About Eric Wing
I’ve been working on the internet since before Instagram existed.
I’m a fractional CMO and marketing consultant, founder of Darby Digital. I’m also a writer, author and speaker. I live and work in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The work
I’ve spent much of my career helping organizations understand how people discover, evaluate, and interact with businesses online. First websites and search, later AI. The tools have changed repeatedly. The need for clear decisions has not.
I founded Darby Digital in 2008. Darby can support execution when needed, alongside the internal teams and partners an organization already works with. Building the company has also given me a practical education in entrepreneurship, leadership, and the daily work of keeping an independent business useful.
My Fractional CMO work focuses on direction, prioritization and accountability. The role is to help leadership teams make clearer marketing decisions, not simply add more activity.
For a defined question rather than ongoing leadership, my marketing consulting and strategic advisory work brings an outside perspective to the decision.
Over nearly two decades I’ve worked with businesses, nonprofits, professional services firms, educational institutions, and organizations of many sizes. The work usually starts with a real question and no obvious answer.
Knowing how is common. Knowing what to do is rarer.
Most of my attention goes to how companies actually make decisions about marketing and technology, and why those decisions so often stall.
Tools arrive faster than organizations can absorb them. The interesting questions are what to adopt, what to ignore, what to stop doing, and who owns the outcome afterward.
Writing, a book and speaking
Some of what I think about ends up as essays and observations. Some of it ends up in a room with other people, at conferences, on podcasts, panels, and in interviews.
My forthcoming book, The Vanishing Brand, develops those questions around AI search, discoverability and the evidence systems can retrieve and trust.
The essays, the book and the talks all come from client work. I work in this every day and I would rather think out loud than pretend the answers are settled.
An essay on the experience behind the work: What Nearly Two Decades of Digital Change Has Taught Me About What Actually Matters →
Darby Digital
Darby Digital is the operating company I founded in 2008, where much of the execution, digital optimization and implementation work happens. EricWing.com is the home of my marketing leadership, ideas, writing, book and public conversations.
Beyond the work
I live and work in the Boston area. It is a good place to be curious, with universities, research, startups, and a lot of people willing to argue carefully about ideas.
Outside of client work, most of my attention goes to reading, writing, and following what’s happening in AI closely enough to tell the difference between a shift and a headline.