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.

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.

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

Across two Brand Innovators events in Seattle and Chicago, marketing leaders from brands including Microsoft, Starbucks, Zillow, Taco Bell, Hershey, Suntory, PepsiCo, Gatorade, Olipop, Whirlpool, Ferrero, Grubhub, and Sesimi explored the forces reshaping modern marketing.

AUTO NY 2026 underscored a structural shift in automotive marketing. The challenge is no longer reach. It is coordination. OEMs are managing national brand platforms while dealers execute locally across fragmented channels, compressed timelines, and increasing personalization demands.

Financial services marketing in 2025 looks nothing like it did three years ago.

AI went from "interesting experiment" to table stakes. Distributed branch networks that used to move slowly are now expected to launch localized campaigns in days, not weeks. And customers? They want personalized experiences without your brand feeling disjointed.

At this year's Digital Marketing for Financial Services (DMFS) conference in New York, the conversations kept circling back to the same tension: how do you move fast, stay compliant, and keep your brand intact when you're managing marketing across hundreds of branches, advisors, and partners?

This isn't a recap. It's a playbook. Here's what financial services marketers need to know, based on what's actually working for the teams getting it right.

The Sesimi team is excited to sponsor three major Franchise Expo conferences this year:

The conversation every financial marketer is having

This November, the Digital Marketing for Financial Services Summit (DMFS) New York brings together marketing leaders from across banking, insurance, and wealth management. Every discussion at the event returns to one question: how can financial brands scale content across distributed networks while staying compliant?

Why Creative Automation Platforms Are the Future of Digital Asset Management

 

Discover the top five trends from DAM New York 2025 and learn how creative automation platforms like Sesimi are shaping the future of digital asset management through modular content, analytics, and compliance.

Discover how Sesimi unites DAM and creative automation at DAM NY 2025, scaling content faster, staying on-brand, and driving better ROI..