How ING Turned Amsterdam Airport Schiphol Into a Stage for Life
ING's 'From – To' campaign uses the visual grammar of travel tickets — the familiar pairing of a departure point and a destination — to reframe the Dutch bank's role in customers' lives as a companion through personal transformation. Created by Amsterdam agency TBWA\NEBOKO and first launched in February 2024, the campaign ran across approximately 350 airbridges and digital out-of-home billboards at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol in The Netherlands, reaching travellers at the precise moment they are moving from one chapter of their lives to the next.
The campaign's central mechanic is disarmingly simple. Where an airport screen typically reads a city of origin and a destination, ING replaces those coordinates with emotional states, life events, and personal milestones. More than 50 individual life journeys are depicted across the installation, according to Clapboard's campaign documentation, ranging from business ambition and new romance to the particular exhaustion of recovering from a trip to Las Vegas. Some executions function as self-contained headlines; others pair the 'from–to' device with photography drawn from real human stories. The result is a campaign that is simultaneously hyper-personal and universally legible — an execution that earns attention in what Kim Larsen, Head of Global Communications, Brand and MarCom at ING, describes as a sea of crowded airport advertising.
The 'From – To' campaign extends ING's global 'Do Your Thing' brand positioning, which was established in January 2020, according to Banken Nl, and which repositioned the bank around customer empowerment rather than product promotion. In The Netherlands and across ING's broader European footprint, this philosophy has consistently shifted the brand's communications away from actor-led commercials and toward the lived experiences of real customers. The Schiphol execution sharpens that promise into a single, resonant creative idea, earning a Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100 for its strategic clarity and contextual precision.
Amsterdam Airport Schiphol serves as one of Europe's busiest aviation hubs. The creative brief for ING's 'From – To' campaign began with that geographic fact and worked outward, identifying the airport not merely as a media placement but as a cultural environment already saturated with the language of transition. Every traveller passing through Schiphol is, by definition, moving from somewhere to somewhere else — a condition that maps directly onto ING's 'Do Your Thing' promise of helping people progress in their lives.
The strategic logic is grounded in context. TBWA\NEBOKO positioned the campaign to intercept travellers at the moment their minds are already oriented toward change, new beginnings, and the emotion of departure or arrival. As Creative Director Joris Phillipart noted in campaign materials documented by Little Black Book, the airport environment allowed the agency to tell the ING story of 'do your thing' by celebrating the power of life journeys, whether big or small. This contextual alignment between medium and message is a defining quality of the campaign's strategic architecture.
In The Netherlands, the retail banking sector is highly competitive. ING competes directly with Rabobank and ABN AMRO, both of which maintain significant retail and digital banking presences across the Dutch market. ING reported total income of €22.615 billion in 2024, according to ING's own financial disclosures, and the bank serves nearly 40 million retail customers globally, including a substantial base in The Netherlands. Against that competitive backdrop, brand differentiation through emotional storytelling rather than product specification represents a deliberate strategic choice — one that 'From – To' executes at scale within a single, high-visibility environment. The global retail banking market carries a conservative estimated value of around US$2.0 trillion with a compound annual growth rate of approximately 3.8 percent through 2030, according to a report by Grand View Research, underlining the intensity of the commercial context in which ING is building brand equity.
Joris Phillipart, Creative Director at TBWA\NEBOKO, led the creative development of 'From – To', and the work bears the hallmarks of a campaign conceived from the environment outward rather than the studio inward. The execution spans approximately 350 airbridges and digital out-of-home billboard placements at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, according to campaign documentation cited by adsoftheworld.com, transforming the functional infrastructure of the airport into an emotional storytelling medium.
The visual and verbal device at the campaign's core is the 'from–to' construction borrowed directly from the airport's own wayfinding language. By appropriating this format, TBWA\NEBOKO sidesteps the usual conventions of financial services advertising entirely. There is no product shot, no interest rate, no app interface. In their place is a series of more than 50 paired statements — documented by campaignsoftheworld.com — that compress entire human narratives into two short lines. The creative discipline required to make each pairing land with emotional specificity at a glance, in a crowded transit environment, is considerable. The team resolved this challenge by pursuing hyper-personal specificity over broad relatability, trusting that a story written precisely enough for one kind of person will resonate outward to others who recognise the emotional shape of the experience, even if not the precise circumstance.
Photography plays an integral role where the executions move beyond text alone. These image-led panels are described by plusoneamsterdam.com as being based on real stories, lending the campaign a documentary quality that distinguishes it from the aspirational fiction common in financial services creative. The combination of text-only and photography executions across the airbridge and digital billboard inventory creates a campaign that rewards repeated exposure — a meaningful property in an airport environment where passengers may pass the same installation multiple times across a journey.
No independently verified third-party performance metrics for ING's 'From – To' campaign — such as brand lift scores, recall figures, or attributed customer acquisition data — are publicly available at the time of writing. What the campaign's structural properties do allow is a substantive analysis of its likely effectiveness within the context of the Schiphol environment and ING's broader communications objectives in The Netherlands.
The media placement alone confers significant reach. Campaign materials cited by Tbwa Nl reference more than 62 million annual travellers passing through Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, with the planned full rollout covering approximately 350 airbridges and digital out-of-home units by June 2024. At that scale, the campaign's exposure footprint within a single Dutch location is exceptional. The contextual relevance of the environment — travellers already in a state of transition — further elevates the probability of message engagement beyond what equivalent reach in a neutral media environment would produce.
The campaign's creative architecture also supports structural effectiveness. By deploying more than 50 individual executions across the same media environment, as documented by adsoftheworld.com, ING avoids the creative wear-out that limits single-execution OOH campaigns. Each new journey encountered by a repeat traveller reactivates attention. The 'from–to' device functions as a mnemonic that links every individual panel back to ING's brand positioning, ensuring that variety in content does not dilute brand attribution. These properties — contextual precision, executional variety, and a consistent verbal identity — represent the foundations on which Clapboard assigns this campaign a score of 71 out of 100.
ING's 'From – To' campaign is an outdoor advertising installation at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol in The Netherlands. Created by TBWA\NEBOKO in 2024, it spans approximately 350 airbridges and digital billboards, using the visual language of travel tickets to tell more than 50 stories about personal life transitions, according to Clapboard's campaign documentation.
TBWA\NEBOKO created the ING 'From – To' campaign. Joris Phillipart served as Creative Director at TBWA\NEBOKO, and Kim Larsen, Head of Global Communications, Brand and MarCom at ING, oversaw the brand side. The campaign's first wave launched in February 2024, with a full rollout planned by June 2024, as documented by adsoftheworld.com.
ING's 'From – To' directly extends the bank's 'Do Your Thing' global positioning, established in January 2020 according to banken.nl. That platform repositioned ING around customer empowerment rather than product advertising. 'From – To' translates that promise into a site-specific OOH format, anchoring life-stage transitions to ING's brand identity within The Netherlands.
Amsterdam Airport Schiphol provides an environment where every traveller is already experiencing a transition. Campaign materials cited by tbwa.nl reference more than 62 million annual travellers at the airport. TBWA\NEBOKO identified this as a moment of heightened emotional openness, making Schiphol a strategically precise match for ING's message about life journeys and personal progress.
ING's 'From – To' campaign received a Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strategic clarity, strong contextual alignment between medium and message, and executional variety across more than 50 individual life journey panels deployed at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol in The Netherlands throughout 2024.
The ING 'From – To' campaign features more than 50 individual life journeys, according to Clapboard's documentation. These range from business travel and new romance to family milestones and personal recovery. Some executions are text-only headline pairings; others incorporate photography drawn from real stories, as reported by plusoneamsterdam.com and campaignsoftheworld.com.
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