Can we envision ourselves in the future? ING Bank Poland used artificial intelligence to help clients visualize their retirement and encourage them to think ahead. Let me tell you how we developed this AI-powered campaign at GONG Creative Agency.

Every year, fewer young people think about their financial future. It’s hard to blame them, as the future doesn’t look as bright as for their parents' generation. Whether it’s climate change, the war on our borders, or rising prices, it’s not easy these days to think about retirement with optimism.

To empower people to start thinking about their financial future, instead of picturing the doomsday scenarios they all know, we simply asked them what they would like their future to look like. And then we “painted” that future for them using state-of-the-art generative AI.

Meet your future self

“Future Me” generates visions of your life on retirement with Text-To-Image Generative AI

The “Future Me” app takes user photographs and a description of their dream future retirement to generate a vision of this retirement. Above is an example of a man in glasses who wants to explore the rainforests when he retires. A vision worth saving for.

We have combined several text-to-image algorithms to create stunning images based on the user’s photo and the answer to the question: “What do you want to do in the future?”. Will you spend your retirement years in vertical gardens of the future? Or perhaps run with your dogs over poppy fields? With generative AI, anything is possible.

“In the future, I want to run with my dogs over poppy fields” envisioned by “Future Me”

It took us 3 months to develop the app and our workflow, we had to pivot many times due to changes in the popular AI models. In the end, we found a good balance between using multiple AIs and human art direction in the process.

The first step was developing a parser with the help of our prompt engineers, to translate customers’ plans in Polish into prompts in English with a predefined set of styles, and keywords that match the campaign's ascetic. The prompts, together with the user photo, are fed to a custom-trained Stable Diffusion, which generates a set of personalized paintings of future retirements. The process is human-supervised by our art directors, who, if necessary, create further variations of the images and mix them with images generated in Midjourney for the same prompt. Human supervision was necessary, as sometimes the AI didn’t see our future in bright colors or took users' selfies for too many spins. Sometimes it gave them an extra finger or two.

Example images created by the app

A selected set of personalized images were printed on metal canvas, a very durable and “analog” way of reminding their owners every day, it’s the future worth saving for.

Making a campaign video with AI

To make the communication stand out and capture the audience’s attention, all of the campaign assets were also co-created with Artificial Intelligence. The generated videos, voiceovers, and music were created by AI algorithms, guided by the human creatives' moderation and editing.

One of the campaign assets created in Stable Diffusion with AI voiceover and music

We’ve challenged ourselves to create the hero campaign video with minimal human supervision. The video script was created with the aid of ChatGPT. We asked it to create a voiceover based on a short brief and the starting sentence. We gave it feedback a few times to trim some parts, finishing with a script that is 95% of the final one. For the initial frame of the animation, we hired Midjourney to paint its vision of a friendly face of AI.

The script was then converted into prompts for Stable Diffusion, and animated using Deforum. Below are some of the Stable Diffusion “visions” created this way, which in the end we used to create three versions of the video.

Sample videos created with Stable Diffusion

Finally, the music was composed by aiva.ai, and the voiceover was synthesized with a text-to-speech algorithm with a popular AI voice in Poland — Ivona. It doesn’t sound like a state-of-the-art AI voice, but this was our purpose, as this voice is a widely recognizable “Polish tech voice”.

Of course, human supervision was needed at every step; some of the AI tools demand a fair knowledge of math and programming and a lot of trial and error to get them up and running. But in the end, this was not just a proof-of-concept but a reliable workflow that allowed us to create multiple versions of videos in a very reasonable time.

Visualizations of reimagined Polish future cityscapes also became part of the campaign to create buzz and spark a conversation about the wider concept of the future.

Polish cities and landmarks from the future reimagined with Midjourney for the Future Me campaign

Conclusions

The development of generative AI already has the potential to create stunning campaign visuals and personalized experiences. “Future Me” activation not only made headlines but also measurable results. The use of AI models allowed ING to run it on an amazing scale, resulting in thousands of 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.

When working with generative AI, it’s important not to jump “all in” and forget the human part of it. There is a lot of backlash on the topic, and we’ve managed to avoid it by communicating AI as a partner in our creative process. It was also uplifting, that artificial intelligence was used here to help our human brains look at the future with a bit of optimism.

Have a look at the full campaign case below and visit our GONG website for more of our work. Check the campaign website too (Polish only) for more examples of generated visions of the future.

Case Video for the “Future Me” Campaign

We are excited to see how AI will continue to shape the advertising industry in the months to come. If you enjoyed this campaign case study, follow me for more publications on AI in creative advertising.