Is your brand’s biggest vulnerability a traditional competitor, or your organization’s inability to execute your strategy consistently across every single customer touchpoint?
Agility requires more than just a fast-moving central team. It requires creating a resilient system that empowers distributed teams to execute flawlessly while adapting to local needs.
Today, we’re going to talk about that critical, and often broken, link between marketing strategy and frontline execution. It’s the ‘last mile’ problem where brilliant campaigns can fall apart in the hands of local dealers, franchisees, or regional managers, leading to inconsistent customer experiences and wasted resources. We’ll explore how to bridge this gap, moving from one-off campaigns to a cohesive marketing system.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome, Andy Baker, CEO & Founder at Sesimi.
About Andy Baker
Andrew Baker is the Founder and CEO of Sesimi, a global brand management and creative automation platform designed to help distributed organisations deliver consistent, compliant and high-impact marketing at scale. Since founding Sesimi in 2010, Andrew has shaped the company’s vision, product and global footprint, building both a world-class team and an international partner network to support enterprise customers around the world.
Under Andrew’s leadership, Sesimi has delivered large-scale SaaS solutions across four continents for some of the world’s leading automotive brands and other complex, multi-location organisations. His deep expertise in aligning marketing strategy with real-world execution has been instrumental in Sesimi’s international growth and the platform’s ability to solve persistent challenges around brand governance, localisation and creative production.
Before founding Sesimi, Andrew built a strong foundation in finance and commercial strategy, beginning his career at KPMG, GE Finance and Sallie Mae. He later transitioned into advertising, leading a boutique agency responsible for Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles in Australia — work that involved developing and delivering Tier I, II and III retail campaigns across all media channels. It was through this experience, addressing the operational complexity of brand and campaign execution across dealer networks, that the idea for Sesimi was born.Andrew holds a Master of Finance and a Bachelor of Business from RMIT University, and brings more than two decades of experience building and leading high-performing teams — both locally and remotely — to support enterprise-grade customers in rapidly evolving markets.
Andy Baker on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-baker-87775038/
Resources
Sesimi: http://www.sesimi.com
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Transcript
Greg Kihlström: Is your brand’s biggest vulnerability a traditional competitor or your organization’s inability to execute your strategy consistently across every single customer touch point? Agility requires more than just a fast-moving central team, it requires creating a resilient system that empowers distributed teams to execute flawlessly while adapting to local needs. Today we’re going to talk about that critical and often broken link between marketing strategy and frontline execution. It’s the last mile problem where brilliant campaigns can fall apart in the hands of local dealers, franchisees or regional managers, leading to inconsistent customer experiences and wasted resources.We’re going to explore how to bridge this gap, moving from one-off campaigns to a cohesive marketing system. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Andy Baker, CEO and founder at Sesimi. Andy, welcome to the show.
Andy Baker: Thanks Greg. I appreciate you having me on board.
Greg Kihlström: Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive in though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Sesimi.
Andy Baker: So by way of background, I used to run Volkswagen’s brand and retail advertising.And we were doing the market research, we were doing the strategic thinking around creative ad content. And then we’re obviously doing execution piece at a brand at a tier one level. And we were executing that perfectly, pixel perfect, some would say across every single media channel file and file supply format for all the different places that advertising content needed to go to. Both digitally, video, social, static, old school print. And what was happening Greg was all that thinking that went up front by the time it actually found its way into the distributed retail network. It was being I don’t I mean, I would use the word bastardized, but it was being effectively diluted. And that mast head idea or that mast head strategic thinking piece was getting diluted to such a point that the brand was was very unhappy with how that was being spread across the market and so Sesimi was built primarily to solve that problem. So Sesimi is a a brand management solution where users can come in, they can access content and they can execute brand content at a localized level to suit demographic, geographic, stock levels, different regulatory requirements across different states and territories depending on where you are in the world. And so we built the platform to solve that exact that exact problem. We wanted to hero all of the upfront thinking and all great execution work and make sure was represented correctly out in market. And so you know to that point and and to talk we’ll kind of start at a the strategic level here but you know not everyone is a designer and not everyone is skilled at, creating assets and everything like that.
Greg Kihlström: So to your point, the best even the best of intentions from those that are that are executing these things, there there’s there are execution problems. And they’re not necessarily creative problem like if the creative strategy starts, great and cohesive.But, from a from a strategic standpoint, where where do you see leaders maybe misdiagnose what the issue is with some of se downstream impacts, maybe overinvesting in creative and strategy while overlooking, some of the operational stuff, where what do you see there?
Andy Baker: I think the greatest challenge and and I’ll use an analogy around this. I have an iPhone 17. It takes amazing photos. Just because I have that technology does not necessarily make me a great photographer. And I think we live in an age where everyone has such great access to so many online tools, when when you think about the tool set that a that a creative team or a design team are classically using, Adobe design, Photoshop, Illustrator. if you go into some of the more recent tools like Canva or Figma. Everyone has access to those. And just but just because you have access to those tools, does not necessarily mean that you have therefore the right to be constantly making and changing content. And so I think that’s fundamentally where the challenge lies. It’s it’s ensuring that the teams that you have within your business stick to their lanes or stick to their swim lanes. Let the strategic people do the strategy, let the let the people who do the creative execution do the creative execution, and when you distribute that out out into your marketing teams or across your corporate marketers or down into your franchise levels. There really should be no need for them to be making wholesale changes to this content. But the access to the tools is giving everyone or this idea that they can and that they should. And I think I think that’s fundamentally part of the challenge. I think too, the other aspect of this is marketers get bored of their content far quicker than consumers do. And so there’s this idea that you have to be constantly refreshing content that’s out in market and so you you layer that up with this access to these tools and and people are just going for it. Well, it’s it’s the it’s the it’s the down so democratizing access and everything like that.It generally, there are some really good things about, democratizing data access, all that stuff. There are some good things about it, but the downside is, yeah, just because you can doesn’t mean you should be fancy yourself a designer or make some change that seems right. But at the same time that needs to be balanced where, a designer can’t design for every local, local need or anything. So, how do you how do you define guard rails, non-negotiables? How do you balance those so that local the local aspects can be localized without to, bastardizing the brand basically. I’m hoping I can hoping we can use the word bastardize. We have an explicit label on this episode, but we’ll we’ll we’ll just go for it. We’ll go for it. So I I think fundamentally you do want to be giving your local area marketing reps the ability to do some level of localization. not every store has the same product issues, not every store has the same demographic of buyer, not every store has the same geographic components. And so obviously for Sesimi, we we cater for this and there are other platforms out there do something somewhat similar. But the way we think about it is is we want to hero that marketing strategy, that execution and then we want to give users the ability to be able to execute or change various elements. And we refer to it very much as like as freedom within the framework. So, let the user change some elements that are pertinent or relevant to those things that I described just before. But keep it within keep it within the boundaries of the brand guidelines, keep it within the boundaries of the regulatory requirements from an advertising standard perspective. But also give them some assets or ultimate headlines they can start switching in and out, and give them access to tailor and edit disclaimers to suit market regulatory requirements that maybe head office haven’t necessarily caught in their first pass of the content. So really the idea being is give them access to elements, but don’t give them access to wholesale changes because human nature is that everyone thinks that they’re a designer and everyone thinks that they are going to come up with the best incentive offer or the best way to attract someone into their either onto their website or onto their into their bricks and mortar retail location. Well, and then so operationalizing that kind of back to your point about creatives, they they want to refresh the creative, they want to make a new campaign, it’s certainly it’s an intellectual challenge to be able to do that. It’s you see one campaign, you want to you want to do better and better work, so there’s there’s that aspect to it.
Greg Kihlström But, thinking about marketing as a system, not simply a series of campaigns, what what could what what does that look like in in practice and, maybe what are what are some of the benefits to thinking of thinking of it more as a system as opposed to again a series of of points.
Andy Baker: So I think I think systemizing your ad content is is a great way to scale. That’s one of the things that we we encourage the brands that we work for and and we work for a whole range of blue chip organizations right down into SMEs across our platform. And and we are always talking to them about systemizing their not their campaigns, but fundamentally their layouts or the or the way that they’re thinking about how they’re going to execute it. And what I really mean by that is is don’t fundamentally change the look and feel of a campaign from a layout perspective. If you are consistent with your layout and you get the refreshed nature of the layout through imagery and headlines and offers, etc. You can scale content really quickly across every single channel. That’s that’s everything from video content to animated content to static content across print, digital, social, etc. If you do start to systemize, it is going to get you into market quicker, you are going to save money on production costs in terms of executing content. Um, you are going to stay out of trouble from a regulatory standpoint, there’s just so many benefits to it that it seems at odds that people still want to create wholly bespoke campaign look and feels every single time from a layout perspective. Yeah, so then how do you deal with the because there there is going to be friction there as far as somebody, again someone thinks they’re a designer and wants to work with assets or whatever and and goes completely off the rails.
Greg Kihlström: how do you overcome some maybe some of common operational roadblocks might lead to frustration as well as some of the just let’s call them rogue agents just want to do their thing. how how do you deal with kind of inherent friction?
Andy Baker: I think what we do particularly well, is when we are bringing on a new customer or a new client to our product and our platform is is handling exact situation. There’s definitely moments in time where a particular layout or a particular campaign is not going to answer needs of the marketing team. Or, you might have someone from sales come in and say, hey, we need to throw everything in the bin and start again. We need to we need to start from scratch. We strongly encourage all of our customers, when you are coming up with a campaign or a layout, think about how you might want to upweight that campaign through the journey of its existence. it might start as a as a brand ad, just purely this is the product, this is the benefit. Isn’t it lovely? Please go out and buy it. All the way through to, things aren’t selling as quickly as we like, we’ve got stock issues, now we want to start to offer an incentive against that particular product and or it might be a price drop or things like things of that nature. When you are coming up with your campaign at the beginning, think about all all the extenuating circumstances or things that you might want to change in that campaign through the life of it. But do it up front, don’t do it as a reactionary piece of added content. nine months into a 10-month media schedule or two and a half months into a three month media schedule. Because at that point, you will need to reinvent the wheel and you and you’re being reactionary as opposed to thinking about how you’re going to handle it up front.
Greg Kihlström: And so then from the measurement perspective. I mean, certainly again classic measures of marketing success, I mean, if we’re talking cars, people buying new cars, leasing, all those things certainly don’t go away. Um, those are core KPIs, but how do you measure the success of a platform and adoption of, this more common, common way of working through things in this, this system of working. What are what what are some of the ways leaders should think about this?
Andy Baker: So, I mean, we work across a number of OEMs across North America and up into Canada. We work across franchise businesses, we’ve got customers over in the finance industry as well. I think fundamentally the measure for a platform such as ours is how much content is actually generated through it. If we are if we do have a a template or a retail template in the platform and people are coming in and accessing that template and executing it across social gifts for carousel type execution or video content where they’re using our AI voice overlay to make the vision match the voice, fundamentally we’re looking to see down we’re looking to see content created. And then we’re looking to see which channels they’re creating content for and which optionalities are they starting to choose. And where you start to drive value from a platform like ours is if you can start to see a slant or a or a trend towards a particular channel. You can then very quickly go and talk to those people that have created that content and ask for their impressions, their CPMs, their CPCs, and you can start to get some very good measurement around that content as well because I think a lot of marketers, particularly in a distributed retail network, they don’t know what people are creating. And so therefore they they don’t know what ROI measures to go and ask for to be able to understand the effectiveness of the content. Yeah, so so to that point, I mean there may be some really interesting learnings, I mean good or or even not so good that are happening on the field, right, that no one would ever know otherwise, right? 100%. I mean, marketing teams are always being asked to go and shoot X product in Y location. They’re always being asked for more assets, they’re always being asked for other templates for different channels. More often than not, those asks get acted upon. And the expense that goes towards those is is considerable. And quite often there’s no transparency about how they’re being used, if they’re even being used. So so this is I mean, this is a key way of getting that central visibility in a, yeah, in a system. I mean, if you have hundreds of of dealers, let’s say, you’re yeah, you’re definitely not getting that data. What what about connecting the dots as well to some of those core KPIs, even, as, something like sales lift even or cost savings, things like that, how how can you do that with something like this?
That’s always a tricky one and I think that’s always part of the challenge in in marketing teams. Advertising is a a lagging indicator of hopefully sales. Like there is no there is no guaranteed link between advertising and the fact that, Andy Baker or Greg are going to walk into a store and purchase a car or purchase a bottle of shampoo. So I think when you can start to build transparency around what’s being created and then you can start to tie that more directly into sales, you can start to tie that more directly into impressions or media bought and you can start to track those two things over time. I think you can start to build a really solid use case for content creation, for particular campaigns, for particular channels and and how they start to drive, that desired effect of sales and revenue.
Well, and there’s got to be something as well about the consistency too, right? I mean, for the for the brand, again, if you’re seeing a brand you can’t recognize when you go from one place to another versus consistency, right? That’s I mean, that may not be a a hard metric or it maybe a difficult metric to to measure, but there’s still, there there’s enough there’s enough research out there that, if you see something six, seven times consistently, it it can have an effect, right?
Yeah, I think the value of a brand is something that is a little bit esoteric in in nature. to your point, if you see something seven times is that influencing you the tenth time to walk in and or go online and buy something. I mean, personally, brand equity or brand value is is really, really important. And that and that is only really driven through consistency of messaging and and the visual and the sound bites that people hear on on various media channels. Until until that time, Greg, where everyone’s walking around with meta glasses or something like that where it’s capturing everything that everyone sees, it’s it’s it’s a little bit difficult to to put a attributable dollar value against it, I think. There’s definitely enough data out there for sure.
Greg Kihlström: So let’s let’s talk a little bit about, uh, looking ahead certainly, um, we we talk a lot about AI and AI generated content and and other things on on the show, of course.
But how do you see AI, changing the game for local marketing execution is it, certainly there’s a lot of potential impacts here, but, is it about hyper personalization, automation, all of the above, where do you see some of its biggest impacts?
Andy Baker: I think AI from an automation perspective, I mean, it’s a very broad question. Um, for instance, we use AI voiceover technology which I mentioned before to match vision with voice if we’re updating um video files, we use AI facial recognition on the digital asset management side of things to tag elements within ads and within the digital asset management side of what we do. Where I think AI is is going to play a part is in that hyper localization piece and and people’s ability or more specifically, brands’ ability to execute content and get into market quickly. The biggest challenge really is around the regulatory pace. So, well, the regulatory piece, but also brand consistency, right? Like yes, you can go into an AI solution and you can create an image that is a that is a product, or a Coke bottle for argument sake. But Coke are never going to use that because it’s it’s never going to meet the standards or currently might not meet the standards of how it looks and how it needs to be represented in in in a in a beach side location. But the better it gets and the more reliable it starts to become, I only I I just think AI is going to be something that is going to be able to create hyper personalized content at scale across every single media channel and it’s going to become dare I say for everyone to be getting served hyper relevant ads across every single channel because we will have the technology to do that.
And then, I guess I know we touched on this a little bit in the in the beginning already, but how do we maintain this, this dynamic between, brand and the marketer at the, let’s call it at the national global level making sure that their strategy stays paramount while the local, in this case, dealers or or retailers get what they need how do we how do we maintain that right balance of, the brand’s got to stay consistent.
Versus the local the local needs being, let’s say, marketing becomes order order takers from the field, right? Like we want the right dynamic, we want feedback from the field, but it’s it’s not a one-way either way really. Like, how do you, how should leaders be thinking about that as they’re as they’re planning their strategies?
My background is is brand and retail advertising. like brand is everything, consistency is everything. I think really for marketers to be able to shift dynamic from being an order taker to to being part of the organization that is that is driving the messaging at a really high fidelity, right? They really do need to systemize. So the brands that we work with across our platform back to the point I made earlier around you do need to think about how your campaign or how your template does need to be executed across all your various regions, you need to think about how those consumers are consuming that content. If you’ve got an older demographic, they might not be so digitally savvy, so you do need some content or some template capability that is going to be more suitable for that for that demographic and and the media that you’re going to be serving that content to. Whereas, the younger brigade, it’s it’s all social, how do you give your network the ability to be able to take a template but localize it from a social from a social channel perspective? And so that idea of thinking about how your campaign needs to be executed in advance as opposed to being really reactive is something that they fundamentally have to do to stop being order takers and being able to drive real value downstream.
Greg Kihlström: Well, Andy, thanks so much for joining today. Um two questions as we wrap up here. First one, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
Andy Baker: I think we’re definitely talking about how to be brand safe. And so what I really mean by that is this infiltration of AI and all the various tools and the accessibility of them. Back to my earlier point, just because I have an iPhone 17 and I can take amazing photos, does not make me a photographer. Just because I have access to AI tools and the design tools does not make me a designer, it doesn’t make me understand the regulatory requirements from the West Coast to the East Coast across different across different industries. So I think being brand safe for lack of a better way of describing it is will be fundamental. And I do think we need to be thinking about our text act. So, again, you you’ve got access to these tools, but are they actually all talking to one another? Are they are they providing that single source of truth, are they giving you ability to be or the ability to execute across channel or are you having to layer a Frankenstein digital text stack together to be able to execute that, which is probably not going to speed you up in the in the in the long run. That would be the two things.
Greg Kihlström: Well, uh last question for you here, uh what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Andy Baker: I talk to every single person I can in in the technology space, whether they’re a competitor, keep your keep your friends close, keep your enemies close. But always be open to new ideas. Attend um conferences, go to events, jump on webinars, be be inquisitive. Yeah, that’s that’s really how our business started. We were looking for a better way to do the work that we were doing and to be able to make sure that the network were executing content correctly. And if we hadn’t been inquisitive, we wouldn’t we wouldn’t have Sesimi as a business today.
