*(Ok, most of them are)
Have you come across Shingy, aka Dave Shing? He’s AOL’s ‘digital prophet’ and his job seems to involve coming up with ‘brain farts’. I’m not exactly sure what a brain fart is, but in this context it seems to be marginally less unpleasant than a ‘brain dump’.
You can read about Shingy in this biting New Yorker profile from last month. As portrayed here, Shingy is so ridiculous that for a moment I thought he was a fictitious construct designed to parody the aching hipness of the New York digital scene. But he’s real.
Shingy, of course, is not alone these days in having a silly job title. Most agencies have some kind of Head of Futures, but Digital Prophet is so much better because it imbues Shingy with a certain other-world authority. Anyway, Head of Futures is so yesterday.
Dig around and you will find all kinds of entertaining examples. The first thing you will note is that it is essential to upper case them.
Microsoft UK has a Chief Envisioning Officer, one Dave Coplin. I feel sorry for Dave. The UK appendage to his title suggests his powers of envisioning are bounded by geography. “Hey Dave, that’s a piece of Euro-envisioning. You’ve got to envision smaller. You’re UK only. Get back in your box.”
In New Zealand, iSite Media has a Head of Freshness. This is not even original. MediaCom also has various Heads of Freshness dotted around the world, although they are spared too much ridicule because they combine them with other job titles, sometimes as prosaic as Head of Strategy.
MediaCom even has one in Germany, but the Germans use the English title because, I suppose, it defies translation in a culture as rational and ordered as theirs. Geschäftsfü hrer der Frische sounds so much better.
Various organisations employ a Chief Listener, including Dell and the company that used to be known as Kodak. In the latter case, you’d have to conclude they didn’t do their job very well.
HeyHuman (it’s a social agency) has a Head of Conversation. She used to be Head of Conversation somewhere else, but presumably she ran out of things to say to her colleagues.
TBWA/Manchester has a Head of Disruption, whose role, among other things, requires them to go around “wreaking havoc“. I’ve worked with people who wrought havoc wherever they went, but it wasn’t part of their job description and they were all sociopaths.
PR agency Edelman employs a Head of Business and Social Purpose, and I am unable to confirm rumours another agency has a Chief Purpose-ologist. If they don’t, they should appoint one pdq.
I’ve heard tell of one agency where the staff who don’t do digital are referred to as ‘civilians’, which seems extraordinarily condescending and patronising to me.
You, no doubt, will have come across plenty of other examples, whether it involves ‘digital ninjas’, ‘digital rockstars’ (at Heineken, no less), ‘chief pollinators’ or ‘media shepherds’. You can read a good list of them here.
It’s only a matter of time, surely, before some outfit goes the whole way and appoints a ‘Head of Wank’.
And then, within large organisations, hierarchies, ego and politics will come into play, and the Head of Wank will demand a deputy, an assistant and a whole department of their own.
I tend to think that the true test of a job title is whether the holder can explain in a comprehensible way to their aunt or their doctor – ‘civilians’, in that quaint terminology – what it is they actually do in, say, 45 seconds or less.
But I’ve come to realise that this is to take too narrow a view. Some of these job titles are not about the outside world. They’re about the internal workings and dynamics of the organisation.
To the outside world, they’re stupid. But inside, they make a certain kind of sense.
Take Shingy. AOL is as dull as ditchwater, and its CEO, Tim Armstrong, has all the charisma of an actuary. But Shingy is fun, and he spreads a bit of magic dust around the organisation.
As they grow up and become more corporate, digital organisations need to retain the sense of youth, vigour, and sheer exuberance that fired them up in the first place. One of Shingy’s unstated roles, therefore, is help position AOL as a place where unconventional talent can find a home.
At Microsoft, it used to be that the only ‘envisioning’ that went on was about how to screw more profit out of Windows and how to protect its quasi-monopolistic positioning. But these days, Microsoft’s actions have the potential to shape society in profound ways, so a bit of ‘envisioning’ is a good idea.
And however MediaCom defines ‘freshness’, it’s clearly doing something to keep the agency – named Campaign’s Media Agency of the Year for the second year running – at the top of its game and ahead of the pack.
So I say more power to Shingy and his ilk. If nothing else, they bring entertainment and joy to civilians…and an endless supply of material to columnists.
