HubSpot just gave every communications leader a two-part lesson, and the second part is the one that should keep you up at night. On July 1, the company updated its terms of service to feed customer CRM data (like business contacts, company records, email engagement signals) into a shared enrichment pool for a new product called Contact Discovery, launching August 4. Customers were opted in by default. The reaction was fast and furious. "What the hell is HubSpot thinking?" wrote Gabe Larsen, CRO at Atonom. Channing Ferrer, a former HubSpot exec now CRO at Brevo, put it more surgically: "Proprietary customer data should not be shared by a CRM provider. Period." By July 5, four days later, over a holiday weekend, Chief Product and Technology Officer Duncan Lennox published a retraction titled "We Got This Wrong, and We Are Fixing It."

On the crisis response itself, credit where due. The apology was fast, first-person, and named the problem instead of apologizing for how customers felt. It thanked people for the pushback which, lets be honest, is a rare public admission. Brand analyst Melissa Rosenthal wrote some of the smartest analysis I've read coming out of this: "The apology reverses the terms. It does not reverse the strategy." HubSpot still wants to build a shared data network, and Lennox said as much, the company still believes there's a better way to prospect than the status quo, and it knows it has to earn back trust before building it. Fine. That's a defensible position.

Then Clark Barron started pulling documents. Barron, founder of GTM threat intelligence firm Blackout, traced HubSpot's enrichment language through archived product terms and help articles and found, in his words, that the authorization to copy customer enrichment data into HubSpot's commercial dataset had been sitting in the Product Specific Terms since September 18, 2024. His firm's advisory is titled "The 652-Day Gap," the distance between when the terms changed and when customers got an email about it. Worse: for part of 2025, a HubSpot knowledge base article stated the company "won't share the data listed above with other accounts." That sentence was later removed. Barron's summary is the quote of the week: "They told you the opposite, then removed the sentence." A four-day apology cannot beat a 652-day paper trail. The crisis had been sitting in the documentation stack for almost two years, the July 1 announcement just turned the lights on.

Before we judge too quickly, let's name the process challenge for what it is, because it almost certainly exists at your company too. Legal updates are routine housekeeping, terms get redlined constantly, and almost nobody runs a communications review on those redlines; there's no standard practice anywhere that says a change to Section 6 of the Product Specific Terms triggers a customer email. So that's not malice but perhaps a seam between two functions that were never wired together, and HubSpot fell into it in public.

But this is also perhaps worth a flag to your legal and product teams. Think about asking them where have our terms changed in the last three years without a customer-facing communication to match? Or, in their opinion, what criteria should you collectively agree on that would trigger such a communication? HubSpot's apology bought back goodwill but then the archive research spent it again within a matter of days. So if your company is building anything on pooled customer data (and in 2026, that's most of us), the value exchange has to be offered visibly, with the price tag showing before an outside researcher prices it for you.

Quick catch-up on this saga: back in May, GameStop offered to buy eBay for about $56 billion, $125 a share, paid partly in cash and partly in GameStop stock. eBay's board said no in a letter addressed straight to Ryan Cohen, calling the offer "neither credible nor attractive," and hasn't said a public word since. Chairman Paul Pressler articulated the problems with the deal clearly, namely how GameStop would actually finance the deal, eBay's own long-term growth prospects, and who'd run the combined company. eBay has said little publicly since.

Yesterday, on July 7, at GameStop's annual meeting, shareholders voted to let the company create a large pool of new stock, the currency Cohen would need to pay for a deal this size. At the meeting, Cohen addressed the bid directly, confirming the offer and declining to say anything more about it. The stock barely reacted, drifting down about 2.5 percent on the day and ticking up slightly after hours.

We covered Cohen's, ahem, rough CNBC interview earlier in this journey, and what's happened since is that his communications strategy has grown up. He's stopped trying to win the argument on TV and started building pressure through things that can't be dismissed as talk. Things like a written offer with real numbers, official filings, an accumulated position of roughly 6 percent of eBay itself, and now a shareholder vote. That vote is the part to understand because the biggest communications problem any hostile bidder has is looking like one loud man with a grudge, and until recently, that's exactly how Cohen came across. But when thousands of shareholders vote to hand him the money to do the deal, the same campaign suddenly becomes more legitimate. It stops being one man's obsession and starts being something a company's owners formally asked for. He even pulled his own proposed CEO pay package off the ballot before the meeting (maybe the smartest thing of the whole episode) because it erased the "he's doing this to enrich himself" storyline.

That said, don't let the headline number fool you, because it cuts both ways. The vote passed with 68.7 percent support. That sounds decisive until you know that votes like this, routine permission to issue more stock, normally sail through with support in the nineties. Which means nearly a third of GameStop's famously loyal shareholders looked at their own chairman's plan and said no thanks. So yes, Cohen got what he needed, and he also handed eBay a talking point which is that even his own people aren't fully sold.

But look, for all of Cohen's tactical improvement, eBay is still winning this exchange and it's winning with almost no visible effort since May 12. GameStop, meanwhile, made itself a promise it hasn't kept. Back on June 23, the same release that withdrew Cohen's pay package said a detailed financing and strategic presentation was coming "this week." It didn't arrive that week, and it still hadn't arrived by the time of the annual meeting two weeks later where Cohen, given the platform, said only that he wasn't going to discuss the deal beyond what's already public. What's already public is roughly $9 billion in cash and a $20 billion bank commitment letter, which by outside analysts' math leaves the offer close to $16 billion short. A better campaign doesn't fix a funding gap, and right now GameStop hasn't even delivered the presentation it promised would explain how it plans to close one.

This is a case, so far, of substance beating story - a plain business objection holding up against a genuinely well-run comms campaign. It's a useful check on the assumption that message architecture wins these fights by itself. Cohen has done almost everything right on the communications side, and it still hasn't moved eBay an inch, and it still hasn't produced the numbers his own company promised. Whether that changes if he sweetens the offer, delivers the presentation, or takes it straight to eBay's shareholders, is the next chapter. For now, chalk one up for the boring, unglamorous case that the facts of a deal still outweigh how well you tell its story and let's see if that holds.

The Allen & Co. conference opened in Sun Valley this week with the usual spectacle, a couple hundred private jets and a guest list that, per Variety, includes Bezos, Zuckerberg, both Murdochs, Tim Cook alongside incoming Apple CEO John Ternus, and the heads of OpenAI and Anthropic, and an agenda that matters more to communications leaders than most years.

Three things are moving at once:

Obviously none of this will be announced from Sun Valley and that's by design. The conference produces no communiqué, just deals that surface months later dressed as press releases. But the implications are concrete for this audience because the entertainment and news outlets your team pitches are consolidating under new owners, the streaming platforms carrying your brand's media spend are being restructured, and the AI content rules your marketing organization will live under are being negotiated somewhere, quite possibly over lunch in Idaho. Watch this space.