Edu Menezes

Faith Decoded

Preachers who do not exist are gathering real congregations online. Estadão, one of Brazil’s national dailies, went looking for them.

Faith Decoded — posterPlay case film — sound on2:15
Client
Estadão Blue Studio
Agency
Africa Creative DDB
Role
Motion Design
Year
2026

The brief

AI-generated spiritual influencers are passing as real religious voices, and the followings they gather are real.

The idea

Turn the technology on itself. Three AI preachers were made for the piece, each one saying on camera that it isn’t real, and each one pointing at a platform that reads any account on six axes: language, image forensics, synthetic video, rhetoric, metadata and how the money moves.
Faith Decoded — frame 1Faith Decoded — frame 2Faith Decoded — frame 3

Outcome

362 profiles read in under a month, the synthetic ones holding 13.7 million followers between them. It ends on the line the whole thing is for: your right to believe, and your right to know who is behind it.

Credits

Creative Leadership — Sergio Gordilho

Design / Art Direction — Hugo Aranha, Cleber Pereira

Creative Idea / Content — Patricia Colombo

Creative Team — Paulo Aguiar, Adriano Nuevo, Guilherme Bovo

Project Management — Shari Saber

Case Editing — Fernando Faria Freitas, José Ernesto Silva Neto

Motion Design — Edu Menezes / Grupo Caipe

Photography — Marcelo Martins

Sound — Denis Melito

Client Approval — Monalisa Sorio, Regina Fogo, Luis Fernando Bovo