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Rafaela EllensburgServing personalized content about thousands of products to millions of people requires a sophisticated content operation.
At Albert Heijn, the big grocery store chain in the Netherlands, Rafaëla Ellensburg established a content engineering practice that lets the company deliver personalize-able omnichannel content at scale.
In the process, she also created a content engineering practice guild, positioned content within the company as an important enterprise asset, and began developing the semantic practices that will take their content operations into the future.
We talked about:
- her work as a content engineering consultant at Albert Heijn, the big Netherlands grocery store chain
- how the quick growth of digital communication during the pandemic exposed the need to make their content operation more efficient
- how she repositioned content at Albert Heijn to be perceived as an important enterprise asset
- the need for holistic thinking when working with omnichannel content
- the importance of metadata in giving meaning to content
- how she semantically connects her content strategy work to broader company strategy
- their Content Engineering Guild, an org to connect content and engineering teams
- the broad scope of professional development for content folks at Albert Heijn
- how her study of Lean Six Sigma principles helped her improve content operations and workflows
- how she connects content engineering and semantics
- how metadata helps with content discovery for both end users and internal content authors and managers
- her advice to always keep in mind that content engineering is a holistic practice, imbued with meaning, and with lots of possible connections to be made
Rafaëla’s bio
Rafaëla has 10+ years experience in e-commerce management, omnichannel content coordination, data-driven creative content marketing and analytics. In 2022, she established content engineering as a new functional expertise on the cutting edge of digital, data and tech within Albert Heijn, the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands. With her keen eye for detail, structure and strategic insight for profitable omnichannel commerce, she has helped organizations and teams grow and streamline their digital activities. Now, her mission is to realize the marketer’s dream of enabling relevant omnichannel customer experiences in an operationally scalable way.
Connect with Rafaëla online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 191. When you’re managing the content for tens of thousands of grocery store products and serving millions of customers, each of whom expects a personalized shopping experience, you have to build a really good content system. At Albert Heijn, a big grocery story chain in the Netherlands, Rafaëla Ellensburg addressed this need by establishing a new content engineering practice, helping the company realize the dream of a truly scalable omnichannel content operation.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 191 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am super extra delighted today to welcome to the show Rafaëla Ellensburg. Rafaëla is a content engineering consultant at Albert Heijn. If you’ve ever been to the Netherlands, you can’t miss Albert Heijn. They’re everywhere. It’s like a grocery store and convenience store chain that’s all over. So welcome Rafaëla. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.
Rafaëla:
Yes, thank you very much, Larry. I’m very excited to be here. What I’m up to these days, as a content engineering consultant, I’m very much into the organization and structuring of content across the organization. So you can imagine being the biggest retailer in the Netherlands as Albert Heijn, we have a lot of content to share with our customers. So they come to our stores and buy our stuff, of course, but also to really create a customer relationship with them. So one of the biggest drivers for having this role at the organization is the explosion of digital communication these last years and especially after the pandemic, of course, it exploded.
Rafaëla:
So a lot of different digital communication channels opened up. And really, also, all the content that is necessary to communicate with customers with the explosion of digital channels made us realize that the way in which we were working with content was no longer sustainable. So we really needed to scale up our efficiencies and also the digital relevance. So the message that you sent to your customers really has to be relevant because otherwise people get overloaded with things they don’t need, and that’s also something that you want to prevent. So it’s really about scaling up and adding that relevance to it.
Larry:
I love the way you’re emphasizing relevance because it occurs to me you’re in a grocery store with probably tens of thousands of things to sell and all the ancillary, recipes and sales, information and all that kinds of stuff, but the focus on relevance. And in the old days that would happen with some really diligent creative people sitting around a table and coming up with some message. But you’re talking about scale, that doesn’t scale. Not to do the whole thing, but how much work was there to be done when you set out to do this? How much did you see that was the immediate needs to begin to scale your content work?
Rafaëla:
So I did an exercise where I looked at the amount of content that we have in our CMS that serves up the content on our web and our app. And we had around 23,000 static assets in our system. And it’s not easy to manage all of that with a team of around 10 people. And that’s just about communication that you send in mass to the public and not so much about having the right message at the right time to the right customer. So if you think about scaling up to having more personalized approach into your content, then with 23,000 static assets, you are not equipped to do that. So you really need to look at, okay, how can we communicate more personalized with our customers without having to add tens of thousands content specialists to manually configure and publish all that personal content? So that is actually where it started, looking at, okay, we need to become smarter with our content assets to really get that relevance across with a lot more efficiency. That’s where it started.
Larry:
You just mentioned the word assets, and that’s one of the things when we talked, we met a couple of weeks ago at a Janus Boye event in Amsterdam, and one of the things you said there, you were talking about your success in getting people across the organization at Albert Heijn to understand content as a valuable asset. And this is a quest that many of us have been on for decades with little success. Everybody still thinks of it as the marketing guy in the corner writing something. So tell me a little bit about how you repositioned content at Albert Heijn to be perceived as an important asset.
Rafaëla:
So what really helped in achieving that success in having people get that mindset that content is really a very valuable strategic asset, especially if you are scaling up your digital efforts as a company, is comparing it to how as a retailer you treat your products. So if you’re looking at the scale at which Albert Heijn operates, we have more than, I don’t know, we have thousands of products that we sell in thousands of stores. So you can imagine the scale at which we operate with our products, but also the efficiency that is necessary to have that running smoothly on a day-to-day basis. And the key to that is really be very good at managing the data that is behind the products and managing the data really well. Make sure that you can also, if you look at the digital channels, you can really provide very personalized offers to your customers because you know exactly what a person has bought, when, where, how many times. So you know what a customer finds important and relevant.
Rafaëla:
So if you take a look at how we treat our products, we can learn a lot about how we should treat our content. And they’re both assets, they’re both really important assets within the company, but the products get a lot more attention, of course, it’s a core business, but as you scale your digital efforts, you also need to look at how important your content assets are and how strategically valuable they are to your business. And that is really what sparked the idea in people’s minds like, “Okay, content is very important for us and we need to focus more of our efforts and attention to it.”
Larry:
That’s so interesting that you were able to draw pretty early on, it sounds like the parallels between, well, we value our products, we should probably value the information and content about them as well. It’s not like a one-to-one thing, but it seems like a closer thing. I think some orgs, just to cut some slack for folks who aren’t as far ahead as you, it’s probably a harder, and I think it has to do with the mindset. You said there’s already this mindset in the organization around the value of things, and it’s like the leap from product to content about those products, not as huge as it might be in some other places. So that’s super interesting. When we were talking before we went on the air, you said something about, that it’s both about having that mindset, but also taking a holistic view of the whole ecosystem. Tell me a little bit more about what you meant by that.
Rafaëla:
Oh, yeah. So omnichannel is a big word, especially in our field of work, omnichannel marketing, omnichannel content, et cetera, et cetera. And there are not a lot of companies that really can master that. So being present at every channel that you have as a business, that is really the reason why you need to look at it from a holistic perspective. Because if you consider it, everything is connected with each other. And this really touches upon the post, the social media post, the LinkedIn post that Jérémy Ravenel posted last night about how content is connected to every business domain if you really start to look at it. And if you want to communicate at every channel, then you need to have your content, you need to have it configured for every channel in a correct way.
Larry:
And what’s interesting about that, to me, because I do some of that work myself, is in one sense the customer doesn’t care about the channel. They just want to get the steak for the grill or the eggs for the breakfast or whatever it is they’re trying to accomplish. But that just seems to reinforce the holistic part of it. They don’t care where they are, it needs to be a similar kind of thing.
Rafaëla:
Exactly.
Larry:
In my mind, that kind of gets more back to the intent and the purpose of the content, and then you put it in whatever channel it’s appropriate, but that means you have to have your content structured and metadata-ed and all that stuff. Tell me a little bit about that, and that’s probably not an insignificant challenge …
Rafaëla:
No, that’s huge.
Larry:
… with tens of thousands of products.
Rafaëla:
Yeah, that’s huge. And looking back at the holistic part of the holistic side of it, the holistic point of view, is that you have to look at what does it mean? What is the meaning of that piece of content that I’m trying to communicate to my customer? And that meaning is something that you should translate into the metadata of that piece of content. Because otherwise, we humans, we look at content and we know immediately what it means, but the systems that we work with, they don’t know what that piece of content means. We have to give meaning to that piece of content, and we do that with metadata. And that’s really, when I say thinking holistically about content, you really have to think about, okay, what does my content mean if I want to communicate it in an omnichannel way? When I’m talking about holistics, I mean let’s get the meaning into the system.
Larry:
And it’s almost like sitting in the stars in the summer night with a bottle of wine, pondering the meaning of life. “What does the content mean?” But it has very practical and important business implications in your day-to-day life. And coming back to that mindset thing that’s already kind of there and you’re nurturing it and developing it with this kind of structure and meaning around the content, you’ve also talked about how that is sort of driven not just by omnichannel needs, but also by this company corporate strategy and how you tie your work back to that. How do you stitch that together? That seems really important too.
Rafaëla:
Yeah, that’s very important. And that’s also what really gets the senior level going about why content should be an important strategic asset. So you can do this top-down or you can do this bottom-up. So I actually did both. I re-approached senior level directors and explained why content needs to be a strategic asset, and it all has to do with the meaning that is also present in the strategy. So really the words that we use in our strategy and what those words mean for our business performance and our business activities, that meaning should also be represented in your content. There needs to be a direct link between those two.
Rafaëla:
So it’s not just the senior level that needs to get that part, but it’s also the people that are working in the day-to-day operations, working with content, they need to understand the strategy to actually create effective content in their day-to-day operations. So what I actually did when I was working as a team lead within the creative content team at Albert Heijn, I took the team towards our strategy office. There’s a room inside our headquarters where everything about the strategy is visualized and explained, and you can walk around the room and see what the most important parts are of a strategy, and I really took them there and have them look at all of the important points within the strategy and have them think about how that relates to their day-to-day work.
Rafaëla:
So it’s both a top-down and a bottom-up approach that you need to apply and have that connection with the strategy and the day-to-day operations when it comes to content.
Larry:
And as you say that, I’m reminded of this kind of common model, you see a lot like Factor Firm and Enterprise Knowledge and other consultancies have things like this. There’s that sort of the instance data, stuff on the ground level and then the strategy and the application and kind of the two things you were just talking about, strategy and omnichannel stuff, all that kind of higher… This is highly conceptual model I’m setting out here, but in the middle is always something about information architecture, semantics, some way to stitch those two together. And I love that you have a physical place, you can walk into, that strategy room. Tell me a little bit, this is just a side curiosity of mine. That room, so it’s sort of physical artifacts and just sort of a place to remind everyone in the org of what the corporate strategy is?
Rafaëla:
Yes. It’s really not just the corporate strategy, but it’s really a room where you can see who the customer is and what the customer does and what the customer wants. So it’s really focused on the customer. It really putting the customer in the central place around which we form our strategy, and that really helps. Having that customer wishes and needs in mind really helps to think about, okay, what do we need to create to really talk to that customer and really get into the hearts of that customer? So that is really what that room is about, really showing the research what we did about the customer and making it really tangible.
Larry:
I love that. I just love that. And the other thing about that is that the folks you’re taking into that room, the content practitioners, you’ve also done work around this sort of guild you’ve created around content engineering at Albert Heijn. Tell me about that, because that’s sort of like the C-suite. They’re organized, they have their big conference table, they’re all sitting around. You have your Content Engineering Guild elsewhere in the org. Tell me a little bit about that.
Rafaëla:
Yeah. So the Content Engineering Guild is sort of subset of people from the creative content team, and they are people that are interested in the technology behind content. So they’re really working closely with the product owner of the CMS and the developers, but also me now as a content engineering consultant, I step in and have a conversation about, okay, are they working with the CMS? Are they still happy? Is it still usable for them? What are their wishes? And really having them have a say in how the CMS is being developed continually. So it’s really more the tech side of content and having them step out of their day-to-day work and think about how they can help in developing the technology a bit further.
Larry:
That’s so great because it’s so much more common to just have somebody decide on a CMS and then you train people on how to use it. But this is the opposite. This is the content people saying, “It’d be great if we could X, Y, Z.”
Rafaëla:
You’re really working together with the developers, and that’s really what you also need. You need to have that ongoing conversation with both business disciplines, because otherwise the developers, they branch out towards maybe very technical, difficult setups while the content editors are really struggling with how they should configure the content to create that omnichannel experience.
Larry:
That’s really interesting too, because it’s super common in the content world for people to come from English and journalism and copywriting and other kinds of backgrounds without a huge amount of technical knowledge or information, and the engineers are notoriously and correctly buried in the tech doing that. Have you found ways to improve the conversation between the tech folks and the creative folks?
Rafaëla:
Oh yeah, of course. So it’s really being pragmatic about it and have a weekly or bi-weekly meeting an hour actually with the developers and the content editors, but also doing demos. So the product owner of the CMS has a demo planned every two weeks to demonstrate what kind of wishes and needs they translated into new releases of CMS and new features that they develop. So it’s really an ongoing thing to have that conversation going. Yeah.
Larry:
Yeah, I think that’s-
Rafaëla:
That’s basically it.
Larry:
Yeah. I think LLMs are really heightening this, but we all just love being in conversation, and so the more you can facilitate that… Yeah. We’ve talked a lot about a lot of things that I think might stitch together in another way, and I know that they do in your mind, because we talked about how there’s many notions of content maturity, there’s a lot of scales and things out there, but you have this idea about how the relationship between content maturity and digital maturity, and in particular some of the things that can go into that, like content professionals in particular learning… To what we were just talking about with the devs and the creative folks getting more aligned. But you go even beyond that to talk about what content folks can learn from data people and information architecture and supply chain management, even that last one.
Larry:
That makes sense in the context of a grocery store for some reason. But tell me a little bit more about how much more broadly content professionals could be learning about the rest of the world.
Rafaëla:
Oh yeah. No, definitely. So it is not just development, of course, but I think content professionals can benefit by learning, if they would look at how supply chain is put in place, and if they think about the workflows that go into creating content and publishing it, there are many parallels to discover there. So you can almost basically call a content workflow, a content supply chain, because you have the raw material, a photographer is shooting images for a certain campaign, and those images, those raw assets, basically they need to be processed before you can actually use them in the production.
Rafaëla:
So going from the raw assets into the processed goods, and then you have a storage where you actually store and organize those goods before they’re being sold or before they’re being distributed. So if you look at a supply chain in the traditional sense, you can really map it on top of the content workflow and see, discover, okay, what can we learn then from supply chains that are really efficient? What can we learn there? I haven’t told you this yet, but I did a Lean Six Sigma course when I was a team lead because I really wanted to discover how can we gain more efficiency in our content operations by learning some Lean Six Sigma principles, for example, getting stuff the first time right, starting with really good material really helps in getting that efficiency from ideation towards publication. So there’s a lot to discover there.
Larry:
That’s really interesting. It’s just broadening your continuing professional development to look at things like… I love that you did that Six Sigma course, because it’s not super common in content people, but from what you just said, just like you take the raw materials, you do something to them, you process them, you turn them into something different than you store and manage and organize that, and then that tracks perfectly. I think that’s going to sound very familiar to any number of content supply chain folks.
Larry:
Hey, I want to make sure we get to, because we talked a little bit after your talk in Amsterdam about semantic because as a semantic nerd, I was like, “Ah, just one slide at the end.” So I want to noodle on that a little bit more with you about… But seriously, but at the end of that conversation, you said you… because you had talked a lot about the semantic layer and the need for metadata and all that stuff, and you kind of left it hanging, not as… you didn’t dismiss it. It was just like, “Next thing we got to do is got our heads around the semantics and how that fits into content engineering.” I guess, kind of give us your definition of semantics and how it applies to content engineering.
Rafaëla:
Yeah. So this is an area that I just started to look into, actually, I started last year because I was looking into knowledge graph technology for my content engineering practices. And it has a lot to do with domain modeling and content modeling and the semantics that are used in the modeling, I think that is the part that I’m exploring right now. So how can we apply or use a semantic layer to help us with orchestrating that content in all the channels that we have to really create that relevant digital experience at a larger scale? And I think that the semantic layer is something that could help us there. I know yet how, but I think it really has to do with how we can link all the semantics with each other from different domains. It’s still something that I need to work out.
Larry:
Yeah. Well, you should come to the Knowledge Graph Conference with me next week.
Rafaëla:
Yeah, I wish I could.
Larry:
This episode will air after that, but no, and just because I’m just a couple years ahead of you in terms of the inquiry around that. The top line that I think about it is I think of data, like a knowledge graph is semantic. It is sort of a super metadata. Because we’re all familiar with working with metadata and a lot of the stuff you’ve talked about, like the need to be able to personalize, the need to structure data and store it in reusable ways. To my mind, the thing that permits the stitching back together is metadata and that knowledge graphs just take that up a notch. It is more than just taxonomy If you have an ontological understanding of what’s going on in your organization and the ability.
Larry:
And you said something earlier about, “Well, humans get this stuff really easily, but machines, not so much.” And that’s the thing about a knowledge representation model, like a knowledge graph, is that it’s informed by humans saying, “Yeah, this is how we organize and understand the world. And here it is in a language that you, dear Computer can read and do stuff with.”
Rafaëla:
Yes. Yeah, that’s it.
Larry:
So I think that’s how it’s going to fit together. I think many details to be worked out as we all
Rafaëla:
Oh, definitely. Definitely. Yes. And when I talk about knowledge graph inside the organization, I often use the reference to Google because that’s what people know in their daily lives. And the thing is that I think the semantic layer will help with making the content in the organization a lot more findable. So it helps with searching for answers in the organization, and that also links very closely to the reusability, because if you cannot find a piece of content, you also cannot reuse it. And that’s really at the heart of engineering, that content, structuring it, but also using the semantics because people use the semantics. People use words to find something, keywords, terms, labels, tagging. The words really help people to use content and reuse it. And if people can do that, then the machines also can do that. And then the machines can help us orchestrate that content in all the channels. So that is how it all ties together for me inside of my head.
Larry:
That makes perfect sense to me the way you just articulated that. And I love the way you said that people use words to find stuff, and that sort of gets it to me. I had Torrey Podmajersky on six or eight months ago, and she has this hypothesis that everything is content. And sometimes that’s almost a little bit of a stretch, but in the case of metadata, which always has labels associated with it, that’s content. So I think in terms of our content engineering and content management, the metadata and the ontological descriptions of things in a knowledge graph, it’s just more content. And I think we kind of all have to get in there more and play with it and figure it out.
Rafaëla:
Yes, we need to get in there. And I think it’s not just the content, but it’s also the relationship that you create with the content. And that is the missing link, I think, in many individuals who are working with content and want to get to that point of maturity and that hyper-personalized magic future that everyone dreams about. I think it really comes down to how can we model reality and really apply that meaning and connect that meaning in a way that machines can understand, just like humans understand.
Larry:
Yeah. And we’re this close. We’re very close.
Rafaëla:
We’re so close.
Larry:
I mean, the technology exists. We have to use it better, and we got to get out-
Rafaëla:
We have to use it.
Larry:
… ahead of these LLMs too, because they’re taking all the oxygen out of the room right now. But anyhow. Hey Rafaëla, I can’t believe it. We’re coming up close to time, but before we wrap up, is there anything last, anything you want to make sure we share with the folks before we finish?
Rafaëla:
Oh man. I think we really already touched upon it, right? The holistic parts, the meaning, the connections. I think if you think about those three things and really start searching for examples in data management, information architecture, and supply chain management, you will get a lot of steps ahead of the rest, I guess.
Larry:
I agree.
Rafaëla:
I guess that’s my takeaway.
Larry:
I agree completely, but I also want to point out that those things that the holistic, meaningful, connect-ey thing just seems very people-oriented too.
Rafaëla:
Yes, it is.
Larry:
But we need to figure out these business and technical practices that stitch it all together.
Rafaëla:
Exactly. Yeah.
Larry:
Hey, one very last thing, Rafaëla, if folks want to connect with you online or follow you, what’s the best way to find you?
Rafaëla:
I think LinkedIn would be the best way. So just search my name on LinkedIn and then we can connect.
Larry:
Excellent. I’ll put that in the show notes as well. Well, thank you so much.
Rafaëla:
Yes, thank you very much.
Larry:
This was such a great conversation.
Rafaëla:
Thank you. I really enjoyed it.
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