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Boston, Mass. - February 11, 2003 - Outside The Classroom, the leading provider of online health education programs, today announced that it has named David A. Copithorne to the new position of Chief Marketing Officer. With more than 25 years of experience in marketing, publishing, journalism and public relations, Mr. Copithorne most recently was CEO of Porter Novelli International, one of the world's largest public relations firms. At Outside The Classroom he will be responsible for guiding the company's entry into new markets, driving the growth of its current products and customer base, and managing its corporate and financial communications.
"Dave Copithorne is truly the preeminent expert in his field, and we are pleased to have him join the Outside The Classroom team," said Brandon Busteed, CEO of Outside The Classroom. "His deep knowledge of social marketing and his entrepreneurial skills will play a key role in the company's continued expansion and growth as the premier provider of online prevention."
Porter Novelli International is a global top-ten public relations firms and a subsidiary of the Omnicom Group, a $7-billion marketing services conglomerate. The company is a leader in communications and marketing services for the health care, social marketing, technology and consumer-packaged goods sectors and is known for its research-based approach to global consumer, health care and corporate brand management. Among other things, Porter Novelli is known for its groundbreaking anti-tobacco social marketing programs that led to significant reductions in teen smoking rates.
"Outside The Classroom's online prevention program is addressing the culture of binge drinking and alcohol abuse among college and high-school students, a national problem of crisis proportions," Copithorne said. "The company is pioneering an entirely new and enormous market for web-based interactive health management services that have the potential to do more to prevent the destructive behaviors of young people and other groups in society than anything that has come before."
Mr. Copithorne is also a proven entrepreneur who in the 1980s co-founded a marketing communications consulting company, Copithorne & Bellows Public Relations (C&B), that twice made the Inc. 100 list of America's fastest growing privately held companies. He grew the company from a home office in Palo Alto, California, into a global consulting firm with offices in San Francisco, Boston, London, Paris, Singapore and 10 other cities. In 1995 he sold C&B to Omnicom and subsequently merged it with Porter Novelli International. A graduate of Harvard, he started his career as a newspaper and magazine journalist with a national reputation for his reporting on business, government, technology and politics.
AlcoholEdu, Outside The Classroom's flagship product, is an online course that students take in the privacy of their dorm rooms. Presenting valuable information in a non-opinionated format about the medical and social affects of drinking, the course empowers students to make more informed decisions. Prior to the introduction of AlcoholEdu, not a single university in the U.S. mandated alcohol education for incoming classes. Now, more than 35 universities have mandated that their entire incoming freshman classes take the course, and more than 300 institutions have adopted AlcoholEdu for certain segments of their student populations. Additionally, major national Greek-letter organizations have adopted the program and mandated its use by new pledges on campuses nationwide. In all, more than 100,000 students have participated in AlcoholEdu over the past year, making it the most widely used course on the Internet.
Outside The Classroom also serves schools as a critical resource for collecting data about student health issues using a dynamic web-based survey tool. TheHealthSurveyä is the first and only online survey to accurately measure students' health-related thoughts, attitudes and behaviors on a campus-specific basis. AlcoholEdu and TheHealthSurvey form the cornerstone upon which schools can build a comprehensive prevention strategy.
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