Mirage? M&A drought appears to be ending in PR, marketing space.

After a long drought, M&A is picking up among the service providers relied on by many corporate communications departments and their agencies .

Entrepreneurs seeking funding for their new initiatives are also breathing a sigh of relief that venture capital is again flowing, with the disruptive ad buying network TRAFFIQ getting $10 million in new funding from two firms yesterday.

In the PR space, the perennially loss-making Medialink video news release business was put out of its misery by Shoba Purushothaman’s VC-backed digital video warehousing startup, TheNewsMarket. Medialink needed a new digital business model and TheNewsMarket had to find a way to help its subscribers generate more content, so we’ll see if a merger can be the catalyst for growth.

The place I called home for 20 years, PR Newswire, pulled the trigger on a deal Friday to buy The Fuel Team, the longtime partner behind the PRN “Media Room” and “IR Room products.”  As with the Medialink/NewsMarket, PRN obviously sees the logic in being a repository for its clients’ myriad digital assets  — not simply text press releases.

Another transaction that closed in the past couple of weeks is Techrigy, the social media monitoring company acquired by the fast-growing UK-based marketing automation roll-up Alterian.  Unlike VC-backed competitor Radian6, Techrigy was privately owned and built its business as an OEM solution more than a retail supplier of monitoring.

Who will buy Radian6 and lesser known SM monitors like Crimson Hexagon?  What about legacy VNR producers — like KEF Media Associates and On the Scene Productions – suffering from shrinking demand for glossy, made-for-TV productions?

Another potential acquisition target is Peter Shankman’s advertising-supported ProfNet clone, Help a Reporter, and Feedroom, which suffers from a TheNewsMarket-vs-Brightcove identity complex.

In their quarterly communications with shareholders, the publicly traded PR services firms Cision and Vocus revealed their M&A agenda. Vocus, which hasn’t had a blockbuster acquisition since buying PR Web in 2006, said it would prefer not to use its extra cash for a share buyback.  Rather, CEO Rick Rudman, said he’d target companies that provide one or more of the same services as Vocus, to expand the customer base; or firms that could be added into the Vocus platform to create a new capability; or an organization in an attractive geographic region not currently served  by Vocus.  Cision, on the other hand, is plagued by debt and actively divesting its European media monitoring businesses to concentrate on its software product, CisionPoint.

Other entrenched PR/IR/marcom services players with money to spend include Berkshire Hathaway’s Business Wire; Thomson Reuters; Nasdaq OMX, which owns Globe Newswire and the IR web-hosting service Shareholder.com; and Jorn Lyseggen’s unconventional sales powerhouse Meltwater Group, which recently began selling a social “buzz” product on top of its inaugural media monitoring service.

The shooting death of a Kuwaiti businessman this past weekend is a sobering reminder of how wrong things can go when misinformation is used to pump up stock prices.

Whether Hazem Khalid Al-Braikan killed himself or was murdered isn’t the point.  What is clear, no matter how the CEO of Al Raya investments died, is that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had frozen his assets because of suspicious and potentially profitable trading that occurred just before the release of news on a bogus tender offer.  (Read the full account here)

The credibility of time-sensitive, market-moving corporate news is central to the smooth operation of our global equities markets.

There’s a place for humor, such the ongoing spoof between Apple and Google on the BBspot blooper site and other venues clearly marked as parody.  But the biggest trusted providers of financial information — Dow Jones, Reuters and Bloomberg — are fighting an increasingly difficult battle to screen out bogus data from legitimate news on their closely watched platforms.

Hats off to astute newsroom staffers who rejected the fake release concerning Harmon International and Textron this past weekend, having questioned why those  NYSE -listed companies would not have issued their statements over PR Newswire or Business Wire.  Phone calls and faxed releases from Kuwait were deemed suspicious.

BW’s Neil Hershberg, a former colleague of mine at PR Newswire, noted today that we are approaching the one-year anniversary of an odd SEC statement that gave corporations the green light to experiment a bit more in the way they disclose their material news to investors.  During the past 12 months, the vast majority of companies have continued to broadcast their full-text news to the media, investors, employees, customers and other audiences via the security-obsessed commercial newswire services — ranging from industry stalwarts Business Wire and PR Newswire to Nasdaq’s Globe Newswire and the upstart Marketwire — rather than risk raising questions about the authenticity of their information.

Certainly, some innovation has taken place: 

• Ebay supplemented its use of BW with Twitter to snap highlights during the company’s quarterly conference calls
• Nasdaq-listed BGC Partners, Inc. issued a short statement over PRN saying its earnings release had just been posted to its website.  The downside of “notice-and-access “release is that investors have to take an additional step to download the company’s data, and opening additional browsers is potentially slow and cumbersome

As the C suite and investor relations officers strive to stand out from the crowd — especially when the economy begins to grow again — there will be new models and exciting ways to share information.  High atop any list of possible disclosure solutions should be the question, “Will investors trust that this information is legitimate?”

While Batboy still lives in the form of an off-Broadway musical, I miss seeing his face on the cover of the tabloid Weekly World News, alongside the supermarket checkout counter.

Now an online publication, Weekly World News never confused its readers by trying to be anything other than off-the-charts zany.  PhD Ape and the friendly underwater Nessy-like monster known as Kraken were fictitious and fun.  It’s the same model that works well for the Onion, which still thrives as an ink-and-paper parody periodical.

Where things start to get as hairy as another Weekly World News cast member, Bigfoot, is when an organization respected for publishing the truth strays from the mission — even  in the name of comedy.  April Fool’s Day is the day the shananagans usually happen.

As a former editor of the Utica College Tangerine, I know how much fun it is to create an entire issue of phony articles, photos and ads.  But when we re-branded the weekly the Gangerine each year on April 1, we inoculated ourselves against anyone claiming they were confused over what was true and what was concocted.

Not so when a fake item — like a press release — is presented as fact.

Because the feeds of commercial wire services like PR Newswire and Business Wire are pumped directly to the hundreds of thousands of equities terminals of Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters and Dow Jones and to media web sites, there is a great deal of anxiety about fake press releases.  Bogus content can tarnish the editorial reputation of those  media brands as well as those who issued April Fool’s releases during a lapse of judgment.

That’s the reason why hoax releases are routinely rejected, even when they are well written and presented by organizations with deep pockets and good intentions.  It’s not personal.  History has shown that a gullible public and inexperienced journalists can lead to embarrassment.

Fast food companies seem to be particularly fond of generating press through hoaxes.  In 1996, Taco Bell announced via full-page ads and a press release that it had purchased the Liberty Bell and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. Citizens and politicians went ballistic, saying that a national symbol of U.S. freedom should not be sold.  The restaurant chain issued a follow-up release a few hours later saying the whole story had been a practical joke.

Other fast-food and beverage chains have tried to match Taco Bell’s creativity.  Burger King routinely uses April Fool’s Day to create buzz, through full-page newspaper ads and other tactics.  One heralded the introduction of the left-handed Whopper sandwich, and another followed the Mad Cow Disease tainted beef scare and claimed the chain’s name was changing to Chicken King.

As someone who has had to reject releases submitted by PR agency execs and their eager clients, I emphasized that the individuals digesting press releases were not always able to discern fact from fiction.  Unless an issuer was willing to make it clear that the entire press release was a parody, there was a chance it would be taken seriously by an unwary consumer, investor or reporter.  The brand reputation of a newswire service was more important that the potential loss of revenue by refusing to distribute a hoax press release.

I wish I could say that every hoax story was caught before it went out.  But that would be stretching the truth.

The press secretary for the acting governor of Pennsylvania, Mark Schweiker announced on April 1, 2002, that he had changed his mind and decided to run for a full term.  The tongue-in-cheek release included clues that it was a hoax, including a campaign manager named April Phuels and a quote from Schweiker’s wife saying she did not want to leave the governor’s mansion because the bed sheets were delightfully soft.   The Schweiker release was “killed,” a newswire service term for alerting media not to use a story, within a few minutes of transmission.

Business Wire sued the individuals behind a phony 1999 press release that claimed a company called Webnode had been granted a government contract to regulate ownership of portions of the Internet.

Some pranks have proceeded without setbacks, primarily because broadcast or print outlets were willing parties to the April Fool’s jokes.  These three are courtesy of the Museum of Hoaxes:

• In 2004, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered announced that the post office had begun a new ‘portable zip codes’ program. This program, inspired by an FCC ruling that allowed phone users to take their phone number with them when they moved, would allow people to also take their zip code with them when they moved, no matter where they moved to. It was hoped that with this new program zip codes would come to ymbolize “a citizen’s place in the demographic, rather than geographic, landscape.” Assistant Postmaster General Lester Crandall was quoted as saying, “Every year millions of Americans are on the go: People who must relocate for work or other reasons. Those people may have been quite attached to their original homes or an adopted town or city of residence. For them this innovative measure will serve as an umbilical cord to the place they love best.”

• In 2000, Miller Beer announced that it had struck an agreement with the town of Marfa, Texas to become the exclusive sponsor of the phenomenon known as the Marfa Mystery Lights. These are spherical lights which appear south of the town each evening, seeming to bounce around in the sky. They’re variously rumored to be caused by ghosts, swamp gas, or uranium (though they’re probably caused by the headlights from the nearby highway). Miller announced that under the terms of the agreement the Marfa Lights would be renamed the Miller Lites. The local paper, which was in on the joke, printed the news on its front page.

• In 1999 the Savings Bank of Rockville placed an ad in the Connecticut Journal-Inquirer announcing that it would soon begin charging a $5 fee to customers who visited a live teller. The ad, which appeared on March 31, claimed that the fee was necessary in order to provide, “professional, caring and superior customer service.” Although the ad was a joke, many customers failed to recognize it as such. One woman reportedly closed her account because of it. The bank then ran a second ad revealing that the initial ad was a joke. The bank manager commented that the first ad ironically “commits us to not charging such fees.”

• In 1996, Virgin Cola announced that in the interest of consumer safety it had integrated a new technology into its cans. When the cola passed its sell-by date, the liquid would react with the metal in the can, turning the can itself bright blue. Virgin warned that consumers should therefore avoid purchasing all blue cans. The joke was that Pepsi had recently unveiled its newly designed cans. They were bright blue.