FT Weekend / Open Minds

Prospecting into culture with mind-opening editorial.

After winning the account from incumbent adam&eveDDB, we worked closely with FT Weekend editor Alec Russell to define a core communications challenge: people deeply respected the FT’s daily paper but the strength of this publication was compromising the cultural credibility of its Weekend offering.

How could we prove the value of FT Weekend without compromising the legacy of the daily paper? Our solution, was to position them as complementary.

FT daily is primarily a reductive, decision-making tool, but FT Weekend is the opposite; a chance for readers to pause, look up and open their minds to art, science, history and cultural affairs. We developed a creative proposition that ended up becoming the central CTA on the campaign: ‘Subscribe to an open mind this weekend’.

However, efforts to realise this in creative fell easily into advertising cliché, until we struck on a thought - why make ads saying how FT Weekend’s editorial opens your mind… when you could just show people first-hand?

“This campaign goes to the heart of my ambition for the journalism in FT Weekend each week. It is sharp, provocative, probing and embraces the big ideas of our age - yet it is also tinged with mischief.” - Alec Russell, FT Weekend Editor.

And so we put the editorial front and centre - taking mind-opening articles from the magazine and drawing provocations from them which became the hero lines on our assets. They were accompanied by bespoke illustrations from a selection or artists, designed to bring to life the curious and challenging subject matter.

The resulting campaign ran across OOH, digital and social. In only three months, Open Minds delivered a 900% increase in conversions vs the previous 2016/17 FT Weekend campaign.