2018 is an election year in Brazil and Estadão newspaper wanted to alert voters to an absurd reality that no one is talking about: in Brazil, 1 person is assassinated every 10 minutes. So, the idea was to compare, in a digital platform, the numbers of deaths by violence in Brazil to those of countries officially at war today: Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Myanmar, for example. Brazil is always in the lead.

First, we chose the countries at war that show up more frequently in Estadão news and are more known to the general audience, such as Syria and Iraq. Then, through the newspaper database, we collected the numbers of casualties of those wars until 2017. Estadão also had access to the total amount of homicides that took place in Brazil for the last 10 years. We put the numbers side by side to show that Brazil – regardless of the size of the territory or population – could easily be considered a country at war. The data was transformed into a website, digital media and out-of-home media throughout the city, with updates according to the most recent Estadão news. The objective was to make the comparison as clear and easy to understand as possible. The X – a target and a trench symbol – is the main visual element of the campaign.

The Facebook post that launched Warboard was the most engaging in Estadão’s page: it had nearly 4 thousand shares on the first day and hundreds of comments. Users wondered and discussed about the reasons of the alarming Brazilian number: drug traffic? Guns? Corrupt police? Corrupt politicians? Impunity? The website also had a significant amount of views on the first day: more than 15 thousand unique visitors.