey identified tech stack limitations as a major blocker to digital advertising growth. Many mid-sized organisations are large enough to require modern systems but lack the resources to implement them effectively. AI is being adopted in many newsrooms for workflow efficiencies but, without clear success metrics or governance structures, organisations struggle to assess what is delivering value.
  
  

• Advisor expertise: Ariane Bernard is a media product and technology leader with senior roles at The New York Times, Taboola and as chief digital officer at Le Parisien. She has replatformed legacy publishing stacks, built product teams from scratch and led complex global launches, specialising in CMS transformation, paywalls, analytics and machine-learning driven personalisation.
  
  

• What’s underestimated: “AI-assisted engineering is already reshaping both product capability and engineering economics, and the pace is compounding. Many of the automation pilots we have seen in recent months have helped teams imagine what was possible at the workflow level. But the real shift is structural. It requires reassessing build-versus-buy decisions, capital projects and team skill composition. Treating it as incremental risks locking in technical and organisational architectures that will age quickly.”
  
  

Learn more about the FT Strategies Advisory Partners network here.

If you’re facing complex strategic decisions or seeking to accelerate transformation within your organisation, we’d welcome the opportunity to talk. FT Strategies, together with our Advisory Partners, combines strategic insight with deep operational experience to support meaningful outcomes. Book a discovery call to discuss your priorities and explore how we can help you achieve your goals.