Ads For Online University Anger Officials at Other Colleges

from the truth-in-advertising dept

A number of universities are pissed off at a series of online ads for the online University of Phoenix, saying that the ads misled people into believing these other universities were associated with the online offering. The ads would show up on Google, or other search sites, when people did a search for a specific university. The ad would show a link that said the name of that university and "Earn Your Degree 100% Online", but which actually linked to the University of Phoenix. Officials at the University of Phoenix blame an outside agency that put together the ad campaign. To be honest, with the simplicity of setting up ads in Googles adwords system, I'm surprised that there haven't been more widely publicized versions of this trick.