Social and creative strategist, London

Lefan Feng

I build the strategy, then I make the thing. Four years of content that had to work, not only look good.

StrategyArt directionVideoWritingEN / 中文
Selected work
Financial Times, FT Live

The best material in the business
was being thrown away.

ft-hero.mp4
FT Hydrogen Summit, the 16:9 master

FT Live filmed every summit. Senior people in finance, energy and policy saying things nobody outside the room ever heard. The footage sat on a drive.

I built a cross-speaker format out of it. Several experts answering one question, cut fast, vertical, written for someone who had never heard of the summit. Then I turned it into a template with the conversion from 16:9 built in, so the rest of the business could run it without me.

It is still used across every FT Live event.

ft-1.mp4
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The same masters cut to 9:16, published on @financialtimeslive
6%Engagement rate
twice the industry average
800K+Views on the
short-form programme
30%Lift in audience
interaction, four months
AllFT Live events
now use the format
FTWeekend Festival, 2024

Nobody came for
the line-up poster.

A lifestyle festival inside a business newspaper. The audience was not the FT's usual one, and the usual speaker-card treatment was never going to reach them.

So the campaign ran on the people on the lawn. Dogs, families, hats, the queue for the tent. Human first, programme second. I shot on site and published through the day, so a moment on the grass was live while it was still happening.

Two other things came out of it. I launched FTWeekend on Reddit, which put the festival in front of communities the FT had never reached. And I built a custom GPT to compress the posting workflow, so one moment could be cut and out across three platforms without waiting on anyone.

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Kenwood House, September 2024
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Published on @financialtimeslive and @ft_weekend
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Winner, FT Marketing Network Award
Excellence in Digital and Social Marketing

The team behind the 2024 festival campaign, on the night.

270K+Organic
impressions
2,000+New followers
during the festival
30+Campaigns run
across FT Live
Financial Times, Global Banking Summit 2024

Publish it before
the panel ends.

Presented with The Banker, London, December 2024

A three day summit usually gets covered as a run of announcements. Speaker confirmed. Agenda live. Tickets closing. By the time the thing actually happens the audience has stopped reading.

I ran it as a story in three acts instead. Twelve weeks of build-up across five formats, then live publishing from inside the room, then a wrap that kept the conversation going after everyone had gone home.

On the day I edited and published from the back of the hall, straight out of the Twitter backend, with clips up within minutes.

Stay tuned for her keynote interview. Then: she is speaking now. Both published from the room, while it was happening.
300K+Impressions
across channels
8,000+Engagements
on the campaign
3xEngagement on the
keynote posts
HighestEngagement rate of any
FT Live event in 2024
Financial Times and Schroders, Business Book of the Year 2024

An award is a result.
We ran it as a question.

A book prize announces a longlist, then a shortlist, then a winner. Three announcements, each one a full stop.

I built it as a question held open for months instead. The longlist opened it, a filmed conversation with the FT's Andrew Hill deepened it, and the award night answered it live.

Schroders came in as a partner rather than a logo, so the investment perspective sat alongside the editorial one instead of underneath it. Posts made with them ran at two and a half times the engagement of average FT Live content, which almost never happens with partner work.

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Who will be the winner
bb-1.mp4
The longlist film, the live announcement, the shortlist
Award night, December 2024
400K+Impressions
across channels
10,000+Engagements
on the campaign
2.5xEngagement on the
partner posts
20K+Organic views on the
Andrew Hill film
Looping Fawn, ceramics

They weren't buying the object.
They were buying the making.

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the hands
Carving, studio, 2025

The account was posting finished pieces on clean backgrounds and the numbers were flat. What people actually stopped for, in the comments and the saves, was anything with a hand in it. Wet clay, a tool, a kiln being opened.

I pointed the whole video strategy at making rather than selling. The finished piece became the end of the film instead of the subject of it.

i

Reference. Shells, bone, stone tools. Where the language comes from.

ii

Making. Hands, the carving tool, the studio bench.

iii

Pieces. Styled on records, carpet and mossy brick. Never on white.

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pieces on records
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stacked cups
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on mossy brick
Product photography and styling, 2025
40%Lift in organic
Instagram engagement
3,100+Followers, with
no paid spend
End to endInsight, direction,
shoot, edit
Ultraclout Media, Portobello Road

Pick one format.
Make it a franchise.

A beauty brand wanted Gen Z and millennial attention and had no particular reason to expect it. I proposed one format instead of a content calendar: street interviews, asked at Portobello Market, out every week.

Answers cannot be scripted, and a format people recognise stops being content and starts being a show they come back for.

I briefed and managed editors and more than a hundred creators. Writing a brief tight enough to stay on brand and loose enough that the person still sounds like themselves is most of that job.

i

Question. Weekly ideation, then one question built to open someone up rather than get a quote.

ii

Place. Portobello Market, chosen for the range of faces and the speed of filming.

iii

Cut. Every film edited twice, once for TikTok and once for Rednote, each with its own hook, pacing and subtitles.

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Street interviews, Portobello Market, 2022 to 2023
3 monthsLaunch to
monetisation
400K+Views on a
single film
5,000Rednote followers
in two weeks
100+Creators briefed
and managed
Currently

Freelance creative lead on a new independent magazine, where I set the art direction and write the interviews. Alongside social and content strategy for three brands, one of them running across Instagram and Rednote at once.

Everything here started as something nobody had looked at twice.

Get in touch

Lefanfeng6@gmail.com

+44 7803 781847Londonlinkedin.com/in/lefanfeng