Celebrating Pierre Agostini

The Beginning

At approximately 6 a.m. on Oct. 3, 2023, Ohio State was informed that Emeritus Professor Pierre Agostini was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize for Physics. Activities for that day included: 

• Facilitating Agostini’s “First Reactions” YouTube video with the Nobel Foundation. 
• Responding to numerous national and international media requests. 
• Writing and distributing an Ohio State News Alert, which was sent at 8:43 a.m. 
• Conducting interviews and developing Ohio State News stories for web and YouTube. 
• Developing a plan to hire a French photographer for updated photos. 
  • These photos became the official portraits for the Nobel Foundation and Ohio State. 
• Identifying members of a Nobel Working Group with Advancement, College of Arts & Sciences, the Department of Physics, and the Enterprise for Research, Innovation and Knowledge. 

The Spreading News

As a result, nearly 30,000 unique individuals engaged with the Ohio State News story and university statements produced on Oct. 3. Pierre and Ohio State were mentioned in the media approximately 2,700 times worldwide, including:  

Capturing Agostini’s Story

• Showcasing the award at osu.edu and Ohio State News in October when the 2023 Nobel laureates were announced, and again in December, when the ceremony took place in Stockholm, Sweden.
• Hiring a photographer to take portraits of Agostini at his home in Paris, and a photographer to take portraits of him, his colleagues, family and friends during the December ceremonies. 
• Working with the College of Arts and Sciences to redesign the Agostini-DiMauro Atomic Physics Research Group website.
• Featuring Agostini’s story on the front page of osu.edu.
• Promoting the award through enterprise university social media accounts:

Celebrating Nobel Week in Stockholm and Columbus

These efforts generated social media content that drove engagement throughout the end of the year

Nobel Prize OMC Social Media Analytic Totals:

Enterprise (main university accounts)

Ohio State News

Welcoming Professor Agostini Back to Campus

Professor Agostini’s post-Nobel return to campus provided OMC and its partners an opportunity to build meaningful and authentic experiences that strategically aligned with OMC’s goals and priorities, including: 

• Capturing Agostini’s work and story and sharing it with our communities.
• Celebrating this moment for Ohio State through experiences.
• Connecting this story back to Ohio State’s brand and institutional priorities to enhance the university’s national and international reputation.

To set the stage for his visit to campus, our storytelling work began with a video designed to make our audiences feel as if they’d celebrated with Agostini in Oslo. It built a groundswell of excitement to celebrate this incredible moment directly with Professor Agostini. It was later adapted to feature key moments of Agostini’s events on campus.

OMC leveraged all its communications channels to achieve its objectives, including features in the Alumni Magazine, Ohio State News, and OnCampus. The content focused on key Ohio State experiences that tapped into the excitement of the moment for the university community. Most notable was the Scarlet & Gray Clap-in, organized by OMC, ERIK and the College of Arts and Sciences, that brought together more than 400 faculty, staff, students, aspiring scientists (and, of course, Brutus) to celebrate this achievement as a community and capture the essence of what it means to be a Buckeye. 

The Ohio State News video of the clap-in generated 2,157 views with 100% likes, and the Agostini-focused video has more than 2,500 views — both on YouTube. The Ohio State News coverage of Agostini’s events on campus generated more than 6,600 views. About 60% of traffic to the OSN story came from social, 22% from search, and 11% from email.

Content related to Agostini’s visit drove 15.3k unique pageviews across roughly 33 different Ohio State pages, primarily from the news.osu.edu, physics.osu.edu, and opticalscience.osu.edu websites. For Google searches related to just Agostini’s name, 41.5k impressions and 2.27k clicks were made to Ohio State pages. 

Social and earned media efforts shared the Buckeye pride and enthusiasm for Agostini with the broader community. The compelling photos, video and stories went viral, and the results speak for themselves.

The posts celebrating Dr. Agostini’s visit to Columbus are the highest engaged posts on the enterprise Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn in FY24. Across X and Facebook, the posts celebrating Dr. Agostini’s visit to Columbus are all in the top three of most engaged posts in FY24. The short-form social video, produced by OMC, was viewed more than 2.6 million times. Overall, social media content generated 2.9 million impressions, with an 11% engagement rate, and inspired 35,672 link clicks to Ohio State websites.

Media coverage of Ohio State’s on-campus events generated 26 media mentions, with local highlights including positive coverage by the Columbus Dispatch, ABC6 and NBC4. Most notably, ABC6 ran Agostini’s story as part of its “Positively Columbus” feature which included a positive story that ran during the evening news for 3 minutes and 25 seconds. Overall, the advertising equivalent for the earned media coverage is estimated at $158,800.