AIMEN

TitleAIMEN
BrandCANAL+
Product/ServiceCANAL+
Category C03. Use of Social Platforms
Entrant BETC Paris, FRANCE
Idea Creation BETC Paris, FRANCE
Production MAKE ME PULSE Paris, FRANCE
Credits
Name Company Position
Stéphane Xiberras BETC Chief Creative Officer
Benjamin Le Breton BETC Creative Director
Arnaud Assouline BETC Creative Director
Alexandre Girod BETC Copywriter
Julien Vergne BETC Art Director
Bao Tu NGoc BETC Lead Producer
Josselin Bondoin BETC Assistant producer
Julien Leveque BETC Head of activation strategy
Guillaume Martin BETC Head of Strategy
Guillaume Espinet, Elsa Magadoux, Alexis Delwasse, Peter Feurmour BETC Agency Management
Audrey Brugere,Jordane de Villaret, Christopher Marchand Canal+ Brand Management

The Campaign

Everyone uses social networks today soit 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.

Creative Execution

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 fulfill 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.

Results

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 YoungPope’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).

For the launch of the CANAL+ Young Pope series, we wanted to promote Pius XIII, a modern yet ultra conservative pope played by Jude Law. We created AiMEN by programming the artificial intelligence IBM Watson to the image of this pope so that he could express himself in real time on social networks. It answers users in a contextualized way by only quoting verses from the Bible when they go too far or are contrary to the morals of Pius XIII.

To make sure Pius XIII would answer users vile messages appropriately, we educated AiMEN for weeks. We started with vocabulary related to anger, envy, desire, and selfishness so that he could identify clearly the messages he would have to answer. Then we nurtured AiMEN with more than 39.000 verses from the New and Old Testaments. By doing so we were sure Pius XIII would have the capacity to process users’ messages and answer them with appropriate verses in an effective way. This learning process associated with the power of the AI enabled us to surprise thousands of social networks users with the purpose of expandingThe Young Pope’s notoriety in a both organic and viral way.