This week on the Croisette, Cannes Lions is grappling with the question it has been circling for years and can no longer avoid: what does genuine creativity look like when the tools that once made it rare are now available to everyone? For the first time in its seventy-year history, the festival has changed what it calls excellent before a single entry has been judged — introducing AI Craft subcategories and a brand new Creative Brand Lion, recognising not individual campaigns but the systems, cultures, and human judgment that make creative excellence repeatable. Umich
It is a question that David Shing — known to virtually everyone in the industry as Shingy — has been asking, in his own unmistakeable way, for the better part of three decades.
The Original Digital Prophet
David Shing is an Australian futurist, speaker, creative director, and strategic digital consultant. He studied at Billy Blue Design School in Sydney, helped invent internet technologies in his early twenties, and moved to the United States where he would go on to become one of the most recognisable — and deliberately provocative — voices in digital marketing. The ContinuumWikipedia
He joined AOL in 2007 as Marketing Director for AOL Europe, was promoted to VP of Media and Marketing for AOL International in 2010, and in 2011 created the role that would define his public identity: Digital Prophet. The title was never entirely tongue-in-cheek. It reflected something real about what he was being asked to do — monitor the digital horizon, identify what was coming before it arrived, and communicate that vision to brands, agencies, and audiences who were still catching up to the present, let alone the future. Wikipedia
He worked with iconic brands including LVMH, Chanel, Nike, McDonald's, and Google, transforming their approaches to digital engagement. He was a fixture at SXSW, TEDx, Cannes Lions — a stage presence as much as a strategist, known for a speaking style and fashion sense that made him impossible to ignore and, for some, difficult to categorise. That, arguably, was the point. In an industry that rewards safe thinking with safe results, Shingy arrived as a deliberate disruption — someone who believed that the way you show up is itself a creative statement. genconnectU
After more than a decade inside AOL through its evolutions into Oath and Verizon Media, he departed in 2019. His reason, characteristically, was not corporate — he said he wanted to be a better listener and teacher. Since then, he has built an independent consultancy, advised global brands on creativity and digital strategy, and continued doing what he has always done: helping people see what they couldn't see before. ShingyLibsyn
Why His Voice Belongs at Cannes — and Beyond It
Shingy's passion lies in educating major brands on the opportunities presented by emerging digital, social, and mobile technologies. But to reduce him to a trend-spotter is to miss what makes him genuinely valuable. What Shingy has consistently offered — through all the noise and notoriety and deliberately wild hair — is something far more useful than prediction. He offers a way of seeing. The Continuum
He describes his approach as "unearthing the essence of trends, brands, and people's self-knowledge." That framing matters. He is not interested in trends as data points. He is interested in what trends reveal about human behaviour, about what people want, about what they fear and aspire to and seek connection through. The creativity he champions is not creativity for its own sake — it is creativity as a tool for genuine human resonance. LinkedIn
This is precisely the conversation Cannes Lions is having in 2026. As AI becomes embedded in the creative workflow, the dominant question at the festival is what happens to originality, emotional depth, and creative courage when the tools of production are widely democratised. The emerging answer — one Shingy has been living for decades — is that technology does not replace the human quality at the centre of great work. It raises the stakes for it. His own view is unambiguous: "We don't need 100 AI tools. We need three tools with great interfaces on top of them." Clarity over volume. Intention over novelty. Human judgment at the wheel. e4mLinkedIn
Revisiting a decade of his own conversations with creative leaders, founders, musicians, and marketers, he found a consistent pattern among the people whose ideas had aged best: they were curious, generous, restless — and remained students even after becoming teachers. That portrait reads as much as a self-description as an observation. LinkedIn
The Vision Behind the Work
What David Shing represents — underneath the persona, the prophet title, the decades of stage appearances — is a genuinely rare kind of practitioner. Someone who understood the digital world not as a technological phenomenon but as a human one, long before that framing became consensus. Someone who has always insisted that creativity is not a department or a deliverable but a disposition — a way of approaching the world that, when cultivated deliberately, changes what you are capable of building.
It is that conviction that sits at the heart of his course with genconnectU: Unleashing Creativity in the Digital Era. In it, Shingy shares the frameworks and philosophy that have shaped his thinking across a career spent at the intersection of imagination and implementation — helping leaders, marketers, and creative professionals understand not just what the digital landscape looks like, but how to move through it with boldness, originality, and genuine impact.
In a week when the industry is asking what creativity is truly worth, David Shing's answer — as ever — arrives with clarity, colour, and absolutely no interest in playing it safe.
His course is available now on genconnectU.
