AI campaign “Meet your future self”
A dialogue through time - with your own future self. You can ask anything. Hyper-personalized, interactive, featuring a custom-developed aging AI model, a modified GPT-4o chat (including animations & GenAI images) on 50 life-sized interactive installations in Sparkassen across Germany, and also available on mobile.
Challenge
One in five people over 80 in Germany lives in old-age poverty. Looking back, 61% say they would have made more financial provisions.*
The problem: one’s own “old age” always seems far away, and only very few take sufficient action today.
Solution
We brought old age into the present: with a “Call Through Time,” where you can talk to your future self. You can ask anything – from pets to hobbies, what the weather is like – up to the most important question: What should I do today to have a good life later on?
“With the idea and implementation of the ‘Future Self’ by Curious Company, and the use of the latest immersive technologies for a hyper-personalized user experience, we achieve exactly that. We confront and make it tangible how good or poor retirement planning feels through one’s own example.”Evi Popp, Board member of neuen leben.
Business
Even the word “retirement planning” was almost considered toxic in sales at Sparkassen and Neue Leben. To customers, it feels like an annoying dentist appointment that they’d rather avoid. We needed an emotional opener to make people even start thinking about their own old age – and to guide them into a consultation situation.
In line with our idea of “digital sustainability,” we didn’t want a quick campaign, as had been done in previous years, but a lasting experience that we could continue to develop over months and years. Directly in Sparkassen as an installation, as well as mobile on the web.
Story
What will I look like when I’m older? How will I be doing? Am I actually doing everything right today? The longer people spoke with their AI-aged self, the more it clicked for them: “Wow! I exist in the future, and I’m doing well!”
An emotional level and immersion that no retirement planning campaign has ever achieved before. (We’re not just claiming that – all analyses and tracking data confirm it.)
Tech
The experience is optimized for the 50 installations in Sparkassen, but also works on the landing page and is continuously optimized there.
The core is our own AI-aging model, which runs locally (without internet) on PCs in Sparkassen and therefore operates very resource-efficiently.
For nerds: Our aging AI consists of 6 AI models/systems:
- Stable Diffusion with Controlnet to generate the dataset. Special attention was paid to ensure that the AI model ages ethnicity correctly and does not change skin tones.
- An in-house aging model trained using the CycleGAN method.
- A segmentation model to remove the image background.
- A segmentation model to remove hats and clothing.
- A face restoration model.
- A facial recognition model to align the face on the projection.
The aged self was then animated in real time, dressed in new future clothing, placed into a future background, and could even wink at the user.
The chat is a visually enhanced (and at the same time content-limited) GPT-4o model. Initially, we wanted to keep the chat open with free text only, but during testing we realized that for many people this experience is their first contact with an AI chat, so we had to guide it more with presets (selection buttons). In the mobile version, both run in parallel, which works very well.
With our own experience analysis system (CuriOS, more on that soon), all participants can see at a glance what the campaign, experience, and sales are delivering. Practically every interaction is tracked live and can be continuously optimized to ensure the immersion works as best as possible while also booking consultation appointments. Reactions on social media and press coverage are also collected and analyzed centrally.
