A new menu, refreshed identity or growing restaurant network creates marketing work at every location. Quick-service restaurant (QSR) brands need to turn those changes...

Head office creates national campaigns, sets brand standards and remains accountable for compliance. Dealers then adapt those campaigns to local inventory, offers, events and market conditions, often through processes head office cannot fully see.

Sending every local change back to an agency or central marketing team slows production and increases costs. Work produced outside the approved process is faster but harder to track, govern and measure. OEMs need a model that gives dealers a practical route to market while preserving brand control and visibility across the network.

 

 

Most organisations have systems for managing approved content. Problems start when a dealer, franchisee, partner or store manager needs to turn that content into an advertisement, email, social post or other customer-facing asset.

At CMS Connect 2026 in Montreal, Sesimi’s Director of North American Sales, Mike Thompson examined where brand governance breaks down when the approved production route is slower than the local workaround. Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Chuck Kahun later linked Mike’s argument to the content problems clients are raising with Forrester.

 

Australia's automotive market is becoming more crowded. More brands and vehicles are competing for attention, buyers are moving across more channels before making a decision, and dealerships have more ways to reach them.

For dealerships, the challenge is increasingly about deciding where to focus: how to understand a local market, turn national brand strategy into relevant local activity, get campaigns into market quickly and determine what is actually producing results. These questions reflect broader shifts already emerging across automotive marketing in 2026.

Those same challenges shaped the AADA 2026 panel Winning Locally: Making Your Dealership Marketing More Effective, moderated by Sesimi CEO Andrew Baker. Rather than focusing on the next marketing trend, the discussion explored how dealerships can make better decisions about customers, channels, creative, spend and measurement.

The conversation pointed to a broader shift: dealer marketing is becoming less about producing more campaigns and more about making better local marketing decisions.

What’s New?

We've introduced a range of new capabilities across Sesimi to make planning more flexible, strengthen content governance, and give teams greater visibility across Funds, Reporting and Digital Asset Management.

 

Marketing teams have never had more opportunities to publish content. Yet the brands customers recognise most easily are not necessarily the ones producing the most content. One of the largest studies of creative consistency, analysing 56 brands and responses from more than 624,600 consumers, found a clear relationship between consistent creative execution and stronger brand performance. Decades of brand effectiveness research show that recognition grows through repeated exposure to distinctive brand assets rather than constant novelty.

5 OEM Marketing Trends Redefining Brand Control and Dealer Speed in 2026

At Cannes Lions 2026, OpenAI arrived with an advertising business. Amazon demonstrated agentic ads through Alexa+. Disney and Omnicom announced sequential streaming campaigns. EA introduced a platform that places brands directly inside gameplay.

Each announcement solved a different problem. Collectively, they highlighted the same shift. Marketing technology is becoming more connected because campaigns now move across more platforms, more formats and more customer interactions than ever before.

Franchise, dealer and multi location organisations already understand what happens next. Head office builds the campaign. Brand teams approve the assets. Local teams adapt them for their market. Legal reviews exceptions. Sales managers want to see which locations have launched. Customers only ever see the finished campaign.

Those operational challenges surfaced throughout Cannes. The spotlight may have been on AI, creators and new advertising formats, but the underlying challenge was familiar: as campaigns become easier to produce, marketing teams need better ways to manage how they move from strategy to execution.

5 OEM Marketing Trends Redefining Brand Control and Dealer Speed in 2026

OEM marketing models are being rebuilt under pressure. Central teams are expected to move faster, support dealers more directly, and maintain compliance across increasingly complex networks. Legacy agency models and fragmented tools cannot sustain this. he OEMs pulling ahead are not increasing output but restructuring how marketing operates.

The Franchise Growth and Marketing Conference (FGMC) brought together franchise marketers, operators, technology leaders, and growth teams to discuss the forces shaping franchise growth.