The last few months have seen a couple of the mighty fall. Not one, but two “Biggest Ever!” IPOs were pulled on failures to drum up adequate investor interest: Pershing Square USA – tipped to be the largest closed-end fund in the US – and Special Opportunities Reit – which would have been London’s largest float this year.

Initially targeting $25 billion, Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square slashed the fund’s anticipated size twice in just a week, settling on $2 billion before finally deciding to pull it. According to the FT, the CEO’s own regulatorily-dubious marketing techniques made a hard sell even harder: despite hundreds of meetings, investor interest could not be converted.

It’s a similar story for Special Opportunities Reit. Despite a market awash with cut-price commercial real estate assets, the fund failed to drum up even half of the £500 million it had hoped to raise. Investors remain wary of calling the bottom of a market that’s found phantom bottoms before.

Of course, valuable insights will have been garnered in the process, and both funds swear there was significant demand. In its withdrawal statement Pershing promised to re-evaluate the fund’s structure based on investor feedback, but these surely are understandings that should have been garnered well in advance.

Even as the IPO market (supposedly) begins to heat up, we remain far from the peaks of the mid-2010s. These two all-too-public fact-finding exercises have demonstrated just how important it is to know your audience and what matters to them. If and when they do go back to market, it will be with a preamble they could have done without.

Taking The Mickey

In the world of communications, ‘constructive’ debates between corporate affairs and legal are commonplace. When working together effectively, these are departments that do an important job in keeping the other’s bluer-skied thoughts out of the picture.

It’s a state of balance that, within Disney, has clearly been upset. It made global headlines when the company attempted to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit on the grounds that the widower had agreed to terms in a free Disney+ trial, five years earlier. It’s a position that the company ultimately rowed back on: the lawyers lost and corporate affairs has been left with the mess.

The position was particularly surprising given the number of high-profile cases of allergy deaths in recent years, with Pret a Manger and Costa Coffee coming under particular fire. It’s been a good few years since a restaurant order wasn’t followed up with a question about allergies and, in the UK at least, the onus has clearly settled on feeder rather than eater.

Nobody reads the Ts&Cs and, if they did, would they make the leap? Even if there was a tenable legal footing, Disney opened itself up to public outrage and ridicule, and the reputational cost is likely now to be far greater than the legal one it was contesting. Lawyers be warned.

The Desperation Economy

Oasis are back. Even between brothers, time (and a very expensive divorce) truly does heal all wounds. While marketing teams have been having some fun, many fans have not. Ticket seller – and the brothers themselves – have faced criticism over the use of dynamic pricing.

The fallout has sparked a CMA probe into the tour’s official ticketer, Ticketmaster, and led to a (less than convincing) statement from the band that they “at no time had any awareness that dynamic pricing was going to be used”.

Other businesses, too, have been dragged into the melee. A hotel in Manchester has faced criticism – most notably from the city’s night time economy adviser – over allegedly cancelling previous bookings in order to resell rooms at triple the price. The hotel has doubled down on claims it was a “technical error” but, in such a febrile atmosphere, anger cuts through far quicker than truth.

There is, of course, the question of whether or not any one has a right to these tickets, or to feeling hard done by. When tickets are going to touts who never had any plan on attending, or pre-existing bookings are cancelled to make way for bigger spenders, though, this question feels a little moot.

Reputationally, there have been no winners. Oasis will likely be forgiven when their tour kicks off next year, but for ticket resellers – a group who has previously bought into a “no one likes us, we don’t care” mentality – such high profile criticism has meant increased scrutiny. Not just from the fans whose ability to take action is fairly limited, but from the politicians, regulators and artists who can impact their license to operate. They may soon find that this image is not one they can roll with.