Donald Chesnut, chief experience officer for SapientNitro, is set to appear as a featured speaker at this week’s FutureFlash conference, hosted by the Institute of Communication Agencies (ICA) in Muskoka. Chesnut’s talk will centre on the influence of the maker movement within the marketing industry. Ironically, as the world becomes more digital and more experiences become virtual, there’s an increasing desire to revisit tangible objects and real experiences. Marketing had a chance to discuss Chesnut’s thought on makers and the advertising industry ahead of FutureFlash.
*Note: This interview has been condensed and edited
In the context of the marketing industry, how do you define a maker?
Anyone that really looks for creativity in making something…. Anyone that’s actually building or making something physical. It’s pretty broad.
Where have we started to tangibly see an impact from the maker community in the advertising industry?
My background is as an experience designer – UX at the core. I firmly believe that brands are being built far more through experiences than ever before, rather than communications. The actual experience – the mobile app, the physical store, the people – the tangible aspects of the brand do far more to build, define and communicate what the brand’s about. If you believe that, and I think many people do in this digital era, we’ve moved to a more participatory type of brand building.
For me, what [the maker movement] represents is this tangible desire to create and make something. Many brands are starting to allow people to co-create their own products. A project I saw recently for Verizon: the team rethought their in-store experiences as in-store workshops, telling you how to make more use of your wireless device. They allowed people to play, created props and [had them] use their own phones to create Vine videos. If you look at how that work was actually built and implemented, it’s very much indicative of the artisanal nature of the maker movement.
There’s a huge emphasis now on brand authenticity. Does the maker movement play into that trend?
That’s one of many threads I see… the ability to create something that is bespoke.
I look at other trends that have come alongside the maker movement, like Etsy and Kickstarter – making something bespoke, getting it funded, to turn it into something mass-produced. [It’s the] same thing with brands that are now open and allowing you to co-create. I can have the pair of shoes I want that I’ve co-created. It’s representative of consumer participation in the brand world… It becomes a very authentic expression of the brand because it’s part-consumer, part-person and part-brand.
How do you see makers fitting in to the marketing ecosystem?
Digital is no longer new. We’ve all been around it long enough. We’re all online, all the time, and there’s an element of screen fatigue going on. There’s a desire, and I’ve seen it with many of our teams and many of our clients – [to ask] how do we go beyond? How do we create an experience that’s beyond these multiple screens?
Digital has long been focused on transactions and getting things usable. Now there’s an opportunity for emotion, and I think both of those things – screen fatigue… a desire to push towards emotion – it’s pushing people to create things, experiences.
It’s almost as if, as things become more virtual and digital, we start to crave tangible, physical objects once again
Absolutely.
How disruptive do you think makers will be in the marketing industry?
One research piece estimated that 135 million Americans are makers. That’s I think about 57% of the population. There’s no way that that’s necessarily true in that that percentage of Americans identify as makers, but they’re doing what makers do [as] homemakers, artisans, etc…
It’s far bigger than we realize, and I think that will be very disruptive. Brands [and creatives at agencies] are continually looking for opportunities to stand out from the crowd. If you can actually create something that is immersive and experiential… maybe dealing with light and sound and touch, as well as a digital screen, then you’ve really made an impression. I do think that it’s not [as much] about the maker movement being self-identified as [it is] what the maker movement represents. I think it will be very disruptive.
