Welcome to the Franchise Marketer Newsletter Edition 21!
⏳ Read time: ~6 minutes
Welcome back to the Franchise Marketer Newsletter!
This week, we share my interview with Andy Baker, founder of Sesimi, a creative automation platform built for multilocation brands.
I really enjoy sharing Aussie success stories, and this is one of them.
Not only that, it solves a massive problem for franchise brands, and Bakers’ Delight is already using them!
I was also seriously impressed by the speed of the platform, it’s lightning fast!
If you’ve ever struggled to keep franchisees on-brand while still giving them local flexibility, this edition is for you.
The Biggest Time and Money Saver Franchise Marketers Aren’t Using Yet
If you run marketing for a franchise system, you know the pain:
Endless artwork requests
“Can I change the price?”
“Can you resize this for Facebook?”
“Can I have this with my suburb instead?”
Agency bills for micro-changes
Franchisees going rogue in Canva
Back-and-forth approvals are eating your week alive
This issue, we’re spotlighting a tool that eliminates almost all of that Sesimi, the creative automation platform built specifically for multilocation brands.
After interviewing founder Andy Baker, one thing became very clear:
👉 Franchise marketers who adopt tools like Sesimi recover massive amounts of time and budget.
Here are 7 points to take away and why Sesimi is a solution that will save you a lot of time and money.
1. Franchisees want to market locally, without becoming marketers
Andy’s original problem came from the Volkswagen dealer network, but it mirrors franchising everywhere:
“They’re great at running the business. They’re not great at copy, design, or media.”
Franchisees need flexibility:
their own offer, product mix, suburb name, opening hours, pricing, and local photos.
But every small change turns into a request that lands on your desk.
This realisation became the foundation for Sesimi:
Give franchisees controlled freedom
Automate what can be automated
Remove anything that requires design or marketing skill
Keep the brand protected underneath
It wasn’t about making franchisees designers.
It was about removing the need for design entirely.
2. The real drain on franchise marketers isn’t strategy, it’s execution
Andy described the “old way” perfectly:
“We’d send out InDesign files and hope for the best. After that, anything could happen.”
Franchise marketers today deal with the exact same friction, just multiplied across:
Social formats
Video formats
POS
Print
Local offers
Compliance
Approvals
Constant resizing
Sesimi was built to collapse this production layer, not replace marketers.
The insight:
👉 Most franchise marketing teams spend 80% of their time on work that shouldn’t need a marketer at all.
Check out the podcast interview to see the demo in action.
3. The Bakers Delight lesson: flexibility works only if it's structured
One of Andy’s strongest examples was Bakers Delight, where every bakery:
Sells different products
Runs different local specials
Has different price points
Has different foot traffic patterns
Marketing HQ could never produce POS for each location manually.
Franchisees couldn’t be left to improvise in Canva.
So Sesimi was designed to do this:
Product changes
Price changes
A4 → A5 → social transformations
POS tickets
Posters
Localized backgrounds
Auto-updated disclaimers
Andy’s insight:
“When you make it easy and safe, franchisees don’t go off-brand and they stop asking for changes.”
It’s not about restricting them.
It’s about giving them a system where they can’t break anything, even if they try.
4. Video is now the biggest time sink and automation is the only way out
Franchise marketers told us the same thing:
Video is now expected, and it’s killing their workflow.
Localising video usually means:
Replacing supers
Updating offers
Re-cutting for 9:16, 1:1, 16:9
Changing price points
Swapping B-roll
Adjusting VO
Exporting 15 versions per asset
Andy built Sesimi’s video engine out of necessity:
“Franchisees don’t know Premiere or After Effects. Nor should they. But they still need localised video.”
The platform automates:
Resizing
Supers
Product swaps
Offers
End cards
Suburb/location lines
VO changes
Music selection
The insight for franchise marketers:
👉 If the video isn’t automated, it will own your calendar.
5. Why generative AI isn’t ready to replace brand-led systems
Andy is bullish on AI, but realistic:
“AI is incredible, but it’s terrible at consistent brand marketing.”
He found that:
Each prompt yields a new visual style
Tone shifts unpredictably
Imagery varies
Layout rules break
Compliance becomes impossible
Which is why Sesimi uses AI inside guardrails, not instead of them:
AI helpers for headlines
AI for video resizing
AI for VO
AI for future hyper-local background generation
But always from inside brand templates
The product exists because brand consistency matters more in franchising than anywhere else.
6. The simplest insight: franchise marketing is a scaling problem, not a creative one
Andy summed it up:
“The national idea isn’t the problem. It’s the hundred little variations every location needs.”
That’s what Sesimi was built to solve:
One template → hundreds of local executions
All on-brand
All instant
All without involving HQ
All without involving an agency
The takeaway for franchise marketers:
👉 Your bottleneck isn’t ideas. It’s production volume.
👉 And volume requires automation, not more staff or more approvals.
Removing Friction Is the Future of Franchise Marketing
Andy’s journey with Sesimi isn’t about selling software.
It’s about fixing a structural issue that every franchise marketer faces:
Local relevance vs. brand consistency vs. limited resources.
The insight that stuck most:
“Franchisees will execute great marketing if you give them a tool that makes it simple and impossible to get wrong.”
For franchise marketers, that means less:
policing
resizing
approvals
rework
late-night fixes
agency spend
And more:
strategy
creative thinking
media performance
franchisee satisfaction
brand consistency
Final Point
Do yourself a favour and check out the demo in the interview; it will be worth your time.
I guarantee employing something like this will save your marketing team a lot of time and money, plus your franchisees will be able to create better content at scale.
Reach out to Andy on LinkedIn.
Book a demo on the website; it’s worth checking out what I have seen in the demo.
I wouldn’t have released this episode as well unless I was 100% confident in this, and I have been looking into this for our Jim’s Mowing brand as well.
Being able to push as much local content, whilst being on brand as quickly as you can with this software, is seriously impressive.
Andy is a great guy as well, so if you’re interested, please reach out to him.
Franchise Marketer Podcast
Each week, I interview marketing experts or share insights from the strategies I have used to help grow Jim’s by 2,000+ franchisees.
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Joel Kleber - CMO, Jim’s Group
Host, Franchise Marketer Podcast
2024 #1 Franchise Executive (Franchise Executives Top 30 Report )
Helped grow Jim’s Group to 5,500+ franchisees.
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