Albert Heijn is the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands with over 1,000 stores. To help bring Albert Heijn’s customer-first vision to life across multiple channels, APS were a natural choice as an experienced in-house agency partner. The award-winning global agency won the pitch process against a number of key competitors.

Overview

As a global communications company working in-house with a number of retailers, APS understands the demands of multi-channel campaigns throughout the year. Their teams work closely with a number of lead agencies, with creatives able to quickly immerse themselves in a campaign – expanding key visuals and concepts and delivering fully-fledged communications, on tight timelines and budgets.

Think

APS provides a unique, one-client touchpoint, taking any brief from concept through to completion and delivery – whether this is POS and packaging in store, creative concepts, video, photography, design, digital or social media content creation.

Create

Being onsite allows for shorter lines of communication. Creative teams work as one with the client to ensure each campaign’s true potential is realised and value-added at every point of the journey.

Deliver

The APS creative network globally supports Albert Heijn’s onsite team in Zaandam – however support will predominantly come from APS’ Halfweg creative hub and APS’ Eindhoven technical hub who have been working closely together with the onsite team since day one, to ensure brand and cultural immersion.

“Our partnership with APS Group has allowed us to deliver on a vision we have had for some time now: to increase control of our marketing communications.”

Albert Heijn Studio Director

As part of our Crown Commercial Services agreement (Lot 1 RM3785 Managed Print and Digital), we took on the printing and dispatch of the Companies House highly secure mailing activity.

Think

In collaboration with Companies House to kick start project transition, we developed a comprehensive work stream plan –this included a parallel run of work during the final week of transfer to account for its highly critical and no-fail nature. As with all project implementations, our risk and compliance team developed and managed a risk register. This also included developing and testing a disaster recovery solution. We set up a secure communications channel to receive daily automated print requests.

Create

Our facility holds full PCI DSS certification -all data is fully encrypted and rigid data retention standards ensure that all customer data is deleted within 30 days. The items are then printed through our automated production line, mail sorted and despatched. Print quality has been guaranteed through a combination of Six Sigma sample size calculators and internal quality management tools.

Deliver

By working collaboratively with Companies House to understand their mail profiles and volumes, we were able to recommend the most appropriate mail tariff. This was fully tested through our in-house high speed mail sortation machines to validate address quality and qualification. The fully automated file receipt, validation and production readiness routines are much more efficient, with Companies House now only needing to become involved if any discrepancies arise. The main SLA of zero spoils and 100% correct despatches each day is fulfilled.

“Thank you to APS for delivering a seamless and pain free transition. The whole project was on a short timeline, but APS demonstrated agility and flexibility in adapting to what was required. The Companies House team quickly developed confidence in APS’s delivery capabilities, and we did indeed achieve the target that we both wanted.”

Discover

For a number of years, we have worked with Philips to produce and mail their referral marketing communications, delivering between 100-200k customers pieces per month across their lifeline, well-being and professional healthcare divisions.

Design

Philips asked us to look at innovating their existing direct mail packs, as it was felt that they had become outdated in their creative execution and customer impact.

Deliver

We suggested a new design each month, including a tactile and eye-catching pop-up self-mailer, something Philips had not previously tried before. The mailer had a soft touch coating to add interest when picked up by the respondent.

Develop

Harnessing our extensive vendor base, we were able to deliver production cost savings of over $3.5k, as well as giving Philips new options for their direct mailing. Through their monthly A/B testing, we are working with Philips to use insights gained to further improve response rates.

With Philips recently acquiring Biotelemetry, the Philips research department were looking to launch a new technology that would allow clinical trial patients to do ECG’s at home and send the results directly to the relevant clinics.

We were tasked with helping to create a new kit of marketing collateral. This involved the design and concepting of ideas, in line with current Philips brand standards whilst incorporating new brand standards for Philips Biotel Research too.

Our teams developed a multitude of assets including brochures, social media posts and an animated sales video. Furthermore, we coordinated a photo shoot for new lifestyle imagery which involved location scouting and model casting.

“We had a challenge to bring a new product to our portfolio of services with pre and post marketing materials in a specific timeframe while working to adopt a new brand.  Once we found The APS Group we felt instantly confident in the team’s abilities to meet all the creative, copyrighting, as well as, their ability to walk us through new approval processes to deliver all the material on time and within budget.”

Amanda Myers, Philips Bio-Tel Research , Demand Generation Specialist