Last week I promised to hail a cab and take our temperature via Jeff Goodby’s Cab Test.

Essentially: What are we doing that people notice and (hopefully) enjoy noticing enough so that they remember it.

Some good news, some bad…

The good news is we’re getting noticed. Budweiser commercials in particular. Bud’s NFL sponsorship and Super Bowl promotion specifically.

The bad news is, not by cab drivers.

It was actually a bartender at the House On Parliament who admitted to remembering and liking Budweiser’s NFL ads. And it was a young patron within earshot of me at the bar who chimed in on the “chick who kicks the ham” – confirming the enduring power of Bud’s Super Bowl sponsorship.

As for the cabbie responsible for delivering me to the House On Parliament? Well he articulated (passionately, I would add) that, unlike the rest of the population, he is completely impervious to the persuasion tactics employed by advertisers.

He “never buys anything based on the lies they tell on TV,” and knows that, “whatever they advertise in the paper, you can be sure they ain’t got when you get to the damn store.”

(Alas, the damage we’ve done ourselves!)

My driver did however very much like the ad where the guys jump on the moving couch like it’s a bobsled. He insisted it was a Rogers ad (it’s for Bell), and further insisted that though he likes the ad he’d never buy their phones (it’s an ad for their TV product) because he’s “a Bell guy.” (They made him sign a contract.)

So where does all this rigorously mined qualitative research leave us?

Well, as a profession near the bottom (and sinking) on the most reviled list according to a recent Gallup survey, I know of at least one cab driver who would concur.

Time management is dead. Project management is dead. The MBA is dead. Conventional marketing is dead. Traditional advertising is dead. Print is dead. ebooks are dead. Commercial radio is dead. Satellite radio is dead. Network television is dead. Social media is dead. Journalism is dead.

One of the more recent posts on this site had me thinking (inadvertently) about the liberal use of “death” in the context of business blog, article and book headlines and titles. (Which is a pleasant change as my thoughts are, for the most part, exclusively focused on death alone.) The death of all of the aforementioned topics have been written about. The list of “Is dead” and “Death of” articles and books goes on and on.

So, why all the dramatic (and often wildly overstated) predictions? Well, part of the reason rests with human nature. We like simplicity. We like a straightforward narrative. But more importantly, we like change.

In fact, according Russell Poldrack, a neuroscientist and researcher at the University of Texas, the brain is “built to ignore the old and focus on the new.” The brain is wired to appreciate novelty, which, as he surmises, is important from an evolutionary standpoint, as we don’t spend all our time noticing the things in our surroundings that don’t change.

Hey, that chair is in the same place! Hey, the rug is still on the floor! Hey, nobody is still buying that whole ‘sex addiction’ thing! (Sorry – that last one was a little too Tiger-Woods-centric).

Mr. Poldrack goes on to state that novelty causes the dopamine system to be activated, which is a “gimme more” neurotransmitter (also known as the “bank fee administrator” transmitter). So, our brains literally crave change. Or in the case of “trend-watching,” impending change. Which would explain why, given the opportunity to choose between Reflections On The Evolution Of Consumer Listening Patterns versus RADIO IS DEAD, people would be inclined to read the latter.

What does it all mean?

In short, when it comes to creating a headline for an article or a title for a business book, it’s important to convey the idea that you’re about to talk about is a huuuuuuge change. Even if it means stretching the truth a bit. Or a lot. It’s all about being more “changeyoriffic,” as Mr. Poldrack put it.

Okay. Poldrack never used that word. I kind of made that word up. It sounded more novel and exciting.

At the end of last summer, my friend Nick and I went deep-woods canoe camping. We packed our gear and headed for Killarney Provincial Park about 20 minutes south of Sudbury. Just two GTA guys portaging in the Canadian Shield – it was us against the wilderness and technology wasn’t invited.

It wasn’t so much that technology wasn’t welcome as it just was simply impossible because of the very NATURE (see what I did there?) of where we were. So the phones, usually our lifeline to anyone not within 20 feet of us, were left in the car for the four-day, three-night excursion.

In the end I left the park with a clearer and more relaxed state of mind than I can remember enjoying in a long, long time. But nothing could prepare me for the backlash we would encounter from friends when we got back to the car and recharged our phones.

I was inundated with over two-dozen missed calls and even more texts, and when I got home I had people looking for me on Facebook and Twitter whom I hadn’t talked to in weeks! Turns out that when you don’t share with people in your network that you’re going to disappear off the grid for a few days (a huge social gaffe on our parts in the first place), rumours like the recent ones surrounding Gordon Lightfoot’s “death” start surfacing everywhere.

Our personal “brands” live and die by the technology we’re wired into 24/7 through the radio, the web, TV, newspapers and magazines, and most of all, our cell phones. Taking a couple of days off is akin to dead air for a TV station – unthinkable.

It’s staggering when one stops to contemplate how immersed we consumers are in the gadgets and gizmos we’ve created just to stay connected to the media mainframe. And whether those means are used for entertainment, news, buying or selling, staying connected to one another, or just spreading rumours, it’s worth stepping back every once in a while to get some perspective.

But not for too long, or people might just start thinking you’re dead.

So, the 2010 Winter Olympics are over and Canada’s performance was lackluster to say the least. This isn’t just my opinion, pretty much everyone I talk to agrees.

No, I’m not talking about the performance of our athletes. I’m talking about Canada’s batch of Olympic advertising. It wasn’t great. In fact, in summarizing the Olympic advertising we’ve been inundated with these past couple of weeks, my initial plan was to award Gold, Silver and Bronze to those ads worthy of the podium. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a Gold to be seen. Not sure there was even a Silver.

I initially suspected that I was just being too tough a judge, so I asked around. I asked everyone I could. And mostly people outside of the industry. When asked to name a commercial that stood out to them, most people couldn’t. Or they named a commercial or campaign that stood out because it was annoying.

If there was a “winner”, it seems it’s the Coca-Cola “hockey” spot – which I agree is a great one. Hard to award it Gold, however, as it turns out that spot is eight years old (and created by our very own Bob Goulart and Dave Hamilton) and originally created for the 2002 Winter Games. Is an eight-year-old spot really the best we can do?

And while I didn’t think any one spot was worthy of Gold, I did think there were a few flashes of brilliance.

HBC’s tagline “We Were Made For This” was outstanding. Leveraging their heritage, they told us that their rich Canadian history has led them to this moment – the moment where they can design and sell the outfits for our home Olympic Games. I loved the line and the emotion it stirred. It almost made me forget they’re owned by an American. Nonetheless, the strategy and the line “We Were Made For This” stood out for me.

There were a few very nice spots for VISA (don’t love that the iconic voiceover is Morgan Freeman – an American), but nice Olympic stories, very well told.

And McDonald’s had some nice moments. Not quite the glory years when they used to leverage the wonderful line “Anything’s Possible When You Have a Dream,” but some nice moments, nonetheless.

All in all, maybe the big win was just being associated with these games. Regardless of the creative. It’ll be interesting to see how much “post-sell” the major sponsors of the games do. Because if those brands can somehow – even slightly – attach themselves to Sidney Crosby’s golden goal, or Joannie Rochette’s triumph in the face of adversity, or any of the countless stories that made us all feel so proud to be Canadian these past two weeks, maybe that’s the victory. Maybe just being attached to these games was Golden. Of course, some more memorable creative wouldn’t have hurt either.

A mote of dust floating isolated in a glass of water will move randomly in every direction, buffeted by the natural motion of its surroundings. Over time, however, those random movements will compound into a significant drift in a certain direction. Physicists study this phenomenon and call it “The Drunkard’s Walk,” but that averaged, long-term movement in a particular direction is something much more important to the marketing world: it’s a trend.

In his book The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, Leonard Mlodinow introduces and explores this and other theories of randomness and statistics that affect our lives and then applies those theories to everyday situations.

Mlodinow demonstrates and discounts common fallacies when it comes to judging random chance. In advertising, one of the biggest quandaries is the extent to which we should rely on statistics and trends. Though it’s true that a random sampling of the population will sometimes represent the greater whole, Mlodinow references a study of preference in musical tastes that confounds the very idea of how we gather data: focus grouping.

Essentially, a team of researchers set up a microsite in which several groups of test subjects could listen to the same 40 tracks by completely unknown artists, rate them, and then read reviews and post their own. In each of these groups, the reviews and ratings could only be read by members of the same group.

Our intuition tells us that over a large enough sampling, each of the smaller communities would show the same tracks as most popular, or there would at least be a noticeable correlation among the highest rated songs. Instead, they found wildly differing results—that a track rated #1 in one community could be rated #40 in another—and they were lost as to why such an anomaly had formed.

As it turns out, the populations in their groups weren’t even following their own tastes, because songs that started out popular in certain groups tended to continue to be popular based entirely on the tastes and reviews of others. People weren’t judging, they were subconsciously following the trend.

If we had been privy to just one of those groups, however, we would have assumed a pattern and considered the top song to be just that—the song that would be most popular overall. But we would be wrong.

Anyone looking to drive consumers to their brand could consider these unpredictable, unknown variables as a setback. After all, if the future is unforeseeable and chance is inescapable, how can we be sure that we’ll be successful? Well, we can’t. But knowing that—and accepting it—is the first step to making that setback a positive result.

We shouldn’t rely too heavily on our statistics, because we must always consider the unpredictability of human nature when we consider the predictability of success. Mathematicians and physicists may try to predict the path of a particle in a fluid suspension, but a mote of dust is a mote of dust. When dealing with human trends, the future is even more uncertain.

One of advertising’s most respected creative leaders, Jeff Goodby, has said that advertising is only great if it passes his “cab test.”

The cab test is when an ad exec gets into a taxi and the driver asks whether they’ve done any work he’s familiar with. If the answer is “No,” you’ve failed the test.

The exercise is Mr. Goodby’s call-to-arms. He’d like to see us get back to making marketing communications that are truly famous – outside the navel gazing walls of our awards show circuit.

Jeff Goodby’s a guy I look up to. His agency’s one I’ve long admired. So naturally I’m hailing a cab this afternoon to take our temperature.

I’ll share my findings here in a week. Stay tuned!

Some recent comings and goings in the world of marketing blogs:

15 ideas
After more than 400 posts, Proximity Chicago Creative Lead Kevin Lynch says he’s shutting down his 15 ideas blog. That’s bad news for the blogosphere – especially since he’s blaming it on something he said at Big Orange Slide. Goodbye Kevin’s funny blog. Sorry about that.

Applied Arts Wire
The Applied Arts Wire blog has unveiled a sleek new look to put it in line with the recently relaunched AppliedArtsMag.com. The tag is “Your window into the Canadian creative community.” Recent action includes campaign profiles (ZAK’s eating disorder campaign), portfolios (Mike Grandmaison), industry surveys and a big community-building push on Twitter.

The Ad Contrarian
Bob Hoffman posted twice this week about the latest Edelman report – the one that says consumers don’t trust their friends anymore. In so doing, he offers faint praise to Patricia McDonald of BBH Labs: “Unlike most social media proponents, [McDonald] at least can think straight and write a coherent sentence. She doesn’t write in clichés and jargon and she’s not in denial about the facts, like most agencies will be. (You can bet agencies won’t be showing the Edelman report to their clients any time soon. Too much money to be made in social media.)” Oh, snap! Except he’s wrong. We shared the report with our clients right here this past Monday.

Church of the customer blog
“There’s a lot marketers can learn from artist and musician Lady Gaga,” says Jackie Hubb. Among them: “Give fans a name . . . Make it about something bigger than you . . . Develop shared symbols . . . Make your customers feel like rock stars.” Good call.

I’ve been working, often passionately, at the business of advertising for the more than a decade. Which is a roundabout way of saying that I now very much look forward to not thinking a stitch about it two days of the week: Saturday and Sunday.

Which brings me to Terry O’Reilly, a man I’ve worked with, admired, and even envied for his considerable and seemingly effortless talent. Terry is the host of a radio show called The Age of Persuasion, now in its 4th season on CBC Radio. The series takes listeners deep into the world of advertising, providing a well-researched and wonderfully quirky history of the business, as well as insights about a phenomenon that, according to Terry, drives culture, art, communications and politics.

Here’s the trouble:

It airs Saturdays. And it’s about the business of advertising. And now, despite my best efforts to cleanse the palate over the course of my weekend, I find myself going to considerable lengths to listen to The Age of Persuasion, putting off chores, laying down books. I’ve even made myself late for the gym, sitting parked in my car to hear the end of an episode on the art and science behind famous – and sometimes infamous – hits and misses.

Terry’s infectious. So is his enthusiastic fascination with the fragile, enduring and every evolving relationship between consumers an their best-loved brands. And though he’s told to my face this show is not written for guys like me, guys in “the biz,” I know he’s wrong about this.

The Age of Persuasion is precisely for people like me. Because what makes you great in this business of ours is falling in love with our history long enough to want to shape it. The great storied past that inspired me to care and learn, to dig deeper and wrestle ideas to the ground in the first place is what’s really on offer Saturday mornings at ten. And so, I find myself giving up a little of my weekend. Giving it to the very business I so look forward to retreating from at the end of the week. Giving myself over to the crazy, enduring wonder of it all in the hopes I’ll learn something new. Again.

Thanks Terry.