NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Greg Bell, co-founder and co-creative director of hot indie shop Venables Bell & Partners, San Francisco, is departing the agency.

JVIS USA LLC is an international supplier for automotive components and tooling with facilities in 6 countries and customers all over the world. Their website helps them introduce their products to auto makers.

Going multilingual

When JVIS commissioned their website, they requested just a few static pages. It was built as a simple static HTML site (no CMS) and in English. Very soon after launching their new site JVIS decided to localize to Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian and Spanish. These are the languages spoken by their larger clients.

At that point Jason Marshall contacted us about translating JVIS' website. It was already built (as a collection of 23 HTML files), ready to be translated. Our translation service would have produced another 92 static HTML files which JVIS would have uploaded to their server. It was clear that JVIS was going to be adding new content on a regular basis and maintaining it all in several languages without using a content management system would have been a very unwelcome task.

The likely possibility of turning a client from being happy to frustrated, due to this manual content management, concerned us very much.

We suggested to Jason Marshall, the web designer who built JVIS website, to first migrate it all to a CMS and only then begin the translation process. The first choice was Drupal, given its powerful multilingual capabilities. Maintaining a multilingual Drupal site would be much simpler, not just for us, but mostly for the client. From the client's point of view, only English texts would need to be managed. Drupal would automatically handle everything else.

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NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- One of the world's largest advertisers, Unilever, is launching a massive review of its media planning and buying later this month encompassing 13 countries around the globe. The payoff for the winning agencies will be huge, considering that Unilever spent $755 million in measured media in the U.S. alone last year; Ad Age's annual Leading National Advertisers report found that the consumer-package-goods giant laid out $2.4 billion overall on advertising in the U.S. in 2008.

ADOTAS — Today, many car buyers are making their purchases — or, at the very least, conducting substantial, decisive research — online from the comforts of their homes and offices. Prospective automobile buyers are no longer watching TV commercials, reading newspapers and walking into dealerships for all of their purchasing needs and information. These changes in behavior have created excellent opportunities for automakers to invest in online marketing initiatives that reach highly targeted consumers at a fraction of the cost of national TV commercials. Consider this: zero U.S. automakers purchased TV advertising during the tube’s marquee 2009 event, Super Bowl XLIII. By [...]

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Gap Inc. is busy finalizing a deal with Crispin Porter & Bogusky to handle its flagship brand's holiday campaign, according to executives familiar with the matter. The move could be a precursor to a full-blown account shift if last year's Old Navy review is any indication. Gap Inc. put out an open call for fresh creative ideas for that brand and ultimately handed the entire $200 million account to Crispin in October.

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) -- Corona marketer Crown Imports is seeking a media agency to handle buying and planning for its brand portfolio, which includes the Corona Extra, Corona Light, Modelo Especial and Pacifico beer brands.

LONDON (AdAge.com) -- Internet ad spending is forecast to keep growing despite the recession, but the mix of online spending is changing as display falls further out of favor with marketers, leaving online alternatives to fight for the marketing dollar.

ADOTAS — One of the absolute coolest things about affiliate marketing is the fact that a single affiliate can take on a Fortune 500 company for ad space on a site like MSNBC. In Q2 of this year alone, affiliates inundated this and many other sites with arbitrage media buys. So how does an affiliate start to compete with a Madison avenue agency trained media buyer? Affiliates actually have a HUGE advantage over agency media buyers - agency media buyers have to buy for their clients, according to their clients specifications. As an affiliate, you make all those decisions. While you are [...]

ADOTAS — In our weekly poll, readers overwhelmingly said that Apple should not get rid of ATT, just add more carriers. Readers (some correctly, others not so much) also pointed out mistakes. Overstock follows Amazon’s lead in dropping affiliates* Karen Garcia: “Just to clarify your final paragraph and your earlier statement that “The Legislature recently passed a bill forcing companies to collect taxes from online-marketing affiliates” this isn’t accurate. Neither affiliates nor merchants are the source of sales tax revenue. Affiliates collect no payments from the consumer and merchants merely collect and remit sales tax when required. Payment of taxes falls entirely to [...]

ADOTAS — Internet Oldtimers Foundation, Jumptap, eXelate, Kampyle, The Digital College Network, HopStop, Winstar Interactive Media, Travel Ad Network, Getfugu and the Rubicon Project had annoucements this past week. The Rubicon Project: Justin Thomas has been appointed as Director of UK Publisher Development with responsibility to strategically support publishers in the UK to help them optimise and monetise advertising inventory. Thomas brings ten years of UK internet experience from previous roles at AOL and Xelector across disciplines including commercial strategy, business development, sales and marketing. He will be based in London. Jumptap: The mobile advertising company has announced that David Karnstedt, president and CEO [...]

Carl's Jr. snuck onto the Viral Video Chart this week in the No. 10 spot with its video of "The Hills" star Audrina Patridge eating a Teriyaki burger in a gold bikini.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Google, AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft, along with agency and marketer associations, took another step today in pressing their case that that the government doesn't need to regulate the collecting of data for ad-targeting purposes by search engines, websites, advertisers and ad networks. They've crafted their own set of rules in the hope of heading off potential regulation in Congress.

DETROIT (AdAge.com) -- U.S. auto, car and truck sales in June dropped 27% vs. the same month a year ago, to 880,000 units. While that estimate, courtesy of Ford Motor Co., might not look so hot on its face, Ford's U.S. sales analyst George Pipas noted that the last time the U.S. industry's monthly sales fell less than 30% was September 2008 -- nine long months ago.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- After years of doing business the same way, lately it seems as if there's no end to new metrics for TV. This year, Publicis' MediaVest is seeking to add a secondary guarantee to its TV deals with select networks, based on new data from media and marketing research company TRA and TiVo.

MINNEAPOLIS (AdAge.com) -- School may have ended around Memorial Day, and the summer solstice was on June 21. But this week seems to be the official start of the season, with workers scrambling to free themselves from bosses and BlackBerrys in order to enjoy Independence Day.

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) -- In what's believed to be a first-of-its-kind arrangement in the struggling newspaper industry, Belo's Dallas Morning News has tapped rival publisher Tribune Co. to handle its national ad sales.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- First, the Food and Drug Administration went after Cheerios. Now it appears to be targeting another beloved U.S. brand: Tylenol. That could present advertising problems for J&J and Tylenol, as well as the rest of the big players in the pain-relief industry.

Download Drupal 6.13
Download Drupal 5.19

Drupal 6.13 and 5.19, maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as critical security vulnerabilities, are now available for download. Both releases fix some other smaller issues as well.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in Drupal 5.0 release announcement.

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I'm a changed person, thanks to this recession. I eat more meals at home and actually pay attention to the price of groceries. Living on my own for the first time, I find myself buying and using more household products, from dishwasher soap to stain remover. As a result, I'm newly receptive to advertising in those categories. But what surprises me is how few marketers of such products actually pursue my age group.

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) -- State Farm is reassessing how it compensates its advertising and marketing-services agencies. It wasn't immediately clear whether the insurer is looking to slash fees; adopt the sort of value-based model lately championed by Coke; or simply to bring its practices closer in line with contemporary norms.