← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#811: Sesimi CEO Andy Baker on connecting marketing strategy with frontline execution
00:28:27
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The agile brand.
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Welcome to Season eight of the Agile Brand Podcast. This season we're going all in on.
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Expert Mode, MarTech, AI and Customer Experience, talking with the people and platforms behind.
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The brands you know and love.
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I'm Greg Kilstrom, your host and I help Fortune 1000 companies make sense of martech, AI and marketing ops. Hit subscribe or Follow to make sure you always get the latest episodes and leave us a rating so others can.
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Find us as well.
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And make sure you check out our sponsor Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world applications. For more information, go to teksystems.com now let's dive in.
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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. Tell me discuss this topic. I'd like to welcome Andy Baker, CEO and Founder at Sesame. Andy, welcome to the show.
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D
Thanks Greg. I appreciate you having me on board.
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C
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 Sesame?
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D
Absolutely. 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 the, the executional 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 that, 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 masthead idea or that masthead 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 Sesame was built primarily to solve that problem. So Sesame is a, as a brand management solution where users can come in and 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 problem. We wanted to hero all of the upfront thinking and all the great executional work and make sure that that was represented correctly out in market. Yeah, yeah.
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C
And so, you know, to that point and to talk, you know, we'll kind of start at the strategic level here. But, you know, not everyone is a designer and not everyone is skilled at, you know, creating assets and everything like that. So to your point, you know, the best, even the best of intentions from those that are, that are executing these things, you know, there, there's, there are execution problems and they're not necessarily creative problem. Like if the creative strategy starts, you know, great and cohesive, but you know, from a, from a strategic standpoint, you know, where, where do you see leaders maybe misdiagnose what the issue is with some of these downstream impacts, maybe over investing in creative and strategy while overlooking, you know, some of the operational stuff, you know, where. What do you see there?
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D
I think the greatest challenge, 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. Yeah, right. 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, you know, Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, you know, if you go into some of the more recent tools like Canva or Figma, everyone has access to those. And, 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 in, 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 in promata or this idea that they can and that they should. And I think that's fundamentally part of the challenge. I think too the other aspect to 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 let you layer that up with this access to these tools and, and people are just going for it.
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C
Yeah, yeah. Well, it's, it's the, it's the, it's the down. So democratizing access and everything like that. It generally, you know, there's some really good things about, you know, democratizing data access, all that stuff. There's, there's some good things about it, but the downside is, yeah, you know, 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 does need to be balanced where, you know, a designer can't design for every local, you know, local need or anything. So, you know, how do you, how do you define guardrails? Non negotiables. You know, how do you, how do you balance those so that, you know, the local, the local aspects can be localized without, you know, to, you know, bastardizing the brand, basically.
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D
I'm hoping I can, I'm hoping we can use the word bastard.
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We might have an explicit label on this episode, but we'll, we'll just go for it. We'll go for it.
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D
So I, I think fundamentally you do want to be giving your local area marketing reps the ability to do some level of localization. You know, 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 the sesame we cater for this and there are other platforms out there that do something somewhat similar, but the way we think about it 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 yes, let the user change some elements that are pertinent or relevant to those things that I described just before. But 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 then give them some assets or some ultimate headlines that they can start to switch in and out, give them access to being able 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.
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Yeah, yeah. Well, and then so operationalizing that kind of back to your point about creatives, you know, they, they want to refresh the creative, they want to make a new campaign. You know, 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. You know, so there's, there's that aspect to it. But you know, thinking about marketing as a system, not simply a series of campaigns, you know, what, what could, what, what does that look like in, in practice? And you know, 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 points.
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D
Yeah. So I think, I think systemizing your ad content is, is a great way to scale. Yeah, it's one of the things that we, we encourage the brands that we work for and we work for a whole range of blue chip organizations right down into SMEs across our platform. 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 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, et cetera, you can scale content really quickly across every single channel. That's everything from video content to animated content to static content, across print, digital, social, et cetera. 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. 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.
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Yeah. So then how do you deal with.
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The, you know, because there is going.
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To be friction there as far as, you know, somebody, you know, again, someone thinks They're a designer and wants to work with assets or whatever and goes completely off the rails. You know, how do you overcome some, maybe some of the common operational roadblocks that might lead to frustration as well as some of the just, let's call them rogue agents that just want to do their thing. How do you deal with that kind of inherent friction?
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D
I think what we do particularly well, I think when we are bringing on a new customer, a new client to our product and our platform is handling that exact situation, there's definitely moments in time where a particular layout or a particular campaign is not going to answer the needs of the marketing team. Or you know, 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 up weight that campaign through the journey of its existence. You know, it might start as a, as a brand ad, you know, 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, you know, 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 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. You know, nine months into a ten 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.
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And so then from a measurement perspective, I mean, you know, certainly again the classic measures of marketing success, I mean, you know, if we're talking cars, you know, people buying new cars, leasing, you know, all those things certainly don't go away. You know, Those are core KPIs. But how do you measure the success of a platform and adoption of, you know, this more common, you know, common way of working through things in this, you know, the system of working. What are, you know, what, what are some of the ways that, that leaders should think about this?
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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 template or a retail template in the platform and people are coming in and accessing that template and executing it across social gifs for carousel type execution or video content where they're using our AI voiceover layer 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 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, 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.
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So yeah, so to that point, I mean, there may be some really interesting learnings, I mean good or even not so good that are happening on the field.
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Right.
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That no one would ever know otherwise.
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Right.
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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.
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Yeah, yeah, so, so this is, I mean this is a key way of getting that central visibility in a. Yeah. In a system. I mean, you know, if you have hundreds of, of dealers, let's say, you know, you're. Yeah, you're definitely not getting that data. What, what about connecting the dots as well to some of those core KPIs, you know, even, you know, as, you know, something like sales lift even or cost savings, things like that. You know, how, how can you do that with something like this, that's always.
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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, you know, 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 how they start to drive, you know, that desired effect of sales and revenue.
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Well, and there's got to be something as well about the consistency too, right? I mean, for the, for the brand. You know, 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 may be a difficult metric to, to measure, but there's still, you know, there's enough, there's enough research out there that you know, if you see something six, seven times consistently, you know, it can have an effect, right?
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Yeah, I think the value of a brand is something that is a little bit esoteric in, in nature. You know, to your point, if you see something seven times, is that influencing you the 10th 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, the people here on, on various media channels until, until that time, Greg Riveron'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.
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Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
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There's definitely enough out there for sure.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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So let's, let's talk a little bit about, you know, looking ahead. Certainly, you know, we, we talk a lot about AI and AI generated content and other things on, on the show, of course, but how do you see AI, you know, changing the game for local marketing execution? You know, is it, you know, certainly there's a lot of potential impacts here, but you know, is it about hyper personalization, automation all of the above. You know, where, where do you see some of its biggest impacts?
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D
I think AI from an automation perspective, I mean it's a very broad question. Um, you know, for instance, for instance we use AI voiceover technology which I mentioned before, to match vision with voice. If we're updating video files, we use AI facial recognition on the digital asset management side of things to tag elements within, 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, you know, or a Coke bottle for argument's 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 situ in a, you know, in a beachside location. But the better it gets and the more reliable it starts to become. I only, 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, eerie for everyone to be getting served hyper relevant ads across every single channel because we will have the technology to do that. Yeah, yeah.
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And then, you know, I guess, I know we touched on this a little bit in the, in the beginning already, but how do we maintain this, you know, this, this dynamic between, you know, the, the brand and the, the marketer at the, you know, let's call it at the national, inter global level, you know, making sure that their strategy stays paramount while the local, in this case, you know, dealers or, or retailers get what they need. You know, how do we, how do we maintain that right balance of, you know, 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, you know, we want feedback from the field, but it's, it's not a one way either way really. Like how do you, you know, how should leaders be thinking about that as planning their strategies?
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Yeah, my background is brand and retail advertising. Like brand is everything, consistency is everything. I think really for marketers to be able to shift that, that Dynamic from being an order taker 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 the media that you're going to be serving that content to. Whereas the younger brigade, 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 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 down downstream. Yeah, yeah. Love it.
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C
Well, Andy, thanks so much for joining today. 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?
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Oh, it's a great question. 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. Right. Just because I have access to AI tools and the design tools does not make me a designer. 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, I do think we need to be thinking about our tech stack. So again, 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 tech stack together to be able to execute that? Which is probably not going to speed you up in the, in the long, in the long run?
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Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
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That would be the two things.
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Well, last question for you here. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently.
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I talk to every single person I can in, in the technology place, whether they're a competitor, you know, keep your keep your friends close, keep your enemies close, but always be open to new ideas. Attend conferences, go to events, jump on webinars, be be inquisitive. 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 the content correctly. And if we hadn't been inquisitive, we wouldn't, we wouldn't have Sesame as a business today. Yeah. Yeah. Love it.
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Well, again, I'd like to thank Andy Baker, CEO and Founder at Sesame, for joining the show. You can learn more about Andy and.
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Sesame by following the links in the show notes. This episode is brought to you by Tech Systems. They're leaders in full stack, tech services, talent solutions and helping companies put it all in action. You can learn more@teksystems.com and thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand podcast. If you like the episode, hit subscribe and drop a rating so others can find the show too. And if you're interested in consulting, advisory work, or if you need a speaker for your next event, feel free to reach out. Just visit GregKilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S T.
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R O.
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The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile. The Agile Brand.