Check out this campaign for the pension company AMF which went live last year. Its aim was to encourage young people to start thinking about their pensions sooner rather than later.

How did they manage to do this? By ‘ageing’ your face of course!

Outdoor billboards and TV adverts prompted the viewer to send a picture of themselves via MMS to a shortcode. A few minutes later the sender receives a picture of their face showing how they would look if they were 70 years old.

Some outdoor ads were made using lenticular printing which allows the image of a young man to morph as you move your viewing angle.

The campaign was well supported by online, with users being able to upload their pictures via the website as well as banners driving traffic. I’m pretty impressed with the consistent message across all the different types of media, especially the TV ad which featured famous young Swedish people, portrayed as seniors.

This campaign makes it fun to engage with AMF and share the ‘aged’ picture with friends. Although it doesn’t really address the reasons why young people like me don’t put money into a pension (probably not the objective anyway), it works great for brand awareness.

Results for the campaign were very impressive with 322,946 pictures sent via MMS which exceeded targets by 546%. Advertising awareness increased by 33% and preference of AMF quadrupled during campaign.

This picked up the ‘Best Mobile Marketing Campaign’ at The Epica Awards for the agency Forsman & Bodenfors.

You’ve got to admire the approach they have gone for here.