19/09/2019

ICM 2018 wins international Communication award.

The 2018 ICM (International Congress of Mathematicians) won the SABRE Awards Latin America, the world's leading competition in Public Relations and corporate communication, in the Not for Profit category. The congress was chaired and organized by the Director-General of IMPA, Marcelo Viana.

The award-winning case was “Mathematics in the media: the International Congress in Rio – International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM 2018)” , which also won the Jatobá Trophy – Excellence and Innovation in PR Award in 2018. The work was developed by Corcovado Comunicação Estratégica, an agency that has handled IMPA's Communication since 2016.

The award ceremony took place in Mexico on September 11. In 2018, IMPA was a finalist and received the Certificate of Excellence from the Sabre Awards Latin America in the same category (Not for Profit).

The challenge for ICM 2018 was to publicize and manage all communication for the main global event in Mathematics, for the first time in the Southern Hemisphere. Among the actions taken were press relations – with worldwide dissemination of embargoed content –; accreditation of 120 international journalists and three press conferences; crisis management (a fire and the theft of the Fields Medal); the creation of a website and production of online content (210 articles in Portuguese and English) and daily newsletters for participants; dissemination of the main international prizes in Mathematics; social media; content production and editing of an 80-page magazine in English; and the production of interviews for ICM TV, in partnership with the English production company WebsEdge.

The 2018 ICM became a hub for events of the 2017-2018 Mathematics Biennium in Brazil. For the first time, the 570 young winners of the Brazilian Mathematics Olympiad for Public Schools, with 18 million participants, received their gold medals from three Fields Medal winners – with coverage on the Jornal Nacional (Brazil's main news program). Another event was the presentation of the IMPA-SBM Journalism Prize , created by the agency to encourage reporting on mathematics and science in Brazil. A total of 72 entries were submitted, and the ten finalist journalists attended the congress. The 2019 Prize was awarded in July at the Brazilian Mathematics Colloquium .

One innovation was the partnership with the British company WebsEdge, resulting in the production of 28 interview programs in English for ICM TV, totaling 6 hours in length, which were broadcast on TVs at the event and online.

The result of the outreach was over 200 news reports about ICM 2018 in leading international publications (New York Times, The Guardian, BBC, Le Monde, Deutsche Welle, for example) and in major Brazilian media outlets; 213 articles in Portuguese and English on the ICM 2018 and IMPA websites, with 450,000 views during the period; and 2.5 million people reached on social media, without any boosting.