Talking about what matters – David Shing at The Worthies

David Shing loves the idea of The Worthies because it “does what it says on the tin”.

The inaugural one-day conference and award show is a celebration of the non-profit and public sectors. It is set to take place March 5 in Wellington.

Shing, better known as Shingy, is one of the keynote speakers. He’s taking to the stage with a session titled: ‘The attention crisis: Why behaviour change needs brave creative.’

“I’m not the guy who’s going to talk about performance. I’m going to talk about things that matter,” he tells me.

Brand stories that stick

In his time in the marketing industry, Shingy has held senior marketing positions at AOL International. There he was known as the company’s digital prophet. He has also worked on global brands such as LMVH, Chanel and Nike.

He still goes by the digital prophet title as the head of his own self-titled business, providing marketing services and delivering talks at events like SouthxSouthwest, TEDx, Cannes, and now, The Worthies.

Now, when he meets people, Shingy asks them to tell them about the first ad they can recall. It helps to highlight what factors make a brand stand out.

For him, having grown up in Australia, the first ad he remembers involves kangaroos. It was a Holden radio ad featuring football, meat pies and kangaroos. It felt very “Aussie” but it wasn’t even locally made. Instead it came from the US and had been repurposed for the Australian market.

“It felt like a tribute to all things that are very Australian. They used the medium perfectly.”

How do you make it real?

All of this to say: “The future doesn’t belong to the most efficient brand. It belongs to the ones that are most loved.”

Shingy says: “If there’s a catchphrase for me, it’s probably something like love is loyalty, without a discount.”

He adds that while the industry is in a state of disruption, with AI continuing to develop at rapid pace, what matters most is creating a sense of belonging.

The first step is to make stuff people want. The second is to truly understand who your audiences are. “Who are these people? What are they? What do they consume? Real disruption is get out of your category and sit in culture.”

Despite the technological developments of the past decade, all of this still holds true, says Shingy. Brands still need to be consumed, they still need to impart trust and everyone still needs to feel loved.

And while AI can write the joke, humans are still the ones who decide whether or not it’s funny, he adds. “AI can do everything, but it can’t do taste, style or point of view. That’s still on us.

“AI has raised the floor – the view is better, the only thing we haven’t done is understood that the ceiling is now where we need to go.”

Intention over attention

Everything has been optimised for reach, when really we should be optimising for resonance, Shingy adds.

It’s about intention, rather than attention, otherwise it becomes a formula that forgets about the human on the other side: “Attention is cheap – people open their phones a couple of hundred times a day. To hold my sense of attention, you better be interesting.”

Shingy wears glasses every single day and his go-to specs provider is a company called Gentle Monster. Not because of the product, but because every time he visits a store, it’s “radically different”.

“They sell atmosphere, not eyewear. You can live in this world, flooded with other products, so how can we be different? And so they can flex, but they won’t compromise.” It’s a rule to live by.

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