Everyone uses social networks today so it seemed pretty obvious that Pius XIII would use them to address his believers. We came to the conclusion that the best way to give this fictional pope a voice, was to create Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Dailymotion profiles for him. Then we gave him the opportunity to reply freely to social network users’ messages whose tone or object would be contrary to the morals of Pius XIII. His answers came through the form of verses from the Bible.

To materialize our idea, we became partners with IBM to use their well-known artificial intelligence called Watson. To monitor to which extent AiMEN was able to fulfil its mission both quantitatively and qualitatively we devised an online dashboard. This dashboard provided us with a live picture of the messages analysed and answered by the AI as well as a library of messages effectively answered.

The AI development along with the dashboard production spanned over two and a half months from early August to mid-October 2016.

The activation was released in France and lasted over 2 weeks right before the first broadcast of the series on October 24th 2016.

Our bot analysed over 4 million messages and answered more than 1 million of them to spread the good word. The verses from the Bible answered by Pius XIII generated more than 3 million impressions.

In a 2 week period we built and expanded The Young Pope’s notoriety virally and we contributed to the tremendous success of its first episode with à 13,3% audience share the night of its release (the best score for a CANAL+ original series in 2016).