Ward was reported earlier this month to be leaving the FT, where he oversaw a £2m relaunch marketing campaign. He has now announced that he will be joining his former FT colleague, Michael Murphy, at Friends Reunited.
Murphy was chief operating officer at the FT, but left after a failed bid to buy the FT Business division, which publishes Investors Chronicle and The Banker. In February, he was appointed CEO of Friends Reunited, the site set up by a husband and wife team from their North London home three years ago and which now claims to have 8.5m members and as many as 8m hits a day.
Ward takes up his new post of marketing director in the summer. He will oversee the launch of an online dating agency, the recently created Genes Connected site, and look after the core business, which has expanded out of the UK and now serves school leavers in the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, Australia, New Zealand and Italy.
"Having admired the site from afar, I'm delighted to be joining a great team and can't wait to get stuck in," Ward said.
As FT marketing director, Ward managed a TV, press, outdoor and radio campaign designed to boost falling sales. The FT's circulation dropped by 6% last year to 473,587, while advertising revenues fell by almost a quarter.
The campaign, through Delaney Lund Knox Warren, uses press, outdoor, TV and radio and updates the famous endline to "New FT, new comment". The paper's April circulation count showed a 4.9% fall to 445,349, but unofficial sales figures for the week beginning April 25, when the publicity began, showed an increase of 5%.
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