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 their 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.

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.

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. And what's worse: we don't even think about retirement. Young people postpone thinking about distant future. Older people believe that state will support them in their old age. This mindset does not help solve the problem. And specialists are saying louder and louder that the Polish pension system is on the edge of 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/