Andy Baker’s central argument is straightforward: brands spend millions developing a centralized marketing strategy and lose the return somewhere between headquarters and the local market. Sesimi, the Melbourne-based brand management platform he co-founded in 2010, is built to close that distance.
Andy came to the problem through 20 years in advertising, including running Hubink, a full-service agency, and overseeing Volkswagen’s national advertising across Australia. What he noticed wasn’t a creative shortfall or a media efficiency problem. It was a workflow problem with no infrastructure solution. “In 2009, people were still manually writing briefs in Word documents and shipping them into studio teams,” he says.
He co-founded Sesimi with Paul Volpato after identifying what the early SaaS wave had missed: no platform had been designed to make content creation fast, brand-compliant, and scalable across distributed networks simultaneously.
Today, Sesimi serves enterprise clients including Toyota, Volkswagen, Lexus, Kia, BMW, Polestar, Avis Budget Group, and Scenic Group across Australia, the U.S., Canada, and the Philippines. The platform covers creative automation, digital asset management, co-op fund management, and campaign planning, built specifically for multi-location brands, franchise networks, and dealer groups producing locally relevant content at scale. The market has not always moved quickly to meet it.
“I’m still not sure the industry is ready for what we’ve built,” Andy says, “and I say that in a really loving way of our industry.”
When Two Campaigns Work Against Each Other
Andy’s case against fragmented brand execution is expressed in a specific scenario. A brand spends $1 million in market A and another $1 million in market B. If the content differs across both markets, neither investment compounds.
“You don’t get the cumulative effect of $2 million worth of media,” he explains. “You’ve got two $1 million buckets that are fundamentally almost working against each other.”
Most brands have guidelines. Andy argues that guidelines address only part of the problem. Fewer organizations have the infrastructure to ensure those guidelines hold as content travels from the central creative team outward to regional agencies, local dealers, and franchise operators. “The further you get away from the people who created that nucleus of content, the sooner you start to run into issues,” he says.
Regional teams interpret strategic and creative briefs differently, producing inconsistent executions across markets. “Now you are diluting all the great work that’s being done up front,” he adds.
Sesimi functions as a centralized platform where planning, budgeting, asset storage, and content creation happen in one place. The rationale is cumulative: every market executing on the same visual system builds shared brand recognition; every deviation subtracts from it.
Brand Marketers Like Their Agencies. That’s the Business Model Sesimi Disrupts.
The biggest resistance Sesimi encounters isn’t technical. It’s relational.
Andy describes the traditional content workflow as a vertical pipeline: a marketer briefs an agency, the agency builds the content, and five to seven days later, the output arrives ready for distribution. Sesimi’s creative automation layer collapses that cycle to minutes, according to Andy. That efficiency creates friction with existing agency relationships, whose fee structures have historically been built around retained head hours of content production. “We are very much at odds with the billing methodology and the workflow of ad agencies,” he says.
Andy frames Sesimi as an alternative to production, not to strategy. What brands save on ad production, he argues, can be redirected into activities that generate return: additional media buying, PR activations, and local sponsorships. “We are making things cheaper for a retail network to produce content and redirect that production money into more media buying and PR activations,” he says.
Onboarding a new enterprise client takes six to 13 weeks. Most of that time is spent not on platform training, but on workflow change management, helping marketing teams and their agency partners understand that the agency’s role shifts from producing creative variations to developing the master strategy and creative that Sesimi’s automation engine then deploys.
Generative AI Is Promising Brand Compliance It Can’t Deliver
Andy’s position on generative AI is more specific than either the promotional or skeptical poles of the current industry conversation.
Sesimi uses AI for video resizing, brand-calibrated voiceover, and copy generation constrained by client brand voice parameters. Andy draws a clear line at generative AI for product imagery. “I do think generative AI from a creative standpoint is being oversold,” he says.
He questions whether AI can reliably generate a product-accurate image of a specific car model. Without compliance controls on top of AI-generated visuals, brands face regulatory exposure when the image doesn’t match the actual product. “I do worry about the regulatory advertising risks and the fines associated with advertising the wrong product,” he says.
The concern extends to any generative deployment operating outside structured governance. Sesimi’s approach applies AI within constraints defined by the brand: voiceover calibrated to a specific tone and dialect, copy generation working within the client’s established guidelines.
“We are not anti-AI,” Andy says. “We love AI. We’re using it in all the places that we think are going to strengthen our solution.” But he remains concerned about off-the-shelf generative tools that promise brand compliance across every channel without the governance infrastructure to back it.
Andy has been building content governance tools for 15 years. The compliance infrastructure required to deploy generative AI safely at the brand level, he argues, is real work. The market is not yet treating it as such.
The Relevancy Problem That Comes After Scale
The structural challenge Andy identified in advertising has not eased. It has expanded.
In 2009, the primary channels for brand content were TV, print, static digital display, and outdoor. Today, brands are expected to maintain a presence across TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, streaming platforms, connected TV, and any site consumers visit. “Because most of the ways we’re now consuming content is digitized, there is just a lot of white noise,” he says.
The strategic question that arises is not only about production volume. It’s about individual relevance, and how to achieve it without triggering discomfort. “How do you make content relevant for someone without making them feel like you’re spying on them?” Andy asks.
Sesimi’s data blocks feature enables real-time content updates, allowing price points, disclaimers, and regional variables to change instantaneously across all active content. A price point for a product on the West Coast can differ from one on the East Coast, and both can be updated centrally and propagated across every active ad format without rebuilding templates. Andy frames relevance and brand consistency as complementary, not competing, and argues that the platform enables both within the same workflow.
Looking ahead, he sees the industry still working through a transition his platform was built to address before the current AI conversation began. “The industry is definitely in flux,” Andy says. “Some feel like they have a really good handle on their tech stack. Others feel like they’re still fumbling around in the dark a little bit.”
The differentiator in the next phase, he argues, will be governance, not production capacity. Brands that can create at scale while maintaining consistency across markets accumulate recognition over time. Those who can’t spend their marketing budgets are working against themselves.
Andy Baker’s central argument is straightforward: brands spend millions developing a centralized marketing strategy and lose the return somewhere between headquarters and the local market. Sesimi, the Melbourne-based brand management platform he co-founded in 2010, is built to close that distance.
Andy came to the problem through 20 years in advertising, including running Hubink, a full-service agency, and overseeing Volkswagen’s national advertising across Australia. What he noticed wasn’t a creative shortfall or a media efficiency problem. It was a workflow problem with no infrastructure solution. “In 2009, people were still manually writing briefs in Word documents and shipping them into studio teams,” he says.
He co-founded Sesimi with Paul Volpato after identifying what the early SaaS wave had missed: no platform had been designed to make content creation fast, brand-compliant, and scalable across distributed networks simultaneously.
Today, Sesimi serves enterprise clients including Toyota, Volkswagen, Lexus, Kia, BMW, Polestar, Avis Budget Group, and Scenic Group across Australia, the U.S., Canada, and the Philippines. The platform covers creative automation, digital asset management, co-op fund management, and campaign planning, built specifically for multi-location brands, franchise networks, and dealer groups producing locally relevant content at scale. The market has not always moved quickly to meet it.
“I’m still not sure the industry is ready for what we’ve built,” Andy says, “and I say that in a really loving way of our industry.”
When Two Campaigns Work Against Each Other
Andy’s case against fragmented brand execution is expressed in a specific scenario. A brand spends $1 million in market A and another $1 million in market B. If the content differs across both markets, neither investment compounds.
“You don’t get the cumulative effect of $2 million worth of media,” he explains. “You’ve got two $1 million buckets that are fundamentally almost working against each other.”
Most brands have guidelines. Andy argues that guidelines address only part of the problem. Fewer organizations have the infrastructure to ensure those guidelines hold as content travels from the central creative team outward to regional agencies, local dealers, and franchise operators. “The further you get away from the people who created that nucleus of content, the sooner you start to run into issues,” he says.
Regional teams interpret strategic and creative briefs differently, producing inconsistent executions across markets. “Now you are diluting all the great work that’s being done up front,” he adds.
Sesimi functions as a centralized platform where planning, budgeting, asset storage, and content creation happen in one place. The rationale is cumulative: every market executing on the same visual system builds shared brand recognition; every deviation subtracts from it.
Brand Marketers Like Their Agencies. That’s the Business Model Sesimi Disrupts.
The biggest resistance Sesimi encounters isn’t technical. It’s relational.
Andy describes the traditional content workflow as a vertical pipeline: a marketer briefs an agency, the agency builds the content, and five to seven days later, the output arrives ready for distribution. Sesimi’s creative automation layer collapses that cycle to minutes, according to Andy. That efficiency creates friction with existing agency relationships, whose fee structures have historically been built around retained head hours of content production. “We are very much at odds with the billing methodology and the workflow of ad agencies,” he says.
Andy frames Sesimi as an alternative to production, not to strategy. What brands save on ad production, he argues, can be redirected into activities that generate return: additional media buying, PR activations, and local sponsorships. “We are making things cheaper for a retail network to produce content and redirect that production money into more media buying and PR activations,” he says.
Onboarding a new enterprise client takes six to 13 weeks. Most of that time is spent not on platform training, but on workflow change management, helping marketing teams and their agency partners understand that the agency’s role shifts from producing creative variations to developing the master strategy and creative that Sesimi’s automation engine then deploys.
Generative AI Is Promising Brand Compliance It Can’t Deliver
Andy’s position on generative AI is more specific than either the promotional or skeptical poles of the current industry conversation.
Sesimi uses AI for video resizing, brand-calibrated voiceover, and copy generation constrained by client brand voice parameters. Andy draws a clear line at generative AI for product imagery. “I do think generative AI from a creative standpoint is being oversold,” he says.
He questions whether AI can reliably generate a product-accurate image of a specific car model. Without compliance controls on top of AI-generated visuals, brands face regulatory exposure when the image doesn’t match the actual product. “I do worry about the regulatory advertising risks and the fines associated with advertising the wrong product,” he says.
The concern extends to any generative deployment operating outside structured governance. Sesimi’s approach applies AI within constraints defined by the brand: voiceover calibrated to a specific tone and dialect, copy generation working within the client’s established guidelines.
“We are not anti-AI,” Andy says. “We love AI. We’re using it in all the places that we think are going to strengthen our solution.” But he remains concerned about off-the-shelf generative tools that promise brand compliance across every channel without the governance infrastructure to back it.
Andy has been building content governance tools for 15 years. The compliance infrastructure required to deploy generative AI safely at the brand level, he argues, is real work. The market is not yet treating it as such.
The Relevancy Problem That Comes After Scale
The structural challenge Andy identified in advertising has not eased. It has expanded.
In 2009, the primary channels for brand content were TV, print, static digital display, and outdoor. Today, brands are expected to maintain a presence across TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, streaming platforms, connected TV, and any site consumers visit. “Because most of the ways we’re now consuming content is digitized, there is just a lot of white noise,” he says.
The strategic question that arises is not only about production volume. It’s about individual relevance, and how to achieve it without triggering discomfort. “How do you make content relevant for someone without making them feel like you’re spying on them?” Andy asks.
Sesimi’s data blocks feature enables real-time content updates, allowing price points, disclaimers, and regional variables to change instantaneously across all active content. A price point for a product on the West Coast can differ from one on the East Coast, and both can be updated centrally and propagated across every active ad format without rebuilding templates. Andy frames relevance and brand consistency as complementary, not competing, and argues that the platform enables both within the same workflow.
Looking ahead, he sees the industry still working through a transition his platform was built to address before the current AI conversation began. “The industry is definitely in flux,” Andy says. “Some feel like they have a really good handle on their tech stack. Others feel like they’re still fumbling around in the dark a little bit.”
The differentiator in the next phase, he argues, will be governance, not production capacity. Brands that can create at scale while maintaining consistency across markets accumulate recognition over time. Those who can’t spend their marketing budgets are working against themselves.
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