Canal+ tasked BETC Paris with launching the original series The Young Pope in a way that captured the show's provocative tone. They needed to generate massive buzz among digital-native audiences and differentiate the show from traditional religious dramas by highlighting the protagonist's unique, confrontational personality. The goal was to make the fictional Pope a relevant cultural figure before the first episode even aired.
Creative Idea
An AI Pope trolled social media users by replying to their sins with Bible verses.
To promote The Young Pope, Canal+ created an AI that monitored social media in real-time, trolling users by replying to their sinful or emotional posts with relevant Bible verses, perfectly embodying the show's provocative and modern protagonist.
The Digital Deity Trolling the Internet for Sinners
39,000 Verses and a Sentiment Analyzer
To bring the confrontational spirit of Pope Pius XIII to life, BETC Paris and Make Me Pulse leveraged IBM Watson’s Natural Language Classifier. The team fed a database of 39,000 Bible verses into a custom machine - learning engine designed to detect "sinful" context. By utilizing a sentiment analyzer, the AI could distinguish between anger, vanity, or gluttony in real - time. The technical infrastructure was massive, invoking over 15 million AWS Lambda functions to ensure an average response time of under 2 seconds, making the "robot Pope" feel omnipresent.
Scaling the Word of God
The campaign’s reach was vast, exposing 2.6 million people to the digital pontiff in just two weeks. The AI analyzed nearly 4.5 million messages across Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, ultimately delivering "blessings" or "corrections" to approximately 1 million users. This scale required processing 10GB of text data, proving that AI could be used for complex character embodiment rather than just simple data sorting.
Holy Trolling and Bread Alone
The project, punningly titled AiMEN, functioned as a piece of performance art that blurred the lines between marketing and social commentary. The bot’s logic allowed for contextual humor; for instance, if a user posted about being hungry, the AI might instantly retort with a verse about how "man does not live by bread alone." By using the "sanctimony" of scripture to confront the often - toxic environment of social media, the campaign successfully mirrored the provocative, rule - breaking nature of Jude Law’s character in the series.
Creative Strategy Deconstructed
Company
A provocative series featuring an unconventional Pope who challenges traditional religious authority and modern social norms.
Category
Entertainment brands typically use standard trailers and posters, failing to engage audiences through interactive or immersive storytelling.
Customer
Social media users who vent frustrations or display sinful behaviors online without expecting a divine or authoritative intervention.
Culture
The rise of AI and chatbots enabled character-driven storytelling that interacts directly with real-world digital behaviors.
Company
A provocative series featuring an unconventional Pope who challenges traditional religious authority and modern social norms.
Category
Entertainment brands typically use standard trailers and posters, failing to engage audiences through interactive or immersive storytelling.
Strategy:
Infiltrate digital conversations by personifying a fictional character's moral authority to create interactive, real-world narrative friction.
Customer
Social media users who vent frustrations or display sinful behaviors online without expecting a divine or authoritative intervention.
Culture
The rise of AI and chatbots enabled character-driven storytelling that interacts directly with real-world digital behaviors.
Strategy:
Infiltrate digital conversations by personifying a fictional character's moral authority to create interactive, real-world narrative friction.
Results
The campaign achieved a massive reach of 2.6 million people within a two-week period. The AI engine analyzed nearly 4.5 million messages across Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, processing 10GB of text data. The system successfully interacted with approximately 1 million users (some sources cite 900,000), delivering contextual Bible verses in under 2 seconds. Technically, the project invoked over 15 million AWS Lambda functions. The campaign was highly awarded, winning 1 Gold, 1 Silver, and 2 Bronze Cannes Lions, 2 Bronze Clio Awards, a Gold Lovie Award, and 3 Gold Cristal Festival awards among others.
1M
Users interacted with via AI
2.6M
Total campaign reach
15M+
AWS Lambda functions invoked
Strategy Technique
Create a Parallel World
By bringing the character's specific personality and holy trolling behavior into real social media interactions, the campaign blurred the lines between the show's fictional universe and the audience's reality.
Explore Technique
Creative Technique
Real-Time Relevance
The campaign used IBM Watson to analyze live social media posts and instantly deliver contextual Bible verses, making the fictional Pope's presence feel immediate and omnipresent across the digital landscape.
Explore Technique
Craft Breakdown
AiMEN pioneered the use of IBM Watson to transform a static database of 39,000 Bible verses into a living, breathing character performance that mirrored the show's protagonist.
Utilized IBM Watson’s Natural Language Classifier and sentiment analysis to detect 'sinful' context in real-time.
Built a massive infrastructure capable of sub-2-second response times across 15 million serverless function calls.
Curated and mapped 39,000 verses to specific social behaviors to maintain the 'Young Pope' persona's voice.
Strategically deployed the bot across YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to intercept users in their most 'sinful' digital moments.
The magic lies in the intersection of ancient scripture and cutting-edge machine learning, turning data processing into a provocative piece of performance art.
