TSB and Tiny the Elephant: How the early adoption of AI made a big idea much bigger

TSB is a medium sized bank without the marketing budgets of the big banks, and needs to punch above its weight.

In 2023, TSB launched a new idea: Tiny the Elephant - money is the elephant in the room and TSB can help you shrink it.

As an animatronic puppet, Tiny needed nine puppeteers. Traditional production methods limited scalability and needed significant time and resource, restricting the volume and variety of content we could create.

To be able to use Tiny consistently throughout our activity, we needed a more efficient way of producing assets.

Kindred, TSB’s in-house agency proposed a more efficient and low-cost solution: working closely with Adobe, Kindred trained an AI custom model of Tiny to produce whatever we needed at minimum cost and maximum pace. The outputs stayed true to the puppet likeness, allowing us to bring her to life in new and engaging ways.

In 2025/26, Kindred has been able to use AI Tiny to quickly generate a large number of varied, consistent assets across a range of brand, sales and service activity.

Performance results have demonstrated we are delivering better business performance vs. non-Tiny creative. Current Account Switcher is 51% more effective, prize draw response rates are 5.6x higher, VTRs of Money Confidence videos are 61% higher vs. industry benchmark, and topical social posts have seen a 75% increase in engagements.

Lead times are now 7 minutes instead of 7 weeks and production costs are minimal.

AI Tiny delivers better, faster and cheaper creative work.