Young people in Poland do not want to think about retirement. They do not even want to hear about the problems of the state pension system. It is difficult for them to imagine themselves in a few decades. "Future Me" activation gave them the opportunity to experience the future, to see a personalized version of themselves, and this is the best way to start thinking about retirement and saving for it. The optimistic and imaginative nature of this activation created an interesting and engaging experience for young people that they wanted to share with their friends.

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 think about our distant future. Our brains tend to focus on the present, especially when the future doesn’t look promising. Where the human brain may struggle, Artificial Intelligence comes to the rescue. Using state-of-the-art generative AI, we created Future Me: AI-powered app that enables clients to create personalized visions of what they would like to do in retirement. Using several AI models we’ve achieved a truly personalized experience, where users could see how they will look like in the distant future doing the things they love. And consider saving for this future 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.

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 curated by human designers and sent to users via email to share on social media. Every day we printed images on metal canvas, a long-lasting medium to remind you of retirement plans worth saving for.

To make the communication stand out, all of the campaign assets were created with Artificial Intelligence. 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, Stable Diffusion’s Image-2-Image and Topaz for picture finetuning. For the campaign, we’ve chosen the popular media among our target audience, TikTok and Instagram.

“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.

The Polish retirement system does not work as well as in other European Union countries. Due to demographics and income structure, it is estimated that the first pension of today's 20-year-olds will be only 25 percent of their today's salary. This is a unique and worrying result. Another disadvantage is the fact that some people believe that the state will protect them from the effects of a low pension. That is why it is often said that the Polish pension system is on the edge and it may collapse.

The campaign name in Poland is “Ja w Przyszłości” and the campaign only ran locally, you can find the campaign website here https://www.ja-w-przyszlosci.pl/