GroupM's Rob Norman discusses a 'philosophical' advertising shift.

Thanksgiving weekend, consid­ered the official kickoff of the holiday shopping season, is even more significant this year, because consumers have shown a remarkable lack of interest in shopping recently. Compounding matters, retailers face a shorter holiday shopping season than normal, with Thanksgiving coming late in the month.

Media and marketing services company Valassis communications announced that it would sell its French subsidiaries to HighCo, a French marketing services company, for an undisclosed cash amount.

Specialty coffee chain Dunn Bros. has launched a unique giving program to raise funds for community organizations.

Marketing services firm Sapient Interactive announced today it has partnered with Shubert Ticketing, a provider of ticketing services throughout the US, to revitalize its Telecharge.com Web site.

Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc., announced the launch of Amazon CloudFront, a self-service, pay-as-you-go Web service for content delivery.

Recent results posted by Whole Foods Market have stirred some doubts about the health of the organic food mar­ket in today's economy.

The Limited is promoting its recently launched e-commerce store with a new viral marketing contest. The contest, which is being promoted at The Limited's new online store, chal­lenges consumers to create the "ultimate outfit" by playing with Limited brand products in a virtual closet.

For Kingston Technologies, a maker of memory products, taking advantage of user reviews as a marketing tool turned out to be an effective way for a brand to promote its products. The company found recent success by syndicating product reviews of its own Web site on that of Office Depot.

Casey Jones, the VP of global marketing at Dell who spearheaded the effort to create its own in-house agency, Enfatico, has left his position.