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Jon Slade is the Chief Executive Offices for the Financial Times, based in London.
Slade has 30 years of media industry experience, more than 20 of which have been spent at the Financial Times. He held various roles in the advertising team, before becoming CCO and joining the FT management board in 2014. He is currently responsible for three quarters of the FT Group’s more than £500mn annual revenues. This includes global advertising, print circulation, consultancy and subscription income.
Slade and his team have grown revenue, profitable contribution and readership numbers every year since he became CCO. Notable achievements include returning the FT ads business to growth in the face of industry-level decline, and streamlining the FT’s print operations to sustain its profitable print business. More recently, he has overseen the rapid growth of the Group’s consulting business, FT Strategies, and played a pivotal role in defining and executing the FT’s successful digital subscriptions strategy.
Slade chairs the management board of Alpha Grid and is a board member of Longitude, both recent FT acquisitions. He is also a board observer and advisor at Blendle, the dutch-based news aggregator.
During his time at the FT, Slade has overseen the successful shift in subscription strategy from the metered model to trials, contributing to the FT reaching its long-time goal of one million paying readers. He has led the development of new advertising products for FT.com and led the FT’s strategy for interaction with third party platforms. Notably, he pioneered the FT’s widely reported initiative to establish a time-based currency for digital advertising, CPH (Cost per Hour).
Under Slade’s stewardship the FT has won a number of media awards including International Media Company of the Year at both the 2018 and 2019 British Media Awards, Best Publisher Innovation at the 2018 Digital Trading Awards, and named to AdExchanger’s list of Top 10 Programmatic Publishers Of 2018.
Prior to his current role, Slade served as the FT’s B2C managing director, and before that, was the commercial director for global digital advertising and insight, where he spearheaded the overall strategic direction for the FT’s digital advertising business. In this role he also established the FT’s first Global Commercial Academy to drive learning and development for the advertising team.
Slade joined the FT in 2002 as technology client manager working with European technology and telecoms clients. In 2007, he built the FT’s strategic sales team – a global creative cross-platform advertising team.
He has been a board member of the IAB in London, an active participant with DCN in New York, a founding member of the Google Digital News Initiative, was selected for the Walpole Power List in 2019, and is a spokesperson for the FT on digital media strategies.