Ever wonder how mass advertising campaigns begin? Trendspotter Marian Salzman is in a cafe now, listening to you.

Marian Salzman is a hard woman to pin down. As you might expect from someone who works like a demon and hops an international flight every 10 days. When I finally manage to catch her, she is in London, eavesdropping on cafe conversations and snooping round supermarkets.

Salzman, 43, is a trendspotter, though she prefers the term strategist. However you dress it up, it's her job to track global trends, feeding her findings back to a string of corporate clients. And the lives of total strangers are her raw materials.

"I don't go food shopping in the same way other people do," she admits. "It takes me around two hours to do what should take five minutes because I'm looking in other people's baskets. I also go to cafes and restaurants by myself to listen to other people talk. I don't talk as much myself as watch."

Salzman, who is based in New York, also listens to hours of radio, tunes into more daytime television than your average TAFE student and devours foreign newsprint.

As Chief Strategic Officer for advertising and marketing company Euro RSCG Worldwide, she oversees a network of 1,250 trend scouts who regularly e-mail her gossip and observations from their local neighborhoods. The scout infrastructure fields spies from Manila to Moscow, from Shanghai to Sydney. There are regular scouts in Melbourne, while occasional reports are filed from Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane. Scouts scribble down notes as people order the hottest new cocktail or talk up the latest new music phenomenon.

"We look for patterns," explains Salzman. "We're also analyzing via the Internet about 4,000 news sources. It's a matter of trying to figure out which trend to pay the most attention to because it has the most viability for our clients." Said clients include Intel, Volvo, Air France and Evian, which, like other giant corporations, are always looking for new ways to promote their products and services. "We recognise that the only way to help a client progress a brand or grow their business is by looking forward rather than looking in the rear-view mirror," soundbites Salzman. "I'm trying to imagine probable scenarios and help them plan for situations, then maximize what could happen if it does happen."

Salzman has been credited for bringing the term "metrosexual" to the media, having written a report, The Future of Men, about "the shopping, grooming and personal habits and attitudes of the modern male." In fact, the idea came her way via two scouts based in Sydney. Daniel Pankraz and Matt Donovan found the term to describe men who like both grooming and girls. The thing had legs, and before you could say men's skincare, newshounds the world over were unmasking heterosexual hunks who liked manicures.

Then came Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, the hit U.S.television show (to be followed by an Australian version early next year) that sees badly dressed straight males chewed up and spat out by a team of makeover-obsessed gay guys. For advertisers, it meant a whole new target audience—think footy players advertising shampoo—but for Salzman it just meant fewer hours in the day.

"I hold [Pankraz and Donovan] personally responsible for my loss of privacy," she laughs. "I refer to this [northern] summer as 90 days of metrosexual mania. I've been phoned 24/7 from Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, Dubai, Sri Lanka, Russia and the [Democratic] Republic of Congo, all these absurd countries looking for information on their local metrosexual culture." In New York, the press moved onto "schmosexuals" ("schmo" as in sloppy, referring to gay guys who don't groom), while the Australian press unearthed "rurosexuals" (country guys who yearn for nice haircuts and fashionable jeans).

Salzman is no stranger to the hullabaloo. She broke the term "wigger," meaning white kids wanting to be black. Now she's onto "globesity," the disease of obesity that America is exporting to the world. She is also watching China closely. "Given the countdown to the Beijing Olympics, China might be the most interesting market in the world," she says. Back home, predatory females have not escaped her notice. "Women are demanding sex on the first date when the guy wants to get to know them better. They are hunting in packs. We're hearing that a lot in the States, and the same thing in London. Women judge themselves very seriously when they go out and get picked up and it doesn't culminate in a sexual experience."

Another trend to track is the anthropomorphism of pets. "People are treating pets as members of the family, buying them insurance policies [and] special nutraceuticals," she says. Salzman knows this first-hand, having eschewed traditional family life in favor of a career and her two golden retriever dogs, Morgan and Sacha. "The newest thing is people getting answer phones so they can call their dogs and cats during the day." As we speak, Salzman is e-mailing her "dog sitter" to check her babies will be waiting in her West Village loft on her return.

"Word of mouth is more powerful and people are more connected than ever before," she says. "When I started working, the fax machine was the newest thing. When I was a child, my mother would tell me, ‘You can't call friends who live ten miles away as it's a toll call.’ Today we pick up the phone and call people around the world and don't even think about it. I e-mail 20 countries in any given day."

Salzman was raised in New Jersey, with dreams of writing novels and marrying rich. "I screwed up on both counts," she jokes. But she did make it to Brown University, where she studied sociology. She went on to graduate school at Harvard, then dabbled in freelance journalism, writing for the likes of Forbes and Business Week. Her first taste of trend forecasting came with a job in public relations; she soon worked out that suggesting trend-based angles was a good way to place stories. "One job led to the next. I would have a theory, it would prove accurate, it would help a client and I began to develop a reputation. I wish I could say I'd been super-ambitious about doing it, but really it just came naturally to me." Before landing her current job, she worked for advertising agencies Chiat\Day, later part of TBWA International, and Young & Rubicam. She found time to write or co-write 12 books, and do the odd interview, too. Indeed Marian Salzman, if the buzz is anything to go by, has become something of a trend herself.

So what makes a good trendspotter? "Someone who doesn't stress themselves out over what they're seeing," she says. "I know it sounds weird but I think my greatest strength is having so few opinions. I can see things that I should be appalled by and not be turned off to them." Salzman admits to having colleagues who aren't so thick-skinned. "One of the major trends we're watching in the U.S. is the rise of the religious retailer," she says, referring to Christian franchises. Christian radio is also on the rise. "One of my colleagues gets so angry about it she can't really focus in on it. Another thing we've been watching is the rise of fundamentalism [in other areas], whether it's Christianity or the Muslim religion. People get pissed off about that."

Visiting Kuta just before the Bali bombings, Salzman saw T-shirts printed with pro-Osama bin Laden slogans. She went home and wrote a client report suggesting all was not well in the region. "To me it was very obvious that Bali was no longer this place of wonderful peacefulness. One of the things we monitor is terrorism, because we service clients like Air France and because we're so concerned with travel. I feel like South-East Asia is a mess, like Malaysia is not a safe place to go [and] the Philippines are not safe." Australia, though, wins Salzman's approval. In Melbourne recently, she found more evidence of the move towards boutique hotels and shopping for "artisanal" food—that is food made by traditional methods.

"But the best source for Australia is Sydney," she says. "It's such a melting pot. I think there's an instinctive awareness of what's cool; some of that comes from the beach culture, [some] from an openness and tolerance for ethnicity and gays, for people living different lives."

All this she observes for her clients, who may well be planning billion-dollar campaigns featuring metrosexual dog lovers who like to stay in boutique hotels and shop for cheese made by local goat herders. "That's the commercial reason for doing it," says Salzman. "But it also makes you a world-class dinner party guest. I was at a party two weeks ago in New York and everyone wanted to tell me their metrosexual stories. Now I know how a dentist feels [when] all people do is ask how much candy they should feed their kids …"