PROTECT Your Organization from Misinformation with Blockchain Tech!

Doug Downs (00:02):

The Yes men are described as a culture jamming activist duo created by Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos. Together with a network of supporters, they're known for political activism through elaborate hoaxes, they operate under a mission statement that lies can expose truth, and there are certainly people who might otherwise describe them as shit disturbers. They once created a corrected website for the World Trade Organization. In 2007, they came to a large oil conference in Calgary, posing as ExxonMobil representatives and actually gave a presentation posing as reps of the company. In 2008, they printed 80,000 copies of a fake edition of the New York Times. They pulled a similar stunt on the Washington Post in 2019 and more recently, they staged a memorable incident targeting Adidas. In January, 2023, working with the Clean Clothed campaign, they released a fake press release claiming Adidas had appointed a former Cambodian garment worker as CO CEO and pledged to sign the Pay your Workers Agreement.

(01:11):

This agreement would guarantee unpaid wages and improve working conditions for laborers in Adidas supply chain. The hoax featured a spoof website and a fabricated press release time to appear legitimate drawing initial attention from media outlets before being revealed as a stunt. Adidas responded swiftly denying involvement and clarifying the fake nature of the announcement. The hoax succeeded in bringing attention to the exploitation within Adidas supply chain. Now, you may agree or disagree with the political shenanigans of the Yes men, but the bottom line is you need to protect your own brand from damaging disinformation. Wiztrust has developed a blockchain based platform to certify corporate information and protect against hoaxes like these Today on stories and strategies, a tool that may help you say No, sir, to the Yes men.

(02:23):

My name is Doug Downs. Just off the top, a few thank yous Thank you Decision, which published a list of 10 binge-worthy PR podcast to listen to in 2024, and they included us on the list. Thank you to Lydia Rosasi. Lydia, I hope I'm saying that right. Lydia left a comment on Spotify about our episode with Eric Karani on what African Nations are doing to regulate PR. And when you get a new follower on Podchaser the app tells you their name, it's the only one that does that to the best of my knowledge. So Andrea G, thank you for following the podcast. I really appreciate it. My guest this week is Raphael Labbe, joining today from Amsterdam. Hey Raphael. Hi Doug. How are things in Amsterdam? Fall settling in any snow yet at all?

Raphaël Labbé (03:08):

No, not yet. I'm expecting it. It's always nice when you see the canals frozen, but it's not yet there.

Doug Downs (03:17):

I got to go. I've never been. I promise I'll get there at some point. Raphael, you are the founder and CEO at Wiztrust a suite of software products dedicated to PR and investor relations professionals. So let's start by understanding the growing threat to corporate misinformation and financial hoaxes. Corporations today are facing significant challenges with misinformation, disinformation, financial hoaxes, fake news. What are some of the most concerning trends that you've seen?

Raphaël Labbé (03:51):

Thanks, Doug. First, congratulations for the binge watch list for the podcast. And yes, the main one would be the just increasing numbers. So if you talk about trend we've been in in the PR industry for 10 years, we've helped our clients protect themselves from fake news. I'll explain how after for four years and a half now nearly five. And what we've seen by studying this is that we used to have one successful misinformation targeting large company per year 15 years ago. We now have one or two per month. Wow. So I would say that just the sheer amount of success there is the main change. The second one, if I go in that direction would be the not organization, but the fact that we now have two very clear way of attacking company using misinformation that are very separate, that are with two different goals and are very clear.

(05:09):

So it's usually one side or the other. And that was not the case before where if I remember correctly, one of the largest misinformation that happened, it was an apri fool, was targeting Pfizer. A group of people said, made a fake press release saying, yay guys, we're not going to ask money anymore for diabetes medicines. And then Pfizer had to manage that the next day because of course it was not their decision, but that was a mix of prank activism, these type of things. And it was a bit of a mix. Now it's very clear either you are targeting the markets and you're going to play with the value of a stock and it's going to be for financial reason or you're going to be an what I call an activist, which is you're going to act a conversation. You're going to act PR in the intent of having a social impact or to put a company facing a social issue.

Doug Downs (06:17):

Walk through the Adidas case, we outlined it off the top because that's social activism. Walk through what they did, the tactics that they used and how did they, what were the impacts I guess to Adidas overall,

Raphaël Labbé (06:36):

The way it was built was easy. And that's usually how every attack on a large company is done when you talk about PR, because you can also do fake content and put that on social media. But when we talk about real PR attack, it's like they pretend to be you. They forge a press release with the logo, even sometimes the name of the real press officer, but they'll put a burner phone, they put a fake website where you will find the press release. They fake everything and then they distribute that content to press specialized or generic, and then they look for that press to pick up because then the news is real because then you read your classical newspaper, you read your blog that you trust, but because they duped these people, because they duped the press, then you've got really big problems on your end because people will trust that information.

Doug Downs (07:40):

I can see the issue there. What were the financial impacts and long-term to Adidas do we know?

Raphaël Labbé (07:45):

So for Adidas in that case, I would say none because it was not taken by a major financial newspaper. It was really more an industry problem towards the blogs fashion specialist, a more targeted problem, more B2C than B2B.

Doug Downs (08:10):

Have there been cases where companies have suffered, I would assume temporary financial setbacks if they're publicly traded because once the public catches on that this was a hoax, that the share price should come back. I

Raphaël Labbé (08:25):

Have a long list of stories regarding that because as I said, the main trend is just the sheer amount of production that succeed. So I'm not even talking, it's like an iceberg. What we see, what I am able to see from my place is the one that are above the water, the one that failed there are down. I don't see them. But even that layer on top has been multiplied by 10 over the last 15 years. So to try to answer your concern and your question, yes, if I put something out there in the intent of doing more a financial crime than an activism case, then my goal is to move the price of any asset class or any asset up and down and be able to trade on that change.

(09:18):

And that I'm going to give you a few ones and I'll keep the one that started everything for later. But one of the last, very funny because it's very famous in the US fake press release saying Tesla would buy a company called Lithium. Lithium is producing Lithium batteries. The good thing when you do a fake with Tesla is that there's no PR team. It's actually just Elon Musk. So there are not much to protect. So he actually didn't care or was on the plane or I don't know what happened. But then of course everyone wanted to buy some of these shares of that lithium company because Tesla was about to buy it for double the price. So the price picked when he was at the top, these guys sold their shares at double the price. And then of course a few hours after the company denied, Tesla denied and then he went back down. So how

Doug Downs (10:22):

Help me investing 1 0 1, that would be illegal. Yes. Why would they get away with it? Is there no authority? That can,

Raphaël Labbé (10:34):

There's authority, but first it's going to be a tricky one because you can trade that share outside the US if it's a US listed company. So the company could find one of the bad actors, but it may be difficult for them to grab the person trading. That is when the trade is direct, you buy the share of that company. But there's also a very famous one, I think two years and a half ago and in a fake press release came out using a wire distribution system end up on the real website of Walmart saying that Walmart would adopt Litecoin in their shop the next day. And of course when Walmart do a financial move, it moves the needle a lot. So Litecoin went up 20% Litecoin is not an actual currency, it's a cryptocurrency. So you cannot see who wants that crypto. So the person bought this lco use the act leveraging Walmart sold them, and it's not possible to track them.

Doug Downs (11:49):

So the bad guys in this case are social activists who are behaving in a certain way. And I know there are going to be some listeners that say they may be doing a bad thing, but for a good cause. And that's fine. I don't want to get into that argument here. It's still a bad thing for the point of this discussion and just old fashioned bank robbers, people that are trying to get money out of the deal. So I hear the inspiration for Wiztrust. Tell me how, which is blockchain based. Tell me how Wiztrust addresses this and helps solve this problem.

Raphaël Labbé (12:27):

Okay. It's easy and surprisingly it's even one-on-one by design. So the way we've done it is that a press release is usually a piece of information. Most of the time it's a PDF sent by the company saying, this is our statement that PDF is a unique file. Like everything that is unique, you can have a fingerprint of it. So the equivalent of our fingerprint for the PDF is the metadata where it has been created on which computer, what is the size, where there's all this information, make that piece of information unique. So we take those metadata from that file and we save that exactly like a fingerprint at the cop shop, the cop office, the new police office, police office department. Thank you. So we take that metadata and we store it on the blockchain for everyone to check. But then when you receive the document, you go on mistrust product.com, and then you put you back your documents, you drag and drop it and it would say, oh yeah, it match.

(13:49):

We have that fingerprint in our folder. It's actually a real document emitted by that company. So I can say for sure that this is true. This is the original. So again, one drag and drop from our clients users, like very large corporation to say, this is ours on one side, and you are a financial institution, you are a journalist, you are a trader. You go on the other side, you put that document before making your trade or before writing your article and say, yes, it is authentic or no, I don't know. And the no, I don't know, leaves you back to the place you were before. You have to check. But the fact that we say yes or no, and if it's a no, we say you have to check. It's kind of a protection. Anyway.

Doug Downs (14:38):

I love it. So now your job and you're in pr, your job is to make sure the journalists, the financial institutions and traders are all aware that this exists and adopt this tool. How are you going about making sure that those key audiences are aware that the tool exists? Podcasts obviously fit within there.

Raphaël Labbé (15:00):

I spend a bit of time every week explaining that challenge, either through podcast, either going directly into press institution and seeing the journalist. They explain how they got duped in the first other cases, not of course them, but other colleague and tell them how they can protect as you are, right? Education is a big part of it. We usually don't focus on end users like, sorry, end users, but consumers

(15:29):

Because we are very professional. If journalists don't pick up, if financial institution don't pick up, then the risk that you do trade on that information is very low. So if we manage to block it before it becomes mainstream, before it actually get somewhere else, then usually we're fine. So we really worked on that first line and we spent a lot of time doing it. And it's actually a very interesting job because it's, I would say very fun stories, like all these act stories, the way the company got manipulated create a lot of interest and it's quite fun to explain them to our audiences. And I love doing it. So it's part of the job, it's part of our mission to work on that

Doug Downs (16:17):

Aspect. Sometimes when I see something in the news or social media, and it actually happens a lot, not just sometimes, but I think, oh, that can't be real. And I've taken to, I'll go to snopes.com, I don't know if you're familiar with snopes.com, but it's a site where they will look into whether something is a bogus claim and whether it's fake. You're kind of becoming the snopes.com for these news releases to make sure that they're authentic and from the company that issued the news release. I think this is great.

Raphaël Labbé (16:53):

The difference is that we work on technology and human work so we can That's

Doug Downs (16:57):

Irrefutable. Yes,

Raphaël Labbé (16:58):

Yes. We can be fast. Also, it can help. It doesn't slow the transaction down. It doesn't slow. The blockchain

Doug Downs (17:06):

Technology here is really key,

Raphaël Labbé (17:08):

Isn't it? Yeah, exactly. And it's not that it really matches the need. It's transparent, it's not owned by us and it's

Doug Downs (17:20):

Very efficient as you're listening, if you work in public relations or marketing for a large corporation and you have a corporate security officer, I would think this is a tool that corporate security might be interested in checking out. So I think they'd love the link to this episode. Raphael, thanks for this

Raphaël Labbé (17:38):

And I'm happy to meet them. Sorry Doug, but if they have a need like this, I'm available part of the teaching, whether they buy it or not, but it's becoming very strong and just two other very funny. And then it's just going to give you nuggets for your listener to go dig online. But it happens to BlackRock and the media who picked the fake CEO newsletter was actually the Financial Times. It happens to Starbucks activism saying they would not make clients paid for non-animal milk the next morning. It was crazy in all the shops because no one wanted to pay their 50 cents. My free soy, where's my free soy? Yeah, exactly. And so there's a lot of amazing example, if you start digging in on the web, you'll see unfortunately for the large companies, the bigger you're known, the more your brand is loved and the more you have a risk of getting used or being targeted.

Doug Downs (18:45):

I appreciate this. I appreciate your time today, Raphael. In our previous episode, our guest, rod Cartwright left a question for

Rod Cartwright (18:54):

You. So I've got quite a short question, which is I'd like to ask the next guest, what do you think the most important hidden superpower is of communication professionals? I

Doug Downs (19:07):

Mean, you're in pr. I'd love your take on that. How are we Superman or Wonder Woman?

Raphaël Labbé (19:13):

Adaptability. I would say that because we've talked about change, change in technology, the base of change in society is huge. Also, you have to understand if you need to move now or wait, and I think this is sometimes your c-suite will like, oh, this is the new thing. We have to move. We have to say something. And sometimes it's very important to keep your head straight and wait a bit to see if it's actually just a blip or a more long term. So I think that adaptability and calm, which doesn't seem to be fitting together, is actually make, I think now a brilliant example of what is expected of a comms leader. Yeah, I think that is for the time we lived in, we are living in, I think it's one of the, would be my superpower. The rest, of course, you need so many talents, but I think this is like this adaptability and don't be short term, have a bit of calm and think a bit longer because there's so much change that is happening at the old level of society.

Doug Downs (20:29):

I have a follow up to that then if, and I agree adaptability and how we evolve is at least one of our superpowers. What weight should we give? So-called best practices then, especially if the changes are happening at such a speed.

Raphaël Labbé (20:47):

I would say that you can use Beck's best practicing for the rest of the non-com team. Like when you talk outside to the rest of the C-suite, the best practices makes it business serious or business wise. And you'll say it's best practices, the other company in our industry. And it gives a bit of credibility that sometimes is challenging for PR because everyone feels they are able to do that job, which obviously they're not because it's a tricky one. So I would use it rather when I talk towards the outside, inside the company when I talk to people that are not calm. And I would put it aside when I look at what I'm doing with my team.

Doug Downs (21:36):

Love it. Your turn. Raphael, what question would you like to leave behind for our next guest?

Raphaël Labbé (21:41):

I would like to know what you are excited about in pr, because we talked a lot about threat in that episode. And of course it's interesting and I love talking about it, but there's so much happening. I said adaptability and I would love, I don't know who it's going to be the next one, but what they're excited about, what makes their interest in PR can go for five more years.

Doug Downs (22:06):

Perfect.

Raphaël Labbé (22:06):

Thank you so much for your time.

Doug Downs (22:09):

Did I say that right?

Raphaël Labbé (22:10):

You said that right? It was a pleasure. And if you stop by, I'll stop for the keynote in Canada with pleasure. If by any other chance you come to Amsterdam, I'll have you do a boat tour around the canals if they're not frozen.

Doug Downs (22:25):

Oh, that's a date. That's a date. Perfect. Thank you so much, Raphael.

Raphaël Labbé (22:28):

It was a pleasure, Saint To

Doug Downs (22:29):

If you'd like to send a message to my guest, Raphael Labbe, we've got his contact information in the show notes, stories and strategies is a co-production of JGR Communications and Stories and Strategies podcast. If you like this episode, please leave a rating, possibly a review, check out our YouTube channel. We are now publishing full episodes to each episode on YouTube, and our channel is growing very nicely. We're close to a hundred thousand views now and just launched it a short time ago. Thank you as always, to producer Emily Page. And lastly, do us a favor forward this episode to one friend. Thanks for listening.