For IB Communications, one of the key yearly events in May is the ISCT Annual Meeting. This is a very high-profile event - the G7 Summit for the cell and gene therapy sector. From our point of view, the very public pressure is always on for us to deliver, for ISCT and its leadership, for our clients that are attending, and for journalists that we are persuading to get involved in the event and need the best interviews. Each year, we manage to raise the bar for what we deliver for the meeting. This involves in person interviews for copy, video and audio, as well as virtual interviews with journalists covering from around the world.
This year in 2022, the ISCT Annual Meeting was held in San Francisco, US. Director Neil Hunter attended in person, and was helped with a number of the IB Communications team in the UK that were able to coordinate with the European journalists covering the event. Interviews were held between 8am and 11pm local time. IB Communications had access to 11 ISCT leaders, including four past, current and former Presidents, two regulatory, two UCT, two manufacturing and a commercialization expert, to arrange media interviews with. Nine spokespeople from five of IB Communications’ clients were also attending and available for interview. A week following the meeting, IB Communications had arranged 49 interviews with ISCT leaders, and over 65 interviews in total, with a number of briefings still to arrange to summarize the event. This was a 63% increase on the 31 interviews generated for the last global in-person ISCT Annual Meeting in Montreal in 2018.
Given the plethora of CGT and wider biopharma conferences in the sector, as well as the lack of media attention to the majority of these events, the journalistic and wider market attention generated for this specific meeting was a fantastic result for IB Communications. This has maintained IB Communications’ position to deliver leading industry spokespeople to international media covering the full spectrum of topics across the industry, as well as delivering access to global media for our clients.
IB Communications had little time for celebration or laurel resting, transitioning straight into the thick of Terrapinn’s Advanced Therapies Live 2022 event. Raising the bar each time makes a significant contribution to the visibility of the entire cell and gene therapy sector.
