Translator: Kaitlyn Theberge Reviewer: Denise RQ
I'm going to talk about transparency, transparency in general,
which could be transparency in philosophy, in politics, or in technology.
Transparency leads to a certain serendipity.
A distinctive serendipity.
This serendipity is a weapon that can be used practically anywhere on the Internet.
It will destroy many of the brands all around us,
and it will destroy these brands, as it attacks our imagination,
because our imagination is the land of the brands around us.
I'm going to do a demonstration.
Let's take an imaginary:
Vermeer, a 17th century Baroque painter we're all familiar with,
and there we have a brand that we're also familiar with.
A very old one that is 41 years old.
It has been with us for four decades.
And now I'll show you how, with a little imagination,
we can destroy a brand.
In reality, this is nothing else but a food-processing giant
that produces yogurt in a factory.
That has nothing to do with art, let alone with Vermeer.
What I just did,
and what will definitively make you wonder every time you see a "La Laitière" ad,
was a little thing many Internet users already know about:
every day on the Internet,
these unexpected messages are hammered into you in a serendipitous way
so as to destroy brands.
This summer, you probably didn't miss
that reminder that all brands have a political dimension.
And don't listen to politicians that will tell you
that it's the fault of the Internet or of social media.
Politicians are the first to use transparency to solve a critical problem:
confidence.
When an intense crisis of confidence hit the French political world,
the first thing they did was to pass a law on transparency.
It didn't really work, but politicians forgot the dimension of transparency
which is that transparency comes from technological determinism.
Transparency can also be used by technology experts
as a political response.
You're familiar with Wiki-leaks,
and it didn't escape you that because of the Wiki-leaks affair,
we no longer count on policy
coming from transparency to impose a reality and to destroy a lie.
And it also didn't escape you
that Wiki-leaks means lots of internet users.
These internet users are called Anonymous.
Anonymous is utterly fascinating
because it's the first real social movement of the 21st century.
It's a movement distinctive to the 21st century
in the same way syndicalism was distinctive to the 19th century,
in the same way syndicalism was distinctive to the Industrial Revolution,
Anonymous is distinctive to the digital revolution;
And following the Wiki-leaks affair,
the Anonymous were part of all the big social protest movements,
in the Arab world, here in France, the United States, Berlin,
in Paris, China, Istanbul, or South America,
Anonymous was in all the major events
that touched populations, until recently, in France.
Anonymous is really interesting
because it heralds the social debates of the 21st century.
And these debates will oppose states, as we've seen,
but also businesses,
since Anonymous is already opposed to a plethora of businesses.
Here is one of the most well known cases.
Four years before Sony was attacked by Kim Jong-un and his formidable pirates
(Laughter)
four years before this sad episode
that is easily worth as much as Saddam Hussein and anthrax combined,
Sony was attacked by different kinds of enemies,
in what was known as a digital Fukushima.
Sony was attacked by Anonymous,
helped by another group of hackers, called LulzSec.
And LulzSec followed a very simple procedure:
they took what used to be, at the time, Sony's confidential information,
such as credit card numbers, user names, and passwords,
and they made them public, allowing endless pirating to happen.
Users on PlayStation Network are like you.
They always use the same user name and password.
Once I have your user name and password,
I can access anything: the Amazon account, your Paypal, your company's intranet.
And if you work for the CIA, this is a serious problem.
This had dramatic consequences for Sony.
Here we see Sony's share price over a three-month period.
First off we have Fukushima - this took its toll on their share price-
secondly, there was Anonymous.
Thirdly, the arrival of the infamous hacker group LulzSec
who in a manner of speaking instrumentalized Anonymous and the masses.
Compare this to Nikkei, the equivalent of CAC 40 in the Japanese market,
and you'll see that, first of all, Sony and Nikkei follow the same trends,
and secondly, well, it all falls apart.
After analysis,
we see Sony has lost 3.5 billion in its stock market value in this period,
of which two thirds are attributed to Anonymous.
In the end,
this digital Fukushima will cost Sony 1.7 times the real Fukushima.
That's huge.
And among the things that deteriorated Sony's value,
right off the bat we have its brand, the Sony brand.
So let's imagine that brands are valued in the same way as companies
in the stock exchange.
A business's trademark is a part of its worth in the stock market,
especially when it is widely known.
Today's problem is that we are going back to a world
where a company's brand is its Achilles's heel.
Not counting brands that already have stock market value,
there is an astronomical quantity of them
whose prices can sometimes reach ridiculous amounts.
This year, Apple's value has exceeded 100 billion dollars.
If you take the 100 biggest brands in the world,
their total worth would be 2.9 trillion dollars:
an enormous bubble.
An enormous bubble built on the relationship
between brand equity and confidence equity.
This brand equity is calculated somewhat scientifically,
astonishingly enough,
using the consistency
between a company's practices and the value their brand.
And that's what will attack the masses.
And they're going to attack places we all know well:
Facebook, Twitter, things like that.
All of you have a Facebook account, maybe a Twitter account, too.
And maybe you've come across this serendipity, two years ago,
when the Rana Plaza collapsed in Bangladesh,
killing hundreds of working women and children,
and among the rubble and bodies were found Benetton labels,
highlighting the complete inconsistency
between the values of the brand, and the company's actions.
The trademark disappeared.
30 years of communication thrown away.
You couldn't have missed this serendipity
during the horse meat scandal.
Again, the masses are armed by serendipity.
And in the Arab world,
you couldn't have missed this serendipity,
lasting all summer,
that provoked a collapse in Coca-Cola's market shares
in the entire Arab world.
Today's issue is that businesses are becoming
more and more attached to their brands in a way that is inspired by Dorian Gray.
On the one hand, we have a brand that is public, beautiful, young, dynamic.
On the other hand, a company
that's rarely public, rarely young, and rarely dynamic.
On the one hand, we have values, on the other, we have habits.
On the one hand, we have a brand's imagery on the other, we have reality.
On the one hand, we have consumers,
who are imagined abstractions of publicity agents,
and on the other, we have citizens, you, me, all of us.
Nobody here can be reduced to a simple consumer,
at least, not without a serious lobotomy.
(Laughter)
The issue we find ourselves in
is that little by little, this barrier between public and private,
which we've all seen change with Facebook, and the adolescents who use it,
this barrier also exists for businesses.
And little by little,
the private domain of a business is becoming more and more public.
And under the impulse of the crowd, little by little,
the private workings of the business will become public.
Today marks the beginning of a digital revolution,
which will force brands to apprehend transparency, without fighting against it,
but understanding and manipulating this transparency,
and taking part of it, one way or another.
The digital revolution will force brands
to interact with the masses, rather than put up with them.
The digital revolution will force trademarks
to integrate this famous serendipity.
To make it theirs, not to be victimized.
And finally, the digital revolution will force brands
to share the imagery which was once exclusively theirs.
Thank you.
(Applause)