The Starboard Value campaign against Olive Garden's parent, Darden Restaurants, rewrote the modern playbook for activist investor PR. Inside the 294-slide deck that took down an S&P 500 board.
The financial services PR firms running the deal sheets behind most of the year's largest M&A, IPO, activist defense, and restructuring transactions. Sard Verbinnen, Joele Frank, ICR, FTI Consulting Strategic Communications, FGS Global, Brunswick, Kekst CNC, Prosek, and the senior bench.
On September 15, 2011 — three days before the Qwikster announcement — Reed Hastings disclosed Netflix's expected one-million subscriber loss in a shareholder letter. The canonical case study in IR communications inside an active consumer crisis, and the satellite to EPR's Qwikster canonical case.
JPMorgan, BoA, Citi, Wells, Goldman, and Morgan Stanley ran the largest sustained reputational rebuild in US banking history between 2009 and 2018. What worked, what failed, what it cost, and the lessons that survive.