Building a scalable content engine for global growth

[00:00:00] PHR Chris Dell Human Reviewed Transcript

Jason Hemingway: Welcome to In Other Words, the podcast from Phrase, where we speak with business leaders shaping how organizations grow, adapt and connect with customers around the world. I’m Jason Hemingway, CMO at Phrase, and today we’re talking about the hidden operating system behind global scale. Content. When companies expand, ambition is rarely the issue. Execution gets much harder when content has to scale across markets without losing quality and still remaining relevant. Our guest today has built and run content operations at scale in a few companies and scaled their ever-expanding reach. Chris Dell spent 14 years at Booking.com, building and leading its in-house content agency at its peak, a roughly 400-person global team responsible for marketplace and marketing content community, and geodata visual content. Perhaps we can talk about that a bit, Chris. And multilingual content delivery across 45 different locations worldwide. Chris now runs Next Chapter Advisory and Coaching and helps scale-ups and enterprise grow sustainably, develop leaders and communicate strategic narratives that drive action. He’s also a senior advisor with analyst firm Nimdzi. Chris, welcome. After that long introduction, it’s great to have you with us.

Chris Dell: Fantastic to be with you, Jason. Thanks so much for inviting me.

Jason Hemingway: It’s an absolute pleasure. So, let’s talk about you to start with. I always like to get into this idea of where  

Chris Dell: my favorite topic

Jason Hemingway: There you go. Mine too, but this is about you. I always like to get into this idea of where you started your career, and you started building and leading large content teams. But how did you first get into that profession, and what led to getting, you know, to leading those big content operations in tech firms?

Chris Dell: It’s been a very non-obvious path. I studied History of Art. Actually, I studied originally Painting at Winchester School of Art. And then I studied History of Art in London at the Courtauld Institute. I was determined to go work in the art world. So when I graduated, I was very fortunate. I got a great job at the National Gallery. And there, I was a Curator of Photographic Collections, which was fantastic. A dream job for a History of Art graduate. I did that for a couple of years and then realized, ok, maybe working for the government isn’t necessarily my preferred pace. So then I gradually moved into publishing. I worked at the Architectural Association for a couple of years, working on a weekly there, which I loved. Then we did have some really nice pace. Pulling together content, writing content, picture research, all of these kinds of different things. And then ended up working for a publisher called Thames & Hudson, who’s kind of a well-known publisher in London, New York, focusing on very high-quality illustrated books. So, there I was, absolute bliss because I got to work with every type of content. Typically, we were working with multinational co-editions, international co-editions, with lots of translated editions as well. So, that was absolutely fantastic. I did some commissioning. I did a lot of kinds of project management for them. Then I moved to Barcelona, works as a freelance kind of editor, publisher, writer. A whole bunch of different things, lots of different companies, did quite a lot of translation work. I used to translate from Catalan and Spanish into English, and then got into Booking.com. Actually, I applied twice for Booking.com. I wasn’t successful the first time. I was successful the second time, a year later. So, I started with them beginning of 2010. And as you mentioned, I think already, I started as a writer, individual contributor, completely happy with that. I’d mostly been kind of writing, creating content, most of my career, but within a couple of weeks, it was obvious that they had other plans for me. So within a year, then I was leading a team locally. And then, within a couple of years, I moved to Amsterdam to lead a team globally. And then about two and a half years in, they said, “Hey, do you want to be a Director and just run content for us?” I guess I have to say yes. It’s too interesting an opportunity. So, yeah, it’s been a very circuitous route, but we got there.

Jason Hemingway: I mean, amazing. So, from art to publishing to illustrative publishing as well, back into all of the content. That is an interesting journey. And you were at Booking for a long time, you know, 2010 to 2024, I guess, 14 years. And you moved from that kind of, it’s really interesting because you moved on that hands-on where you’re doing it to kind of leading that. And I said at the beginning, a 400-person content organization. When you built and scaled that in-house content sort of agency or team, what was the core business problem you had set out to kind of solve with it? It wasn’t just writing art. It’s a very different proposition, right?

Chris Dell: No, no, no. I mean, categorically, within Booking, everything we did, we did with purpose, of course. It was very, very tightly run, very disciplined organization. And I had many, many different types of content that I was kind of responsible for, that I was leading. And each of them has a very, very specific business function, all of which will be pretty obvious, I think, to anyone who kind of thinks about it. So we need, we have, let’s say, hundreds of thousands or millions. It’s grown to millions of unique properties that you can book. Each of them needs some content. It needs some visual content, photos of what it actually looks like, and it needs some sort of description, some sort of written content. So then, how do you make sure you get the right photos, typically from partners? How do you make sure that you’re writing the right sort of descriptions, then you need to translate the description? At the same time, another thing I was looking after was how do you moderate all of the content, the user-generated content that we get? So, people leave reviews for the particular properties, and you want to surface the right reviews. You also want to make sure that you’re not putting anything online that is harmful or prejudicial in some way. So then if I look at all the different kind of types of content, then the description is there, I guess, to let’s say, drive trust and make sure that it’s very clear what someone’s actually buying. The review content is there because it’s, I guess, social proof. And again, to build trust and confidence. People like me have seen, have experienced this kind of thing. The visual content, again, is to build transparency, to make sure that when you get there, it should look like what you thought it was going to look like. And then we had other types of content, such as editorial content, sort of much more upper funnel. So, it’s really about kind of engaging with people, giving people something to engage with if they’re not looking to buy something straight away. Maybe it’s just a little bit of kind of planning, very kind of upper funnel concerns. And then we also have things like geodata, which you referenced in the introduction, which is basically where are things? And there you’re trying to make sure that when someone goes along and looks for Barcelona, that they’re actually finding, let’s say, hotels that are in Barcelona, or what they would consider to be Barcelona. But of course, that can be a fairly flexible thing, depending on whether you’re a domestic or international traveler, etc. So, many, many, many different types of content, but each with their own kind of very specific objective. And of course, localization was the biggest part of that. And there, fundamentally, we’re trying to make the platform accessible for customers, but also for partners.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, accessible in every different culture that you operate in, right? And that’s where it becomes a core part of that business proposition that you’re trying to put out there, is that we’re where you are, we’re driving those experiences where the customers are at. So, I completely get it. And you’ve got all these different types of content, business purposes, different business purposes for those types of content. When you’re talking to leadership teams, they’re interesting to see where your kind of reporting line was to start with. But when you’re talking to leadership teams, what are those hidden variables that make it harder than maybe those leadership teams would expect? Because oftentimes you get, you know, we need to do lots of content, you know, and AI is making that lots of, very easy. It’s like, well, what kind of content? What’s the business purpose of the content? All valid questions. And then once you start getting into, well, we need to localize it, and can you just make that happen? It’s like, well, that’s not as simple as it sounds. What are those hidden variables from your perspective that you have to discuss with leadership when they say, you know, make our content scale globally, for example?

Chris Dell: Yeah. And it was interesting. Generally, people weren’t; no one was asking me explicitly to kind of scale content. It was just kind of understood that if we’re, let’s say, going to grow our total number of properties available, that this will have knock-on impact. One of the rather beautiful things about Booking, particularly if I go back to, say, when I first became a Director, so that was 2013, and I was leading the department, is that it was kind of a very hands-off place, very transparent. We would share at a leadership level. This is the strategy. These are our goals for next year. This is how we want to grow. Figure out for yourself what that means for your area. Which is a lot of fun, actually. So, nobody was actually ever kind of, you know, sitting down with me and saying, “Chris, you have to, you know, scale this.” No, Chris, this is what growth potentially looks like. These are the markets we’re interested in tackling. Maybe these are the sorts of properties or even new verticals, you know, because obviously, Booking has evolved from just hotels to, you know, many other verticals, like, you know, flights and attractions and things like that. This is what’s on the horizon. It’s up to me then to go away and really figure out with my own team, with my own leadership team in content, like, hey, what does that mean for us?

Jason Hemingway: So, how do you go about doing that as just a sort of intellectual exercise? So the business gives you, but you know, the business objectives. Okay. All right. Now, what do we do about that?

Chris Dell: What you’re doing a lot of the time is looking at your existing process and saying, “Okay, fine, can I, and a lot of the time, it wasn’t just 10x this, but can I 100x this?” And you stress test it a little bit. So you basically, okay, which part of the funnel is going to break first? I mean, that’s one thing I’ve learnt through working very closely with operational excellence teams also over the years. I mean, I’m fascinated by kind of just creating tight operations. But you only ever need to tackle one bottleneck at a time. In any process, there’s one big bottleneck. You tackle that first. You don’t worry about where the secondary bottleneck is because that’ll become the primary bottleneck, and then you tackle it. So basically, in any process, there will always be one piece that will let you down. You just need to have good visibility on where that is and then understand, hey, if we go to 100x, what part is going to break? What can we do then preemptively to make sure it doesn’t break? Or sometimes you accept that it will break and you just flag to the business, probably this is going to break in Q2, Q3, we’ll then fix it. But yeah, but I mean, it was often, you know, human processes, obviously, you know, considerably more fragile when it comes to scalability. Things like quality management, if you’re not careful, can really start kind of slowing you down. Yeah, but if I think of all the different processes we were running, typically it was the human component. And humans can always bring value in a process, but are we definitely kind of directing them to the right part? And by the way, what’s our fallback position? So, in a sense, my expectation was always things will go wrong, but what happens next? What’s the fallback position? What’s the, how can we, for example, change a quality management process to make it lighter so that we can still get through, you know, a kind of peak season or something like that? And sometimes it just broke. Sometimes it broke.

Jason Hemingway: So, if you’re a CEO, then you’re sort of advising one, and you’re looking at these processes. What are those early signs that might tell you that content operations are slowing growth, or it’s broken? What would you look for? How would you advise?

Chris Dell: I mean, I think as a CEO, you always want to, kind of, keep your ear to the ground. And it’ll become very, very obvious very quickly where the pain points are, because if you listen to the kind of gossip and the rumour, it’s always obvious where in the overall chain something is breaking. And then as a CEO, you just have to be able to kind of identify that quickly and then step in and basically kind of, hey, what support do you need to get this back on the road? Because, again, typically, if you look at something like travel, incredibly seasonal, you know, and the peak is when things are going to break. And the peak is when you most need things not to break. I mean, it’s very, very important. Many, you know, for many consumer organizations, it’ll be pre-Christmas. So, you know, that’s when every system is going to be tested. That’s when you have to really kind of keep your ear to the ground, really understand what’s happening and be able to kind of move in very, very quickly surgically. Yeah. So, I think it’s just a kind of general awareness of organizational dynamics is what tells you when things are really starting to go wrong. Because, of course, content, generally speaking, won’t have immediate impact on the bottom line or even top line. Yeah. Where it could snarl something up in a very high growth environment is, hey, are we able to ship as much product as we need? And if we see then, you know, hey, we’re shipping product much slower. We’re not able to get things live as quickly as we were, you know, a couple of quarters ago. That sort of very, very operational day-to-day metric you kind of want to stay on top of.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, they’re the kind tells.

Chris Dell: There are always tells.

Chris Dell: But again, typically, you’ll hear something before the data reveals it.

Jason Hemingway: Okay, that’s interesting. And so when you’ve got that kind of operating measurement or decisions that are coming out in you, what’s the biggest difference you can make in the teams to keep that quality, especially when you talk about those peak times, for example, like Christmas or the summer period for somebody like Booking, you’re expected to do much more. And so the systems are being tested. What’s the operating decision-making framework that you might use to sort of stay on top of it?

Chris Dell: Talking about, you know, kind of Booking when I joined, one of the things I absolutely loved about the organization is that it was slightly kind of anarchic, which is to say power was often radically decentralized. And that was the kind of general principle. I mean, it was something I absolutely loved about the culture at that point. It was still, I’ll just say as a shorthand, it was very Dutch. But what I mean by that is, you know, the hierarchy didn’t really matter. What mattered were ideas and the ability to have a great conversation around ideas and to be able to challenge. And I think there was a widespread belief across the entire organization that a really great idea can genuinely come from absolutely anywhere. And in fact, it’s more likely to come from people with dirty hands who are actually doing stuff every single day because they’re much, much closer to the customer, to the process, et cetera. So, in general, I didn’t, you know, while we can generate huge amounts of data about how an operation is running. Ultimately, I would still want people in local teams to be able to make decisions, as to, hey, what can be deprioritized in a particular moment if there is a bottleneck. And that’s particularly true with something like quality management, you know, which can very, very, very easily become a bottleneck. That if a local team is completely comfortable with the way things are going, then, you know, they can also make an executive decision, hey, we’re going to do considerably less quality checking on particular types of content or something like that. We’re just going to kind of let some stuff through, and maybe some things will need to be fixed later. But, you know, let’s be kind of pragmatic and practical about this. So, you need to know always like, hey, where are the potential overspills in any process that, if things really, really get busy? I am not, you know, brilliantly placed to make the right decision around quality management for 46 different languages. I speak 3 or 4, but only one of them, probably, I can really be trusted to do quality management, just about. So, there are other people who are much more capable of making decisions, also in terms of prioritizing work. Well, what matters more or less, et cetera.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? I think some of that’s down to sort of your appetite for risk in certain places, you know, and people being able to assess the local risks when you’re empowering different, you know, I don’t know, if you operate a kind of hub and spoke kind of model where, you know, those kind of people are empowered to make decisions based around a set of risk parameters that everyone finds sort of acceptable.

Chris Dell: I mean, obviously, you want to, you know, you want to reduce risk. And in this context, risk, I mean, you know, something that’s potentially,

Chris Dell: you know, non-compliant or typically, we’re not going to get to, there. It’s actually, we’re talking about customer experience. So, it’s something that’s going to have a negative impact on customer experience. Of course, you want to, you know, control that as much as possible. You want to minimize that as much as possible. You want everyone having an amazing experience. But again, there are other people who are much better placed in the organization, much more junior, probably in the organization, who can make these decisions. And I don’t, definitely, don’t need to get involved.

Jason Hemingway: I like that idea of people with dirty hands. That’s a great phrase. I love that.

Chris Dell: These are people I really respect and admire, you know, who are basically close to the actual stuff being produced.

Jason Hemingway: Well, let’s move it slightly away from kind of the operational side of things, because, you know, content operation is one thing, but actually, narrative is quite an important part of it. And particularly at bigger brands, I think, purpose, clear, repeatable stories. What role does narrative play from your perspective in, you know, keeping that fast-growing business aligned? How do you keep everyone on that?

Chris Dell: So for me, the critical thing is purpose. Why do we do what we do? Simple as that. I mean, you need it, I think, in your day-to-day life, but you also need it in a business context. And particularly if you’re asking people to change a lot, if you’re going through constant transformations, if you’re going through constant growth, and you know the growth is going to go on for a long time, it’s exhausting. Change is exhausting. It doesn’t even matter if it’s good change. And in Booking, you know, I was very fortunate to go through many years of really good change as we grew and, you know, the brand grew, etc. But it meant constantly reconfiguring everything that we were doing. And to really kind of take people with you, you need very, very powerful narrative as to why the work that you’re doing matters, why it is important that we keep growing, why it’s important that we change the way that we do things. So, yeah, no, so I realized, like, you need very regular touch points. You need to be incredibly transparent. I’m a huge fan of transparency from a leadership perspective. People are perfectly smart. You know, we’re hiring very intelligent adults to do, you know, who have agency and autonomy and are capable of figuring stuff out for themselves if you give them the right insights, the right data, et cetera. But, of course, you know, there is a responsibility always. You can’t just present raw data; you also have to tell a story around it, you have to make it meaningful, you have to give the right context. So, I think what I was always trying to do at Booking and a lot of what I’m doing since is just building a bridge between the, okay, strategically, yeah, this makes sense, but now, can we take everyone with us? Can we have a really compelling story? And I’m not talking about, leaders should never lie, we don’t want to distort the truth. If there are problems, and obviously, say in 2020, you know, with COVID and everything, you know, a company like Booking, the entire travel industry was hit extremely badly. There’s absolutely no point saying, “Hey, everything’s totally fine. Everything’s going to be okay.” No, it’s not. We’ve lost a huge amount of our business, and we have no idea when it’s going to come back. That’s also a very important moment to be very, very, very transparent. That rule of transparency, it has to be there in good times and bad. But it’s equally important in good times because, again, it’s what lets you take people with you.

Jason Hemingway: And it’s interesting. So, that’s talking about taking people with you. And you’ve also talked in different keynotes I’ve seen where you talk about how reporting lines shape how a team is understood. So, thinking, reversing that out and going upwards. How did those global content leaders or the people in those teams frame their value to those different stakeholders? Or how do they build that storyline upwards, perhaps?

Chris Dell: It’s always a really challenging one, right? I mean, I know a lot of people who work in content and localization, internationalization space. And there are so few companies out, or organizations out there, who have really figured out where content people should sit. Because, I mean, we already talked a little bit about, you know, there were very pragmatic reasons why we were working on particular sorts of content. And logically, then you can say, well, that the scale, the international aspect, et cetera, means that maybe it sits very logically in a particular place.

Chris Dell: I sat, sometimes I report into the COO, in which case then, indeed, I’m very much focused on scale, cost management, efficiencies, all the kinds of classic things that the COO is going to care about. Sitting alongside then, say, Customer Service which has, you know, similar sorts of kind of concerns around scalability and global reach. So there are some interesting, kind of interesting things to share there and learn from each other. But then other times I would be reporting into, say, CMO. And then, of course, I’m going to be much more focused on, hey, how do we expand and tell the brand story? Or how do we work with marketing channels to, you know, because content becomes more and more important. Localization is important to every single part of the platform anyway. So you’re kind of, then it’s really around, hey, how do we make sure our content means that someone prefers Booking.com to any of the competitors out there? And it’s not necessarily changing radically what you’re doing day to day, but it’s just the lens through which you’re kind of looking at it, which actually can be quite exciting as well. Because, again, if someone’s been doing the same thing for a few years, we suddenly have a slightly different lens that we can look at it through. It’s actually kind of reinvigorating. Okay, now I’m doing it for this reason, and that’s kind of exciting. Personally, I love the fact that I kind of moved around the organization. So, I was reporting into Head of Supply, Head of Demand, and at times very, very close to the marketplace itself. Because for me, I learned so much from the different parts of the business. And specifically, how do you tell a really effective story? I, in general, believe that like leaders and particularly senior leaders, a large part of our role actually is just to do that kind of translation. Well, it depends on how generous you want to be. So, you can say we translate, and we basically make, you know, what we do intelligible and digestible to the people we kind of report in to. You can also say, hey, we’re a bit of a buffer for all the things that kind of come down, you know, let’s say new strategic direction. Then you are the buffer where you’re figuring, okay, I can absorb a lot of the ambiguity, and then I need to kind of create some clarity, then for the people below me and actually kind of turn it into action. Either way, you know, it’s, yeah, being able to tell stories up and down the organization, super important.

Jason Hemingway: So, let’s kind of zero in on some of the audience that are particularly interesting to sort of you and I, particularly localization professionals, localization leaders and where they need to build. I think everyone knows they need to build that kind of influence beyond just production and service to the rest of the organization. But they’re often stretched to hit between doing that and hitting deadlines for volumes of things that they need to get done. So, from your perspective, what steps do you think they can take to drive that visibility and recognition where it feels like there’s no time for anything beyond kind of delivery?

Chris Dell: No, I mean, everything you’re describing is super familiar. I mean, I’ve had a chance to meet with a lot of localization leaders recently. And time is a significant constraint. And unfortunately, I don’t have a magic wand that fixes that problem, because I think we’re just looking generally at a little bit of kind of constraint. There’s resource constraint across, frankly, most parts and most organizations at the moment. So, it’s not something anyone in localization needs to feel kind of, they take it personally at all. No, because this is happening everywhere. Nobody has time. You know, HR, Finance, things like Customer Service et cetera, all of these organizations are being kind of really optimized a lot at the moment. Everywhere you go. But I think you have to, if you’re not intentional around carving time out, you will just be stuck in the process operating mode. Which is to say, if you don’t block out a day a week in your calendar where you are going to focus on the future, you are rooted, stuck 100% in the present. And that’s what I’m seeing a little bit at the moment. And that’s really, really hard because an awful lot of people in localization come from dirty hands, you know, actually doing translation and, you know, or really kind of understanding, you know, the nuts and bolts of this stuff. And therefore it’s comfortable. You know, and it’s a nice place to be. People like their processes and, you know, and also they’re extremely expert in these things. They’re very, very good at it. And we all like to do things that we’re really good at. But then, like building strategy, for example, or building, you know, connections or going out telling a story, and all of these things, they can feel a little bit, it can feel a little bit salesy. It can feel a little uncomfortable. It can be, it takes you out of a kind of something that you understand into something that isn’t, you know, necessarily what people have been taught or trained to do. But you have to, you have to carve out the time and to first really think about the future. And I don’t think it’s ever been more important, frankly, to have like a three-year plan, or even a five-year plan. If you’re, let’s say, running a localization team or a content team. And by the way, it will change. Of course it will change. No one has any idea what’s going to be happening in five years’ time. But you still need some sort of plan, something to be working towards that you can show the rest of the business and, again, stress test it, but also say, hey, what do you think about this? Does this respond to your needs as well? What do you need from content in the future? There are actually a very small number of very, very powerful questions that everyone should be asking their stakeholders on a regular basis. But again, because it can feel a little confrontational and because, frankly, the answers sometimes can be unsettling. A lot of people aren’t even really thinking about content a huge amount across many organizations. It’s just something they sort of take for granted. That, yeah, I think a lot of people, therefore, avoid those conversations just because it feels a little kind of unsettling.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, I think you’re probably right. And whilst it’s unsettling, it’s a necessary thing to do, I think, is the message.

Chris Dell: What I don’t want to, I do not want to sound judgmental in any of this, by the way. I’m sure, I mean, inevitably I will, because I’m telling people, hey, you need to do some things differently. I will sound judgmental, I get it. But it really doesn’t come from a place of judgment. It’s coming very much from a place of this is how we need to adapt to quite a radically kind of shifting business environment, where increasingly, if you’re not telling people, hey, content is still important and still hard work. Many people are just going to assume that content is a solved problem because, hey, we have GenAI now, right? Translation is a solved problem because, you know, we’ve got machine translation and, you know, we have LLMs and all of these things. And people have read about this in The Economist or, you know, Forbes Magazine or something like that. Even very senior executives, you know, for the last two or three years have been reading about these things. And in their head, then okay, well, this is all solved, fantastic, we don’t need you know, we can just generate videos, and everything’s gonna be fine. Not quite.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah. And I think, I think that’s the thing is, those teams are the experts, they understand all the pitfalls of saying, yeah, you can just do it. You could do it that way, and your content will just fall apart, and you’ll lose, you know, your brand. You know, you’ll lose everything that we’ve built so far. You need guardrails; to do this at enterprise production scale is not a solved problem by any stretch of the imagination.

Chris Dell: And you’re going to spend an awful lot of time talking to you know, legal teams, and, you know, like there is like, this is a whole new world of pain. And they’re just different dependencies, and that’s not, I’m not by any means, you know, kind of anti-AI, anti-technology, far from it. You know, I kind of embrace this stuff, but I’ve also been working in this field long enough to know that everything comes with very, very, very significant limitations and dependencies. And we can’t just kind of blithely ignore all of these things and just assume it’s going to be fine. No, it’ll be fine when we make it fine. That will take time.

Jason Hemingway: Very interesting. Anyway, look, let’s lighten the load a touch. We’re probably a little bit over midway through, but usually, midway through, I ask all of our guests kind of one question, and you’re no different, Chris. So, I’m going to ask you. What’s the one thing that you wish you could automate in your workday?

Chris Dell: I would like something that makes me a really good cup of Masala chai in the afternoon. That’s my ritual. Normally, like three, probably four o’clock in the afternoon, go make chai. And I like to, you know, boil the ginger and the cardamom. And I actually kind of enjoy this process. I like it a lot. But there are days when it would be fantastic if someone could automate that. I would absolutely love it.

Jason Hemingway: In terms of flick the switch.

Chris Dell: I’ve looked at a couple of companies, like startups, that are actually working on this. And I’ve thought about investing in them, even. Because I think if someone can fix that, I’d be extremely happy.

Jason Hemingway: Well, they’ve definitely got a customer, sounds like, already.

Chris Dell: Oh, yeah, yeah. For me, I would love it.

Jason Hemingway: Okay, well, let’s get back into it a little bit. And we talked a bit about the idea of kind of stepping into the uncomfortable zone. And I guess part of that is about making sure that you can measure things correctly and understand the business value that the content teams are providing, right? So, in your experience, when you’ve moved measurement from just tracking to, kind of, that more business value approach, how did you do that? And how did you get people to see that leaders appreciate that?

Chris Dell: One of the challenges with content, obviously, is that we tend to measure the things that we can measure. And therefore they tend to be very, very operational things. It’s things like how long does it take to produce a piece of content? What’s the quality of the piece of content like? How much did it cost? How much resource did we need to put in to produce this particular piece of content? And that’s kind of where it then kind of falls apart. So, all of that stuff is highly controllable. But also incredibly reductive, very operational. It fundamentally just tells you that the process is going okay. But it doesn’t tell you anything around the impact that you’re having with content. And of course, it’s notoriously hard, particularly in a kind of very large, complex platform which could be Booking, but frankly, it could be any marketplace, you know. I mean, of course, you can run A/B tests and all of these things to isolate the impact of a very particular sort of content. But one of the challenges with content is that it tends to vary an awful lot. So, for example, I mean, you could run an A/B test to say this is the right photo for this particular hotel, but that only tells you about that particular hotel. You can then try and extrapolate something from that, which then potentially applies to all other content. But that’s hard. You’re going to have to make a whole bunch of assumptions. So, kind of getting that very direct kind of link is super hard if you’re just operating by yourself. So if you’re serious about looking at impact, you have to start working with the people who are really kind of consuming the content, which can be Product Engineering teams, Marketing teams. And what’s interesting, I mean, too often large companies in particular end up very, very siloed and there is never enough kind of cross-departmental collaboration, etc. That matrix is always one of the first to suffer as companies get larger. But actually, there are answers in other parts of the business. And there’s no reason why someone working in content should have to fix what the ultimate value of that content is if they can actually just punt it to people in, say, Product and Tech teams and say, can you figure this out for us? Why is it that you need this content? Now, again, it takes you into the kind of uncomfortable territory, uncomfortable conversation territory, because it’s, “Yeah, maybe it doesn’t have value. Maybe it isn’t needed.” But it also takes you into the direction of, yeah, but let’s actually start putting real numbers around the real impact of these things. Also need to kind of get creative because it could be, for example, that sometimes the content, again, in the context, let’s say, of hospitality, but any kind of marketplace, sometimes the content will drive clarity, which means that later on, fewer people will need to reach out to Customer Service. And again, if I’m just producing content and worrying about a process that produces content, I have no idea. So to find out about that, I probably need to go and speak to people in Customer Service. And I probably need to work with Data Scientists, et cetera, to actually really understand what are the potential kinds of correlations, causations, etc., across an entire flow. So basically, content people just have to spend a lot of time working with other people to solve the problems of how do we really measure impact so that we end up with a much more kind of complete dashboard that other people are also invested into. And here’s the other thing. There are many people across your organization who are interested in these questions and they just need you to kind of spark the investigation that allows you to really understand the overall impact.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, and I guess one of the things that you said there, if you can somehow kind of dashboard it, publicize it, and it doesn’t have to be dashboard, it can just be publicizing how you link that content to performance that other people or other departments will be interested in. You talked about it earlier. What are the things that the other business units be in? Loyalty, NPS, those kinds of things, and speed to market. I think it’s those kinds of things that you need to be sort of thinking about. Are these things that you’ve done? Is that how you’ve linked it? Have you done that in the past, i.e., you know, gone to those departments? Did you manage to pull that off? And if so, how long did it take you to do that kind of stuff? What are the timescales? You said about a three- to five-year plan. This should be in those plans, right? And I’m just wondering about how you pull that off and what the timescales you can sort of.

Chris Dell: Yeah, absolutely. So, definitely I’ve done it. Generally, I will have done whatever I preach. Because, again, I like to be hands-on. I like to try and find new ways of doing things as well. It was a constant effort to make sure that we were kind of properly integrating or properly relating, shall we say, to the rest of the business in the context of Booking, but frankly, I see it in most businesses for content teams. Sometimes I would just try to align at a kind of much higher level with other Senior Directors, VPs, whatever, SVPs, have a chance to sit down with them at least once or twice a year to really understand strategically where you’re going. So at least I have kind of full context. And then typically in those conversations, I would start to see things, oh, maybe I can help you with this, or, oh, that’s interesting. You want to expand into this market because we’re probably underinvested, and we probably need to do a little bit more. Or we can do this. I mean, quite a few markets where Booking was very interested in exploring a kind of growth over the years. China, for example, very publicly, you know, did invest quite a lot in China. For quite a few years, and then logically, one of my teams was also going to support very heavily. We had people in Shanghai who would work very, very closely on this and collaborate and make sure that we’re producing the right content for the Chinese market. So have to be out there. At one point, I mean, this is quite a few years ago, we even had a team of Account Managers just for the content agency, which was because I sort of set content up as an agency, sort of an internal agency for all the different stakeholders. So we would even have, yeah, Account Managers, I think there was a team of two or three Account Managers, who would then go out and spend time with stakeholders across the business. And what we saw over time is that they actually shifted from account management, which was a little more reactive, to actually biz dev, which is now I am working proactively with different parts of the business to understand what their needs are and proactively suggest or work with them to co-author or content solutions. That’s very exciting. I mean, that’s a really cool place to be.

Jason Hemingway: That’s really interesting. Much more proactive. I love that shift from sort of being reactive to sort of proactive and actually going out and saying, well, where could we actually add value to other parts of the business? That’s interesting. So talking about shifts, which is a terrible, terrible segue, I know, but I’m doing my best. Talking about shifts, AI is massive. Almost a standard question I have to ask at the moment is your thoughts on AI. And you’ve definitely spoken about, written about and commented on the belief that AI can’t solve all the problems in content and localization on its own. But what do you think? From your perspective, people need to get right, think about before scaling AI across, you know, all of your content workflows?

Chris Dell: So, AI obviously isn’t a kind of straight out of the box solution, only in the heads of some very senior people across many organizations who think that, yeah, but it’s not magic wand. It still needs direction. It still needs someone to choose the right models and to deploy it and give it scope and give it purpose. You still need to determine that it’s the right tool for the challenge that you’re solving. Because there’s, I mean, we saw that, I know that the delta in terms of kind of quality of machine translation through AI models and conventional MT models, that delta is gradually kind of closing. But the reality is translating something with, you know, with AI typically is going to be considerably more expensive than using some of the kind of older machine translation models. I mean, still, you know, neural-based machine translation models. So we don’t necessarily need a very complex solution for all of these things. We need very simple solutions sometimes. I think the fundamental form factor of the hammer hasn’t really evolved in several thousand years because it’s still very good at driving a nail into a wall. That’s all I need it for. So I don’t like things to be overcomplicated. Yeah. Now, clearly, AI can close that kind of value triad, you know, the old kind of adage of, ‘you know, kind of fast, cheap or pick two’. And AI, of course, allows us to, I mean, tech in general, but AI in particular, allows us to start saying, well, actually, maybe I don’t need to compromise. But even then, it brings in so much complexity. And actually, my anxiety is that we deploy very, very complex solutions, which then need to be maintained. And these models degrade over time. Stuff degrades over time. APIs break, you know, you have outages, which then have a catastrophic kind of domino effect across an entire process. And then suddenly the person who, you know, first built these connectors or whatever isn’t in the organization anymore and so on and so forth. Which is to say you need to be really damn sure that it’s solving real business problems. And I think for me, the challenge at the moment is just a lot of AI adoption is led at the top. In fact, if I were being very, very cynical, I’d say it’s actually led by investors. Because it’s almost impossible these days to be the CEO of any kind of decent-sized company, particularly a listed company, and admit that you aren’t using AI. People are going to go, “This person’s living in the 20th century. This is not an investable company anymore.” Presumably, they’re just throwing money out of the window. Potentially not, actually, at all. Because it’s become very, very obvious this year in particular. There’s so many reports coming out that 80% of AI investments haven’t delivered the results that people were expecting. I mean, we’re definitely kind of turning a corner a little bit. But because of this insistence that AI be used by CEOs across a range of organizations, it’s just led to a lot of performative use of AI. And that bugs me. Because again, it’s not rooted in business problems. It’s not rooted in customer experience. It’s not rooted in anything that’s really material. It’s just optics. And that’s kind of bullshit. So, yeah, but I mean, that’s become such a common place across so many different industries now that it’s, I think, everyone sees it. There is huge amounts of value, but it’s just going to take a long time and it’s going to take very, very careful deployment, etc.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, I mean, like many technology problems that, you know, have been solved and then resurfaced over the many years. I think I’ve been in it 20 years, and I’ve seen things come and go. It’s definitely not going. I think the key thing is that it needs time to settle and work out how things hang together. And it will become much better. And you are seeing sort of green shoots in lots of places for it to work. But I think there’s definitely, between content, any teams actually, because AI is a technology, essentially, you’ve got much more collaboration between technical and engineering teams. And from your perspective or in your experience, when you’re embedding, what does good collaboration look like between those teams? Because, you know, content teams, they might be brilliant as writers and producing great content, creative and all of that. They’re not necessarily ideal bedfellows with the technical and more engineering teams, unless you tell me otherwise. It’s not my experience of it.

Chris Dell: No, I mean, of course, I mean, you know, in any content, of course, sometimes there are people who are highly, highly technical. And I’ve worked with some brilliant content people who are very, very technical. But of course, you know, it’s not necessarily the thing that they’re most passionate about when they kind of get out of bed in the morning, which is fair enough, I mean, neither for me. So, I’m a huge believer in, so I do quite a lot of executive coaching these days. So, part of my brain is very much around content, part of my brain is very much around leadership topics, and what I see more and more and more conversation I have with leaders. What I see is that there are very, very few challenges that can’t be overcome with a really good, transparent conversation, where we have a chance to understand where the other side is coming from and what matters to you. And what’s at stake for you? And what’s at risk for you? And how can I help you? I mean, this is for me one of the most powerful questions, always. It’s like, how can I help you? How do we basically kind of approach these problems, not with a spirit of kind of competition, but of collaboration? And more than that, because we always talk about collaboration on a curiosity. Curiosity. How do you approach this? I don’t know where this is going to go. I don’t know what this means for the future, but I’m interested. I’m curious. I’m happy to park long-term ramifications of where this is going, and I’m simply going to look at it with real kind of curiosity. And within that, you have to still set guardrails and boundaries. You have to define what success looks like. It’s incredibly important. You know, tech people like tech solutions, content people like content solutions. Let’s go with that. That’s very high level, but let’s assume. And therefore, there are always some biases. We have biases based on our experiences. I know many, many tech organizations, product organizations, for example, they just want localization to be instantaneous, let’s say, translation, we can just use machine translation for everything, because that way it goes live very, very fast because what matters to them is speed. It’s just about velocity. It’s just about shipping product and then seeing the impact that it’s going to have. Okay, fine, that’s what matters to you. Now, what matters to the other side of the, okay, and now can we have a conversation around this? Now, in the context of that, can we define what success would look like if we’re going to experiment around some of these technologies? And then, can we actually do retrospectives? Can we actually do the postmortems? You know, once we’ve, you know, again, time box it, we are going to work like this, we are going to collaborate for three months, and at the end of these three months, we expect to see these results. Three months later, did we get these results? Yes, no. Was this successful? Yes, no. Because otherwise, again, just for optics, et cetera, too many things we just kind of blindly wander into. We don’t make conscious choices. Sorry, that’s a very circuitous route.

Jason Hemingway: No, I love it. I love it.

Chris Dell: Be conscious.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, be conscious. And test. And talk. Talk, essentially.

Chris Dell: Talk, yeah, yeah. Be curious and be conscious.

Jason Hemingway: So look, we’re getting towards the end, Chris. I’ve kept you for far too long, but let’s just get a little bit of your view on looking ahead. What do you think it’s going to change most about how content teams are built, staffed, and where do you see kind of, you know, localization, multilingual content play a part in that?

Chris Dell: I mean, I think AI has huge near-term application in things like, say, quality management or more intelligent routing, in-process optimization, these kinds of things. I think AI is going to be, you know, model selection, those kinds of things. I think that these are incredibly logical near-term, very tangible kinds of use cases for AI. I think mid-term, it’s very interesting how you can build, you know, kind of safeguarded models that allow you to actually scale. Maybe the sort of descriptive lower funnel content that I was talking about, but also, you know, the kind of upper funnel content, the more inspirational, you know, engaging, et cetera, probably even some sort of personalization layer. I mean, personalization and content, this is a very, very interesting topic wrestled with for many, many years. And I’ve always said, you know, localization is basically the first step towards personalization.

Jason Hemingway: Oh, interesting, yeah.

Chris Dell: Because basically you’re saying, hey, there is a subgroup. These are all of our entire customer base or user base, there is a subgroup. They happen to prefer this language. Fantastic. So, we kind of, we understand a little bit about personalization, but it’s a very, very binary thing at the moment. So, potentially, AI allows us to start working with lots of different types of personas. But I’m not seeing anyone do it very, very effectively. Not much better than, for example, you know Amazon, for years and years, on the basis of whatever you’re buying, probably, if you’re using Amazon, you’re probably using it fairly often. It’s able to build a very, very solid data profile around your entire persona. And therefore, it says, hey, you like this book then, you may well like this book as well, they can do that, it’s very basic data model behind it. But, so you see that potentially that, that sort of thing can get a little more sophisticated, in content that kind of ties it together, can get a lot more sophisticated. But I think it’s going to be longer term, before that becomes, like, a more kind of widespread thing if we get there. And then longer term, I think, you know, one thing that’s very interesting for me is the shift to video.

Chris Dell: I don’t quite know, like, I’ll freely admit, I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone knows exactly what direction social media is going right now, because on one hand, I see kind of growth year on year, but then, actually the last two, three years, some areas have been slowing a little bit. And then I hear a kind of, you know, I start to read articles about, you know, kind of Gen Alpha, et cetera, not very interested in video or don’t want to be in this kind of virtual environment anymore. So it’s a little unclear to me, but I suspect that because older people, people like myself, are probably adopting video. And because that’s where typically the money skews in society, probably there will continue to be investment in, kind of, video content. And then we’re really talking about, you know, we’re definitely talking about AI applications there. We’re also doing about multilingual content, stuff that can be pushed very, very quickly, you know, all this kind of interesting sort of virtual dubbing and stuff like this. Like that, I think…

Jason Hemingway: avatars. Yeah.

Chris Dell: Exactly, exactly. Like that, for sure will be a solved problem. If it isn’t quite yet, but it will be for sure in a very kind of scalable way in the future. Yeah.

Jason Hemingway: Brilliant.

Chris Dell: Yeah. And then deeper personalization. And that really is reliant more than anything on the data layer. Do I even know enough about this person to be able to personalize for them? That’s actually the bigger challenge, frankly, than the content piece.

Jason Hemingway: Data layer, context, tagging, all of those things that personalization, you know, for years has been talking about. Let’s not get into that. That’s a whole other podcast. But anyway.

Chris Dell: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Jason Hemingway: So, look, very last one-word answers. This is the closing, kind of, stuff that we do. So, global growth in one word.

Chris Dell: Exciting.

Jason Hemingway: Excellent.

Chris Dell: I mean, it’s the thrill of adventure, right? Expanding into new markets. Why not?

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, love it. Love it. Exciting. And then just finally, a book or podcast other than this that you’re loving right now.

Chris Dell: So bookwise, actually, I had it. Where is it? Oh, here we go. This one I’m just reading at the moment. It’s really cool. The history of occult thinking around the world. I love this sort of thing. I also write books in my spare time. That’s another thing entirely, but I’m very interested in these kinds of topics. Podcast. It’s been two or three years now. I like history podcasts because otherwise it’s just a lot of self-promoting rubbish. Like this. Look at me right now. And my absolute favorite the last couple of years, Fall of Civilizations, the Paul Cooper podcast. If you don’t listen to that, listen to that. It’s brilliant. Because it’s, from a content perspective, they’re amazing. It’s like the absolute high watermark of UGC. Someone who is just insanely passionate about this particular topic and spends months researching and putting together. And these can be like three- four hour episodes. These are vast. And it’s taking, you know, the fall of all the different civilizations around the world. Which is just, and it’s, you know, it’s going to end badly from the beginning. At the end, you always know. But how is it going to end badly? And it’s always the level of detail and research. It’s like, oh, that’s what this medium is for. People really, really, kind of, putting their absolute heart, soul, all their passion into this incredible content, which just brings these massive historical lessons to life. And the overarching lesson being, hey, it all ends the same way.

Jason Hemingway: I’ll definitely give it a listen. I’ll definitely give it a listen. Well, and that’s it. And Chris, I just want to say what a fascinating conversation running through all the beginning from the start of your career, all the way through running those massive content teams and thinking about actually the future of where it’s all headed. So look, I just want to thank you for your time. And hopefully we’ll see you again on the podcast in the somewhat future, but thanks again, Chris. That was brilliant and fascinating.

Chris Dell: Thanks so much, Jason.

Jason Hemingway: Chris, thanks for joining us today. You shared some amazing and brilliant insights on building global content engines and teams whilst maintaining that kind of trust, consistency and relevance in whatever markets people are in. I’m sure our team, our listeners and everybody else will take a lot from the conversation. And that’s it for another episode of In Other Words, the podcast from Phrase. I’ve been your host, Jason Hemingway, and a massive thank you again to Chris Dell for sharing his insights on scaling global content and building content operating models that support business goals and sustainable growth. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please do subscribe to In Other Words on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or indeed your preferred podcast platform. You can also find more conversations on leadership, growth and global execution at Phrase.com. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.