UK listed companies are now paying to advertise to their own shareholders
Key Points
- London-listed Dianomi has launched a dedicated Investor Relations and Corporate Communications vertical, selling ad campaigns to listed companies that want to reach retail shareholders and financial advisers.
- The company appointed a new Head of Insights to build audience intelligence for the unit.
- UK small and mid-cap analyst numbers have fallen from 29 in 2007 to 17, following the MiFID II research unbundling rules introduced in 2018.
- FTSE Small Cap companies are covered by an average of five analysts, against 24 for the largest FTSE 100 names, and some micro-caps have none at all.
- Dianomi expects H1 2026 revenue of £13.4 million, up 2% year on year.
Listed companies in the UK are buying advertising to reach their own retail shareholders, and a London advertising firm has built a business unit to sell it to them.
Dianomi, which places sponsored content units on financial publisher sites including Reuters, CNN Business and the Wall Street Journal, launched a dedicated Investor Relations and Corporate Communications vertical in the first half of 2026.
The company said growing numbers of listed businesses want to use its platform to engage institutional investors, financial advisers and what it described as the increasingly important retail investor community.
Dianomi built the vertical on the back of individual IR campaigns it had already run, and appointed a new Head of Insights to develop audience intelligence and data work for clients using it.
Why companies have to go looking
The gap Dianomi is selling into opened as UK equity research shrank.
The number of small and mid-cap retail analysts fell from 29 in 2007 to 17 by 2026, a decline the industry traces to MiFID II, the EU directive implemented in January 2018 that forced brokers to charge separately for research rather than bundling the cost into broking commissions.
The number of sectors covered in the UK small and mid-cap survey halved from 18 to nine over the same period, with chemicals, metals and mining, and transport and logistics dropping out as more companies delisted than joined.
Consolidation among the brokers themselves has removed further capacity.
Deutsche Bank acquired Numis Securities in 2023, Panmure Gordon merged with Liberum in 2024, and Stifel closed its UK equities business at the end of 2025. Panmure Liberum, the firm created by that 2024 merger, acts as Dianomi’s own nominated adviser and broker.
The result shows up directly in how many people write about any given company.
The largest FTSE 100 companies attract an average of 24 analysts each, a figure that drops to nine for the FTSE 250 and five for the FTSE Small Cap Index, with some micro-caps carrying no analyst coverage at all.
What the product actually is
Dianomi’s units sit inside editorial pages and mirror the styling of the page around them, with placement driven by the context of the surrounding content.
The company said it reaches more than 500 million devices a month across over 250 premium publishers, and charges on a per-click basis or per view for video.
An IR campaign uses the same machinery a fund manager or bank uses to sell a product, pointed instead at investors the company wants on its register.
The company also launched a format called Dianomi Interactive in April, which lets readers explore products, answer polls or engage with other elements inside the ad unit itself.
Dianomi said the format lifts on-page time and click-through rates while generating engagement data.
Dianomi’s own position
Dianomi expects revenue of £13.4 million for the six months to 30 June 2026, up 2% on the £13.2 million it recorded a year earlier and up 4.5% at constant currency.
Gross profit rose to £3.9 million from £3.3 million and gross margin reached 28.9%, against 25.3% a year earlier.
The company expects a small EBITDA loss, improved on the £0.6 million loss booked in the first half of 2025, and held £6.0 million in cash at the end of June with no debt.
Rupert Hodson, Chief Executive of Dianomi, said advertisers remain cautious against historic spend levels, and listed the IR vertical alongside Dianomi Interactive and a March partnership with AI media firm Dappier as the developments driving new conversations with existing and prospective clients.
