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	<title>Fifth &#38; Main &#187; Apollo</title>
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	<link>http://www.fifthandmain.com</link>
	<description>by Pete Wright</description>
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		<title>Apollo Group says verdict won’t have affect on business — misses point entirely</title>
		<link>http://www.fifthandmain.com/2008/01/apollo-group-says-verdict-wont-have-affect-on-business-misses-point-entirely/</link>
		<comments>http://www.fifthandmain.com/2008/01/apollo-group-says-verdict-wont-have-affect-on-business-misses-point-entirely/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 25 Jan 2008 18:56:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Pete</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Blog]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Apollo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Marketing]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Apollo Group leadership thumbs their collective nose at the courts, saying that the $277.7 million verdict against them &#8220;will not have a material adverse affect on its business or cash flows.&#8221; While it&#8217;s thrilling that the company has enough cash to cover the bond and the finding, investors should note: the company has likely learned [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img src="http://www.fifthandmain.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/img-hdr-logo21.gif" alt="img_hdr_logo2.gif" style="float: left" height="56" width="180" />Apollo Group leadership thumbs their collective nose at the courts, saying that the $277.7 million verdict against them &#8220;will not have a material adverse affect on its business or cash flows.&#8221;</p>
<p>While it&#8217;s thrilling that the company has enough cash to cover the bond and the finding, investors should note: the company has likely learned very little from the experience.<span id="more-200"></span></p>
<p>Like most organizations the size of Apollo, when dealt a blow of this sort, executive leadership takes great strides to insulate operational elements of the company from potential disruption. It&#8217;s a hard thing to do, by the way, because the army of employees and faculty are savvy people, and they read their Google alerts daily on various court proceedings involving the company.</p>
<p>One way to calm the waters is to take a hard stance in favor of business as usual, pushing forward as if there were no legal troubles, no jury finding. And as such, the company learns nothing.</p>
<p>According to Apollo, troubles which allegedly lead to artificial inflation of the stock would have been the purview of former leadership, CEO Todd Nelson, who resigned at the bidding of the board on January 11, 2006. Nelson took a few down with him including former CFO Kenda Gonzales, who put the last nail in the coffin of this particular case <a href="http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/business/articles/1207biz-apollo1207.html">when she testified</a> that leadership did, in fact, bury a report germane to investors regarding enrollment practices.</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;When we received the program-review report, we felt very strongly we did not want it basically tried in the press,&#8221; Gonzales told the federal court jury in Phoenix.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=79624&amp;p=irol-newsArticle&amp;ID=1099873&amp;highlight=">Apollo says they acted responsibly.</a> That they consulted expert advisors on the issue. That the jury verdict is not supported by facts or law. Still, Nelson was resigned over the issue and, by in large, the organization shook off the affects of the transition to new CEO Brian Mueller without much trouble.</p>
<p>And as such, the company learns nothing.</p>
<p>I have no doubt that the company feels strongly about this latest storm. And may, based on the facts of the case, stand a better-than-reasonable chance at winning on appeal in the coming months. But none of that changes the fact that the rank and file in the organization operate a guerilla enrollment operation based on numbers and head-count &#8212; even if the compensation plan is craftily designed to hide that fact. It is, as they so often say, an &#8220;Enrollment Organization&#8221;, and no lawsuit will change that on its own merits.</p>
<p>There are other disputes in the offing for Apollo. The constant turmoil surrounding the company&#8217;s enrollment efforts, EEOC brouhaha, defrauding investors &#8212; they&#8217;re all part of a cycle of directed blindness designed with the intent of protecting the company&#8217;s assets. The result, instead, is the creation of an environment doomed to repeat past mistakes more gloriously in the future.</p>
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		<title>Proof that MySpace has Jumped the Shark: Axia College MySpace Page</title>
		<link>http://www.fifthandmain.com/2007/11/proof-the-myspace-has-jumped-the-shark-axia-college-myspace-page/</link>
		<comments>http://www.fifthandmain.com/2007/11/proof-the-myspace-has-jumped-the-shark-axia-college-myspace-page/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 05 Nov 2007 21:47:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Pete</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Blog]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Apollo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Marketing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[MySpace]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Axia College of University of Phoenix MySpace PageI haven&#8217;t posted much about my experience at University of Phoenix. It&#8217;s a big place with many challenges and, even with nearly a decade under my belt there, I&#8217;m ill equipped to comment on most of them. But I find this one downright funny.About six months ago the [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://myspace.com/axiacollege" target="new">Axia College of University of Phoenix MySpace Page</a>I haven&#8217;t posted much about my experience at University of Phoenix. It&#8217;s a big place with many challenges and, even with nearly a decade under my belt there, I&#8217;m ill equipped to comment on most of them. But I find this one downright funny.About six months ago the director of marketing called me in to a meeting with the MySpace folks. They were evaluating alternative media for marketing purposes and had been approached by MySpace with an advertising package. For over $100,000 they&#8217;d set up Axia College of UOP on MySpace and give them ad space on the MySpace internal site network, driving clicks back to the Axia MySpace page. This, for something like three months. (note: I could have that backwards &#8212; it&#8217;s been a while &#8212; but it could be $300,000 for a month. Either way, it&#8217;s ridiculous).<span id="more-191"></span>They&#8217;d brought me in to help decide if it would be worth it, if we could be cool enough on the site to not look silly. I couldn&#8217;t come up with anything that wouldn&#8217;t make the brand demons cringe. All the good ideas were about user generated content, connecting students and alum with the university &#8230; all the great tools that MySpace was designed to enable.But this was an *advertising* tool, I was told, not an operations tool. So I walked out of the meeting knowing that something would happen, probably too late to be of interest, and likely a lame attempt to shoehorn the brand someplace it has no right being.Just got the email last week. They launched the page and visitors are greeted with this massive flash video tour of the online learning environment. There are screensavers, desktop wallpapers, MySpace badges, and of course links to and RFI to become a student. The profile has 2720 friends as of today and 103 of the most glowing, pro Axia comments I&#8217;ve ever heard. Now, I know that it might be cynical of me to say so, but these comments just have to be plants. First, I know the marketing team, and while they&#8217;re good people on the whole, they&#8217;re just not above seeding copy. There&#8217;s precedent for the discussion anyway, going back as far as 2005, in which they were considering hiring bloggers to pose as students and blog pro-UOP for six weeks at a time. That plan was cancelled, but there were a lot of disappointed lead generators in that meeting.You simply cannot get that many happy people in a room to have an honest discussion about the organization and have not one single negative comment.The saddest part, knowing that this is a marketing initiative, it will be unsupported in 90 days, and dissolved within the year in disrepair. Say there are some legitimate users on the site, they&#8217;ll lose what could be such a valuable network because the organization as a whole has forgotten that it is actually a school.</p>
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