Saving for retirement is not popular among young people. 80% of them do not think about it. It is estimated that the pension in Poland for today's 20-year-olds will be only a quarter of their last salary. The future doesn’t look bright for the young generation and the doomsday scenarios that are all over the media only make thinking about the future more difficult.

The biggest challenge was to find a way how an institution like a bank could engage young people to do something for their future today and consider ING as a partner that supports their saving goals in the long term. By using Generative AI, the same trending technology they use for making fancy avatars, we gave them a chance to see their future selves. It was a trigger to start thinking about saving money for retirement with ING Bank.

It is difficult to imagine the distant future. Most of us tend to live here and now. That’s why we developed the Future Me idea: an AI-powered app that allowed users to generate an astounding images of people doing what they love in retirement. Will they spend their retirement years in vertical gardens? Flying with their cats on the jetpack over the beautiful ocean? Or perhaps they will become tourists on the Moon? Sky is the limit.

Future Me created a personalized, photorealistic picture of you in the future, which became a bridge between your life here and now and your life in the future. Because if you see something, it's easier to make it happen. So everyone could start saving with ING retirement products.

Young Poles rarely think and talk about the future life on retirement. The topic is difficult and creates more fears (42%) than hopes (23%). 20% of young people do not think about it at all.

Why? Research has shown that it is difficult to find a bridge between what is here and now and the distant future. The basic strategic assumption was to stimulate the imagination and show a personalized vision of tomorrow in this activation.

We had to do it in an attractive and fun way, suited to the young target group, to overcome the reluctance around this topic.

AI is a trending technology. Especially at the beginning of the campaign (Jan 2023), it was a fresh, hot topic due to Lensa AI and similar apps. That’s why we’ve decided to create our app as a mobile-first experience.

To create personalized images, all they needed to do was complete the sentence "In the future, I will...” and upload their photo. We have combined several text-to-image models to create stunning paintings based on the user’s images and the answers. The AI-generated images were then finetuned by human designers and sent to users. Every day we printed images on metal canvas, as an environmentally-friendly, sustainable, and long-lasting way to remind you of future retirement plans worth saving for.

To make the communication more impactful, all of the campaign assets were created with AI. The generated videos, voiceovers, and music were created by AI algorithms, guided by the human creative's moderation and editing. The production process involved utilizing Midjourney, DALL-E for combining multiple visual assets, and Stable Diffusion's Image-2-Image and Topaz for picture finetuning. We used TikTok and Instagram as communication platforms.

The campaign timing was also crucial. We started at the beginning of Jan 2023, the time of New Year’s resolutions, when we think more often about the future. This also made "Future Me" campaign the first AI-co-created campaign that sparked a lot of buzz in Polish media.

“Future Me” activation not only made headlines (13 mln reach) but also measurable results. The use of AI models allowed us to run it on an amazing scale resulting in over 30 000 generated personalized images, and over 55 000 reactions and comments! Finally, ING noted a 300% increase in sales of its retirement products in Q1 2023 compared to Q1 2022 and was the number 1 bank to be considered for saving.

“Future Me” activation not only made headlines (13 mln reach) but also measurable results. The use of AI models allowed us to run it on an amazing scale resulting in over 30 000 generated personalized images, and over 55 000 reactions and comments! Finally, ING noted a 300% increase in sales of its retirement products in Q1 2023 compared to Q1 2022 and was the number 1 bank to be considered for saving.