David Shing (born 1970), also known as "Shingy", is an Australian marketing executive. He held various senior marketing positions at

AOL AOL (formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City, and a brand marketed by Yahoo! Inc. The service traces its history to an online ...

between 2007 and 2019.

Personal life

David Shing grew up in suburban Australia. He studied at

Billy Blue William Blue (c. 1767 – 7 May 1834) was an Australian convict who, after completing his sentence, became a boatman providing one of the first services to take people across Sydney Harbour. He was also made a water bailiff and watched boat ...

design school in Sydney.

Career

In 2007, Shing began a long relationship with

as the Marketing Director for AOL Europe. In 2010, he was promoted to VP Media and Marketing for AOL international. In 2011, he became the company's self-named "Digital Prophet". He was charged with promoting the company by speaking at conferences and events, including

SXSW South by Southwest (SXSW) is an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and Convention (meeting), conferences organized jointly that take place in mid-March in Austin, Texas. It began in 1987 and has conti ...

and

TEDx TED Conferences, LLC (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an American-Canadian non-profit media organization that posts international talks online for free distribution under the slogan "Ideas Change Everything" (previously "Ideas Worth Sprea ...

. He stayed on at

Oath Traditionally, an oath (from Old English, Anglo-Saxon ', also a plight) is a utterance, statement of fact or a promise taken by a Sacred, sacrality as a sign of Truth, verity. A common legal substitute for those who object to making sacred oaths ...

and later

Verizon Media Verizon Communications Inc. ( ), is an American telecommunications company headquartered in New York City. It is the world's second-largest telecommunications company by revenue and its mobile network is the largest wireless carrier in the ...

after AOL's purchase by

Verizon Verizon Communications Inc. ( ), is an American telecommunications company headquartered in New York City. It is the world's second-largest telecommunications company by revenue and its mobile network is the largest wireless carrier in the ...

. He left in 2019.

Public image

Shing has spoken at many live events, the coverage of which has focused on his unusual fashion sense, his idiosyncratic speaking style and his nebulous role within AOL (with ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...

''s Adam Gabbatt stating, for example, that the definition of a Digital Prophet "remains unclear"). His appearance on

MSNBC MSNBC is an American cable news channel owned by the NBCUniversal News Group division of NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast. Launched on July 15, 1996, and headquartered at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, the channel primarily broadcasts r ...

and the follow-up article in ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...

'' made him the focal point for a conversation around the meaning behind

buzzword A buzzword is a word or phrase, new or already existing, that becomes popular for a period of time. Buzzwords often derive from technical terms yet often have much of the original technical meaning removed through fashionable use, being simply ...

s in the

media industry Mass media include the diverse arrays of media that reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit information electronically via media such as films, radio, recorded music, or television. Digital media comprises bot ...

. Some have gone so far as to describe his lectures as "pure gibberish," though they are defended as "less outlandish in context" by the advertisers he works with. Although he has been described as a symbol of AOL's "uncertainty and aimlessness" and even "everything that's wrong with corporate America," it has also been argued that the Digital Prophet moniker disguised a "fairly standard role" within the company.

In popular culture

A character named "Shangy", transparently parodying Shing, appears in the comedy sketch show ''

W/ Bob & David ''W/ Bob & David'' is an American sketch comedy television series created by and starring Bob Odenkirk and David Cross that premiered on Netflix on November 13, 2015. The sketch show consists of four half-hour episodes plus an hour-long making- ...

''.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Shing, David 1970 births Living people AOL employees Technology evangelists Australian businesspeople