Activist investor campaigns hit record levels in 2025. The 2026 environment is setting up to be worse. More campaigns, more sophisticated tactics, faster public escalation, and a media and analyst environment that moves activist narratives into mainstream coverage within days rather than weeks.
Most of the CEOs I advise on this work have never been through an activist campaign before. The first lesson they learn is that the playbook the activist is running has been refined over 15 years by firms that do nothing else. The second lesson is that the company’s response is usually improvised from scratch, in real time, under pressure, with legal counsel that has never handled an activist situation, and with board members who are learning about the campaign at the same time they’re being asked to make decisions about it.
This is not how you win.
Here is what every CEO should know before the activist letter arrives. Because once it arrives, you will have roughly 72 hours to get your response right, and improvising during those 72 hours is almost always worse than preparing during the years before.
Know who the activist actually is. There are a relatively small number of activist firms in the US that handle the majority of significant campaigns. Each of them has specific patterns — which companies they target, what they ask for, how they escalate, who they put on proxy slates, how patient they are, when they walk away. Your board should know which activist firms hold any position in your stock before any letter arrives. If you are not monitoring beneficial ownership filings quarterly and running your top 30 holders against known activist profiles, you are starting from behind.
Know what the activist probably wants. Activists almost always have a specific thesis. Strategic review. Operational restructuring. Capital allocation changes. Board composition. CEO replacement. Spin-off or divestiture. Sale of the company. They rarely make up the thesis on the spot. They run it past their investment committee, develop it over months, and sometimes telegraph it in public commentary before the letter arrives. If you monitor activist firm public statements about your sector, you often have months of warning.
Have the relationships before you need them. Specialist crisis and activist defense communications is a distinct discipline — different from general corporate PR, different from marketing, different from investor relations. The firms that do this work well have deep relationships with the activist community, the proxy advisory firms, the major institutional investors, and the business media that covers activist campaigns. These relationships take years to build. If your company’s first conversation with a specialist activist defense firm is the day after the activist letter arrives, you are paying retail for capabilities you should have been building at wholesale for years. For context on what it actually costs to retain specialist communications counsel at the level activist defense requires, see how much does a PR firm cost.
Know your shareholder base. The activist’s leverage is determined by how willing your institutional shareholders are to vote with the activist. If your top 25 holders have been cultivated with consistent, transparent communication for years, the activist has to overcome an existing relationship. If your top 25 holders have been ignored between earnings calls and annual meetings, the activist walks into a vacuum and fills it with their narrative. The difference between these two positions often determines whether a campaign succeeds.
Prepare the white paper before the campaign. When the activist launches, they publish a white paper laying out their thesis. The company’s response — almost always — is to publish a counter white paper weeks later. By then, the activist narrative has ossified. The companies that respond most effectively have their own long-form strategic articulation ready to publish within days of the activist launch. This requires work before the campaign. The white paper does not have to address the activist specifically; it has to lay out the company’s strategy clearly enough that the activist’s thesis looks like a weaker version of the same strategy.
Settle the board on what’s negotiable and what isn’t. Activist campaigns escalate along predictable paths. The board typically faces a choice between negotiating early (giving up some board seats, agreeing to some changes) or fighting through a proxy contest. Boards that haven’t decided in advance what’s negotiable and what isn’t tend to make worse decisions under pressure. Strategic review, board refreshment, capital allocation changes — these are often negotiable at acceptable terms. CEO replacement, forced sale, corporate breakup — these usually aren’t. Know where the lines are before the pressure arrives.
Do not dismiss the activist thesis publicly until you understand it. The single most common mistake CEOs make in the first 72 hours is issuing a defensive statement dismissing the activist’s points before the CEO has fully understood what the activist is actually arguing. Some activist theses are wrong. Some activist theses are partially right. Some activist theses are entirely right, which is why the campaign is happening. The companies that recover fastest from activist campaigns are the ones that engage seriously with the substance rather than defensively with the tone.
Prepare for the personal attacks. Activist campaigns increasingly include specific personal pressure on CEOs and directors. Past compensation becomes a public story. Past strategic decisions get re-examined. Personal conduct — accurately or not — becomes subject to anonymous sourcing. The CEOs and directors who handle this worst are the ones who are surprised by it. Assume it’s coming. Have legal, communications, and personal advisory teams ready before it arrives.
Understand the proxy advisor dynamic. The major proxy advisors have enormous influence over institutional votes. Their analysts will engage with both sides during a campaign. Companies that have preexisting relationships with the proxy advisors and that produce clear, data-backed responses to proxy advisor questions get better recommendations. Companies that are scrambling to figure out proxy advisor dynamics while the campaign is running tend to get worse recommendations.
The AI-era dimension matters more than most boards realize. Activist campaigns in 2026 increasingly play out across surfaces boards didn’t have to manage even three years ago. Coverage of the campaign appears in AI search engines almost immediately. Institutional investors, retail investors, and business media all use tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity to research the situation, and those engines pull heavily from published earned coverage. Companies with strong reputation signals in AI search perform better through activist campaigns than companies with weak ones. This is now part of the standard activist defense toolkit — see what is GEO for the broader discipline, and how to rank on Perplexity and how to rank on Gemini for specific tactical guidance on how brands appear in AI-generated answers.
The activist investor industry is mature, well-capitalized, and playing a game that corporate America mostly didn’t understand 15 years ago and mostly still doesn’t understand today. The companies that prepare for activist engagement the way they prepare for regulatory engagement, cybersecurity incidents, and litigation — with standing capabilities, designated teams, rehearsed playbooks, and pre-built relationships — handle the campaigns materially better than the companies that improvise from scratch. The specialist communications work required here is closer to crisis communications than to general corporate PR, and the firms worth hiring for it are the ones that do this work regularly rather than the ones that happen to be available.
If you sit on a public company board, the conversation to have this quarter is what your activist defense posture actually looks like. Not “what would we do if” but “what have we already done.” The answers, for most boards, will be uncomfortable. That discomfort is itself the signal that the work is overdue.
The letter, when it arrives, does not wait for the preparation you wish you had done.
Ronn Torossian is founder and chairman of 5W Public Relations, which advises public companies on activist investor defense, crisis communications, and reputation strategy. More at everything-pr.com and ronntorossian.com.
