Meet Shingy, AOL’s “Digital Prophet”
Meet Shingy, AOL’s “Digital Prophet”
ShingyIllustration by Tom BachtellShingy believes in storytelling—more story, less telling. A story can be anything—text or image, six seconds or thirteen hours. According to Shingy, we are no longer living in the age of information; it’s the age of social, and social is all about conversations. How does Shingy know? Because he is a digital prophet. Literally. His business card has a microchip embedded in it, and it reads “Digital Prophet, AOL.” It also says “David Shing,” but, unless you knew him when he was a kid in Australia, you should just call him Shingy, which is also his Twitter handle and his URL. AOL pays him a six-figure salary for—for doing what, exactly? “Watching the future take shape across the vast online landscape,” Shingy says. “I fly all around the world and go to conferences.” Last month, he was in Singapore, Brazil, and Germany. “I listen to where media is headed and figure out how our brands can win in that environment.” In 2002, AOL had more than twenty-five million subscribers; it now has fewer than two and a half million. Shingy calls it “a company in transition.”“There is no typical day for me,” Shingy, who is forty-four, said. “Which, if you think about it, means that today is pretty typical.” He arrived at AOL headquarters in the Village wearing black nail polish and high-top sneakers with leather wings. His jacket, T-shirt, and pants were black, and he had decorated them with wide stripes of white paint. He wears his hair up and out, like Phyllis Diller or Beetlejuice. “You’d be surprised how easy it is to get it to stay like this, actually—a blow-dry and then a quarter-size dab of product,” Shingy explained. “It’s all in the cut, not the styling.” He ran into a Ward Cleaver-ish advertising executive named Jim Norton. “My man!” Shingy said, offering his trademark three-part handshake, ending in a hug.Next, Shingy stopped by the office of Erika Nardini, the chief marketing officer of AOL Advertising, and handed her an iPad Mini. “Wanted to show you a little brain fart I had on the plane,” he said. It was a cartoon he had drawn of a bear wearing zebra-print pants and a shirt covered in ones and zeros.“Love it, love it, love it,” Nardini said. “I’m thinking of the bears more as a metaphor.”“A thousand per cent,” Shingy said.“Shingy is my muse,” Nardini said. During this conversation, Shingy was distracted by his phone, but he looked up and smiled every few seconds. “I lean on him really heavily for the feel of what’s happening in the here and now. There is something so polarizing about Shingy, but also so unifying.”Shingy kept moving. He is passionate about spaces, and when a space is not working he reboots it, taking everything out and starting over. He said, “This is a space I recently rebooted for Tim”—meaning Tim Armstrong, the C.E.O. of AOL. The room had been a standard fluorescent-lit office. Now the desk was gone, replaced by leather armchairs in a circle, and the walls were painted dark gray. Armstrong entered, wearing a fleece, baggy jeans, and loafers. Shingy is short and slight, and Armstrong, who played lacrosse in college, towered over him.“Do you like the scent?” Shingy said. A diffuser released a fragrance (called London) designed by Tom Dixon into the air. Shingy’s office features another of Dixon’s scents (Orientalist), but Armstrong’s, he pointed out, was newer.“It’s funny,” Armstrong said. “I thought it was the cleaning materials. The cleaning lady was in here last night, and I’m like, ‘I love the smell of this table!’ She was like, ‘Um, O.K.’ ”“I still need to put some sound in here,” Shingy said.Armstrong looked around. “I have meetings here, and people don’t know where to sit,” he said.“They’ll figure it out, man,” Shingy said.He took an Uber car uptown to IPG Mediabrands, an advertising firm, where he was due to give a speech. “I think some folks from Applebee’s are going to be in the house,” he said. “I’m more of a caffeine-free, gluten-free, raw-food sort of guy, but I am able to find something to like in every brand once I hear their story.”He told the Applebee’s people that to make their brand “remarkable, reactive, and relevant” they have to tell stories in real time. Everyone is talking about SoLoMo—social, local, mobile—but they should be talking about HoMo: home/mobile, cell phones used on the couch.“How many apps does the average person have?” Shingy asked the crowd.“Forty-two?” Justin Colavita, a media planner, said.“That’s right!” Shingy said. “Forty-one, actually.”A colleague turned to Colavita and asked, “How did you know that?”“I was just guessing,” Colavita said. “I must be a prophet.” ♦