Yesterday, Morgan Stanley announced it would not even attend the PGA Memorial Tournament, an event it is sponsoring in June. As the main sponsor of the tournament, which takes place in Dublin, Ohio, Morgan Stanley would typically send employees to the event and leverage its sponsorship to entertain clients. Banks can’t simply back out of their sponsorship commitments, but the current economic climate is forcing them to scale back or eliminate all other expenses related to the events. How could a company like Morgan Stanley wine and dine its clients in such a public way when it’s also taken $10 billion in federal government aid?

Northern Trust Corp., a company that received $1.6 billion through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), was criticized by lawmakers earlier this week for spending money on entertainment last weekend during a PGA tour for which the company is the title sponsor. Wells Fargo also announced yesterday that it is cutting spending on the Wachovia Championship event it inherited when it acquired the bank last December. Given the many missteps financial companies have made since receiving TARP money, it seems like Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo were lucky to learn from Northern Trust’s unfortunate example. In the news cycle, timing is everything.

During the dot-com boom, the practice of public relations rose to a new level of importance among those in the C-suite. Creating broad awareness of a business model could lead to an IPO, which could lead to fame and fortune. While the “idea now, revenue later” time period lasted a few short years, the role of public relations was permanently elevated as was the press release itself. I remember sitting around conference room tables with executives from companies of all shapes and sizes talking about how to position upcoming announcements in order to maximize their impact. When strategizing in the early stages, clients were typically more aggressive about what they wanted to say. But, when they saw their thoughts represented in an actual release, it almost always served as a wake-up call. It occurred to me during that time that disseminating a press release is a lot like mailing wedding invitations. Once you drop them into the mailbox, you are telling the world you’re getting married. Once your release hits a wire, you’ve told the world that the company has done a deal, received funding, been acquired, etc. The new reality a press release heralds can be daunting. Simply put, a company needs to be absolutely certain it can live up to the release.

I learned a valuable lesson several years ago when a colleague of mine issued a release that was not as transparent as it should have been. A client, whose stock was trading at less than $2 a share, asked him to write and distribute a release stating that an article featuring their technology was coming out in Barron’s the next day. I can’t imagine any circumstance where we’d recommend issuing a news release about an imminent article, but this situation was particularly problematic because the “article” was actually a paid advertorial. My colleague questioned the ethics of the release, but the client insisted on distribution prior to market close, which gave him less than an hour to move. Not surprisingly, the release generated significant interest in the company, doubling its stock price in a matter of minutes. Of course, such a dramatic rise in value was a red flag to the SEC and led to a full-blown investigation that exposed the client and our firm to negative publicity.

As public relations professionals, we are in the business of building our clients up and making sure their target audiences hear their stories. But it is also our responsibility to ensure the information disseminated on their behalf is accurate and not misleading in any way, particularly if the company is publicly traded. After all, no one enjoys calling off a wedding.