Albert Heijn Serves Fresh Weekly Offers with Smartly

About the Customer

Albert Heijn is the largest and most famous Dutch supermarket chain with over 1,000 stores in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. It is owned by Ahold Delhaize, one of the world's leading food retailers.

Albert Heijn strives to always be there for its customers: with a shop right around the corner, online, and for those on the move. This must be visible in all facets of their campaigns, including social advertising.

Industry

Grocery

Company Size

100000

CHALLENGE

How to Efficiently Manage Frequently Changing Offers

Albert Heijn was serving their weekly changing offers on Facebook and Instagram to be where their customers are; on the go and on mobile. However, the frequently changing content posed many challenges: it took a long time to produce the creatives weekly and to update changes to on-going campaigns. The team did everything manually, and the work was error-prone.

The ad format - a regular collection ad - also had restrictions in terms of personalization, and the team found it challenging to align with their new corporate design and brand guidelines.

SOLUTION

Automated, Mobile-First Weekly Offers with Smartly.io's Digital Circular

Together with Dentsu Aegis, Albert Heijn automated their weekly offer advertising with the help of Smartly.io’s Digital Circular -solution. They were able to save time from both creative production and campaign management, making the whole feedback loop much quicker.

The Digital Circular enabled them to add different branding messages to the weekly offers, providing viewers a more complete overview of Albert Heijn's services.

Albert Heijn, together with Dentsu Aegis and Boomerang, created Smartly.io Image Templates to produce Instant Experiences that match the new corporate design guidelines. They used a weekly offers feed to power campaign creation and show up-to-date product information in creatives, significantly reducing errors.

The possibility to step out of standardized format limitations was refreshing and it created a new way of working between our creative and advertising teams.

Bram Molenaar

Digital Media Specialist

RESULTS

Better Reach and Engagement with Less Manual Work

The team was able to reduce the time for pulling product information, producing creatives, and creating campaigns from 3 hours to less than 5 minutes per week. This freed up time for strategic planning and testing. All parties involved can now focus on improving the Digital Circular via testing new content, new structures, and more personalization.

The project set Albert Heijn up for a highly personalized but scalable approach, allowing them to create more data-driven creatives that are highly automated and have a measurable brand impact.