The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Saul Colt, Founder of The Idea Integration Company

Episode Date: March 2, 2022

Saul Colt, Founder of The Idea Integration Company Theideaintegration.com

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks it's voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming in a great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in be sure to go to youtube.com for chest chris voss go to goodreads.com for chest chris voss to see everything we're coming in on a great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to go to youtube.com, Fortress Chris Voss.

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Anyway, guys, we have an amazing gentleman on the show today with us. His name is Saul Colt, and he is the founder and creative director at The Idea Integration Company. In his career, he's been named one of iMedia25's internet marketing leaders and innovators, as well as being called one of Canada's best community builders and experiential marketers. A, I'm going to put the A on there for the Canadians. New York Times bestselling author and internet pioneer Chris Brogan once refers to Saul as exactly who you want representing your company,

and that message has been echoed by media properties ranging from Inc. to Forbes magazine. Saul has had many career highlights, including being selected to be the first international employee of Zipcar and the person responsible for the launching of Zipcar into the Canadian marketplace. He was the first marketing person and key part of the growth of FreshBooks.com, the number one cloud accounting service for small business owners, as well as the leadership roles at Rogers Communications, and the first chief evangelist of Xero.com. If that wasn't enough, Saul was also a professional speaker and consultant

specializing in word-of-mouth marketing, stunt marketing, social media, customer service, community building, and business courage. Welcome to the show, Saul. How are you? I'm really good. I feel like we should end the show right there. It's not going to get any better than that introduction. Oh, come on. We're going to find out more about you.

It's going to get way better than my boring read of bios. I do the best. You know, we give it the pump shot, if you will. So give us your plugs, your.coms for people to find you nowadays on the webs and find out more about you. Sure. So if you're interested in me personally, you can find me just about anywhere at Saul Colt, S-A-U-L-C-O-L-T. And my company is The Idea Integration, The Idea Integration Company. And the URL is theideaintegration.com. There you go. There you go.

So in describing yourself, we kind of went through your bio, but what would you describe yourself as being nowadays or your title or maybe your mission, maybe purpose? Okay. So, you know, I think titles are all BS. I don't know if we can speak frankly on this. I'm CEO of the world. So. Yeah. Titles are mostly nonsense, but, you know, because I founded the company, I guess I'm the founder, but what the idea integration companies were a non-traditional marketing and advertising agency. You know, we don't do the things that are real commonplace, the pay-per-click, the SEO, all the stuff that

just sort of bores people. And, you know, personally, I have no interest in. We do this stuff that really builds fans for companies and we do marketing stunts. We do, you know, I tell people we're not a PR agency, but we do the things that feeds the PR agency, all the things that they need to talk about. So, you know, we were the first agency to ever use real clouds or, I guess, simulated clouds to promote a cloud-based software. We use Skywriting to promote a cloud-based software company. country tours where we've hit 18 cities in 21 days and basically didn't shower for a month, just so we could meet a bunch of customers and shoot brand videos for all these customers and have breakfast, lunch, and dinner with the customers. I say we do spectacle stuff. And we've been in business since 2008. And the stunts and the spectacles and the creative marketing is what's gotten us to now.

And the reason we're talking today or the reason that people are excited about our brand again is taking another step in our company. We recently not only reunited, but we brought the entire creative team from Mad Magazine and a few people from The Simpsons back together as a unit. And they're now our in-house creative department, really the backbone of our advertising agency. So we're trying to, just like we've always done on the marketing side, get companies to step out of their comfort zone, do things that people really care about. On our advertising side now, we've got, you know, 21 of the absolute funniest, I call them professionally funny people who have for, you know, the last 20 years skewered advertising and made it poke the stick at advertising. And now they're going to use everything they've learned on the satire side. And we're going to create some really interesting stuff for brave brands or brands that wish they were brave.

That's awesome, man. I grew up reading Mad Magazine and I just, I loved it. In fact, I was heartbroken when I found it was being shut. There was, you know, closing or whatever it was. Yeah, so it was definitely, I like this term, stunt marketing. Is this where I get to throw an influencer off a cliff? Because I've got a few on my list. Yes, that'll make, that'll be really good.

It'll be great for clicks and stuff. I'm sure it will. In prison, but possibly. But I don't know. You know, I mean, some of them claim they can fly. Throw them off and see if they can fly. I don't know what that means. I'm just being funny.

Don't do that, people. So this is pretty cool. It sounds like you've got a really amazing team that you've built around you. Now, you've written some books, to my understanding, as well, haven't you? I haven't written books, but my work has been featured in five New York Times bestselling books. Oh, okay. And what I like to do is, and I don't know if I've posted about this online. I've never actually asked any of the authors if they mind, but whenever I see a book that I'm in at an airport, when we used to go to airports, I would always sign the book and say, I didn't write this

book, but there's words about me on page whatever. And I would put it back on the shelf. So someone could think they're getting an autographed copy. Yeah. Joseph Jaffe, Chris Brogan have talked about you, Jay Baer. I can't see this. I'm nervous with my old eyes. What are some ways that you work with clients? So clients are out there, they know how to reach out to you, work with you. Do you work with influencers that are out there in the marketplace? You know, these Instagram crowds or something else these days? Yeah, we don't do too much work with influencers. Our sweet spot is really either B2B, B2C companies.

Usually, you know, like we sort of specialize in what I call medium-sized companies. Like we've worked with Nike and eBay and Twitter, some giant companies. But our sweet spot is really that sort of mid-sized company, maybe 20 to 100 employees, maybe $50 million and less in revenue and stuff like that. But how brands work with us is simple. Just email us, you call us, you know, we're pretty easy to find anywhere. You know, our process is very like harmless. We, we, you know, we have initial phone call. We do a bit of a fact finding mission, find out where your comfort level is with risk and shock and bold and all sorts of things. And then we go back to our secret hideaway and we get some of the smartest, funniest people dreaming up crazy things for us

to pitch you. And if you like something, you buy it. If you don't like it, you know, we part ways as friends and then, you know, we execute it and, you know, everyone's happy. We've got a ridiculously high success rate because we execute our own stuff. And when you do word of mouth and when you do stunts and things like that, there's a lot of nuance to it. We did a stunt for a belt company, John Y. Belts, J-O-N-W-Y-E.com. Check them out. Best belts in the world. And John's a real nice guy. But we did a stunt for a belt company where we went to the very populated shopping mall at lunchtime where the food court was packed. And the insight we had or our kernel, our nugget of truth, as we like to call it, was that the belt is kind of like the forgotten

fashion accessory. So we did a fashion show without permission in the food court of one of the busiest malls in Canada, where we ran one male and one female completely naked, just wearing belts. And we did a guerrilla fashion show in the food court. So when I say there's a lot of nuance in what we do, we had GoPro cameras covering every inch of the place. We had, you know, people making sure we captured it all. We had plans you know, people making sure we captured it all. We had plans as if we were going to get kicked out in 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds. We had escape routes. We had everything. And what happened was we started our fashion show. Everybody noticed it. It wasn't like people were oblivious to it, but the security were so

fascinated by seeing, you know, a penis and a vagina that they just let us keep going. And after about two, three minutes, we didn't know what to do anymore because all of our plans said that we were going to be thrown out in 10 seconds. So we caught all of our footage and we just sort of humbly packed up our fashion show, went to the editing table and created an amazing piece of content. But there's so much nuance in what we do you know when you're doing crazy stuff it never goes as planned but when you've been doing it long enough you always sort of figure out how to make it work that's pretty wild man i mean who doesn't like seeing a nude runway shows when you're having chick-fil-a there at the mall court they're usually pretty boring around there. So, you know, seeing that, you know, it sounds like you really tie in like a brand sort of a brand sort of reputation or brand's name

or what they do into a lot of the marketing you do. Yeah. So it's, you know, we want to be the place you go to when you want something memorable and, you know and a little bit of reverence. So our level of risk is very high, but my job isn't really to get the brand to come to my level of risk. It's to find out where the level of risk and the comfort level of the brand is and get them to just cross that line a couple steps. And hopefully once they see that the world didn't explode around them the next one cross it a little more and across a little more because like right now is like you know you've got a huge following you've got you know you've been doing this a long time but i'm sure you've noticed that it the internet is noisier now than it's ever been. So like any brand who's just going up to the line of,

you know, expectation is going to get lost. So like you always have to be pushing that line and pushing that line and pushing that line, but you want to do it in baby steps because you don't want to shock your, your customers and deliver something that's way out of their comfort zone too. But eventually you want to take them on a ride that brings them on a journey that, you know, whether they realize it in the moment that, you know, they're really going to enjoy. Carl Reiner, the great, brilliant Carl Reiner said that he used to have something called a refrigerator joke. And what it was, he would tell an off-color joke. And in the moment, nobody would laugh or it would be uncomfortable. And in the moment, nobody would laugh or everyone would be uncomfortable with when you're getting your orange juice or glass of water at

midnight in front of the refrigerator, you get the joke and you start laughing inside the fridge. The refrigerator joke. That's probably why Carl Reiner was so brilliant. So what are some of the other things you've done? Tell us some other stories about some of the, some of the different adventures you guys have been on. So, you know, we've done so many things that it's, you know, I'm going to tell you something, a couple of things we've done and a couple of things that we wanted to do that we couldn't get away. But, you know, because sometimes those stories are funnier, but, you know, we, one of the things we take a lot of joy doing is disrupting conferences. You know, and it's a great way, you know, you've got all the, you know, 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 targeted people in a small space.

We were hired to disrupt a conference in New Orleans. You know, they're mostly tech companies, startups and things like that. But we hired a authentic New Orleans brass marching band, like the ones they use for those like street funerals and stuff like that. And because the, you know, it's always around finding like an insider or, you know, the kernel of truth and sort of working backwards. So we knew that these people were going to spend four or five days in a convention center and probably not see that much of New Orleans. So we brought New Orleans into the conference center and we hired this marching band and we hired, I'm blanking on the name. It's like the most famous beignet store in New Orleans.

But anyways, Cafe Du Monde. We got them to bring us like 200 beignets and we created a parade all through the conference. And the people marching were wearing branded merchandise from the brand that had hired us. We're handing out beignets that are in branded bags and the whole thing. And we weren't a sponsor of the event, but most people left thinking we were the title sponsor of the event and probably underwriting the whole thing. Other things we've done at conferences, we hired a magician to basically levitate in front of the front door of the entrance to a QuickBooks conference. Hopefully QuickBooks isn't a sponsor of the show. But we had a magician levitate in front of the front door and every person that showed up, we were there like 5.30, 6 in the morning. Everyone showed up, got their there like 5.30, 6 in the morning. Everyone

who showed up got their picture taken with the magician. It slowed the line down to actually get into the conference. He was wearing a t-shirt for the brand, the competitor of QuickBooks, Xero that we were working with. And two, well, three amazing things happened from our simple little thing of planting our magician out front. Inside the convention center, they had digital walls, like for all the Twitter mentions. And the logo of our client was displayed far more than the logo of the sponsors. And Magic Johnson, you know, the Lakers great. Everyone loves Magic. He was the keynote speaker in the morning. He stood up on the stage, the first words out of his mouth were, what is zero? Because he kept seeing this logo

everywhere and he didn't think he was a thing. So, yeah. So, you know, some of the things we do, like, you know, they're simple ideas that are hard to execute. They're hard ideas that are harder to execute, but they always have a big impact. You know, people love them. One of my favorite ideas that we got so close to doing, we planned it down to the second and then the brand sort of, I wouldn't say chickened out, had reservations. I'm like, you know, I'm closer to 50 than I am 40. And I remember as a kid that there was this guy who, so I live in Toronto, Canada,

there was this guy who climbed the CN Tower from the outside and they called him Spider-Man and he's climbed a bunch of buildings. His name is Dan, I think it's Dan Goodman, I forget now. But anyways, I tracked this guy down and I had this crazy idea. There was a cigar company that was looking for something just crazy to do. They didn't care that it tied back to their brand. They didn't care. They just wanted to be on the news. So I tracked this guy down. He was living in the Philippines.

We were talking through WhatsApp and he agreed to come. We were going to fly him to Los Angeles and he was going to climb the biggest building in Los Angeles and he was going to climb the biggest building in Los Angeles. And when he got three quarters of the way up, we built this thing. Like we didn't literally build it. We built the plans and we found someone to build it for us. It was going to be like his backpack was going to have suction cups on it. And he was going to place the backpack on.

It was a flat glass building. And we were going to set off a tiny little charge, like an electric charge. And his backpack was going to be this giant flag with this company's logo. And in the plan, we were going to call the police on ourselves so the news copters would show up. We had a line item in the budget to bail him out of jail. It was such an elaborate, like, if I put my concentration to like heists, I could probably, you know, be rich, but instead I use it for mischief. But we had this great thing. And then the client backed out. And I said, you know, if I had the cash, I would have just done it myself because it was just such a perfect plan. So if there's

anyone out there who wants to see the flag of the highest building in Los Angeles, it's going to be spring soon. But yeah, like it's, you know, we, so just to be clear, we do tons of boring stuff too. We do, you know, strategy documents and branding and logos and all that stuff. But, you know, nobody invites me on podcasts and radio shows to talk about designing a logo. But I want to make sure people know it's not all, you know, ice cream and lollipops. So pretty much anything that you can do with your brand and brand marketing, basically. Yeah. But a real area of expertise is that getting attention and having that attention drives sales.

Everything has to come back to revenue or people don't hire you again. Well, you make a good point. It is so noisy. It's hard to stand out. In the early days of Twitter, it was easy to find people like yourself, myself, Chris Brogan, standing out on Twitter. There were very few people that were. I think it was in the top 1,000 people on Twitter at the time. And we were all talking about what we ate for lunch.

Yeah, taking pictures. I still do that. Take pictures of what I eat for lunch yeah take a picture i still do that if it's good i i do it i don't do it oh well i probably am narcissistic in some way i mean let's admit to that my audience right now he's narcissistic d and they're probably right but i do it to just ruin people's diets i'm like if i'm gonna eat this and it's bad for me i'm sharing with you and then i like to share like my burger photos and ice cream photos, like about nine or 10 o'clock when people are crawling into bed and they're just like, Oh, for hell's sakes, it's a, I don't know, common suffrage or something. I don't know what you call it. So there you go. Well, it sounds like you guys have done some

really fun things over there in different services. I love this team that you've assembled. Was it hard to assemble a team of, you know, the people from Matt and the Simpsons? So I can't take a lot of credit for getting them all together. The way it all happened was I've been friends with Bill Morrison for many years. Bill was the, you know, he's worked on the Simpsons for 20 years. He was the right-hand man of Matt Granning. And Bill was the final editor-in-chief of Mad Magazine. He left the Simpsons to go take over the top job at Mad. And Bill and I, you know, we're not best friends, but, you know, we've been friends for a long time. And our relationship was such that, you know, anytime I was in LA, we'd go for lunch and just catch up, you know, maybe we'd see each other once every

couple of years. Well, about seven months ago, Bill was in Toronto for a comic book show. And I saw he was in town on social. And I texted him and I said, would you like a home-cooked meal? And he said, yeah. So, you know, picked him up, made him dinner. We started chatting about sort of, you know, what life post-mad is. And we, you know, over dinner, we just kept talking about how, you know, like the, he's been working with the team and, you know, it's great, but he'd really love to bring them

all back together because it's such a well-oiled machine. And, you know, they're kind of looking for opportunities to work together, but everyone's kind of working like one-offs and things like that. And I'd been looking for something to shake up my business. You know, I've been going strong since 2008, but COVID was devastating for us in a lot of ways. So, you know, wanted to really shake things up and do something very different. And, you know, like I keep preaching to my clients, you got to do something that scares you. I hadn't really done anything personally that had scared me in a couple of years. And this seemed like such a good, but also scary. Like I'm all in on this personally, you know, self-finance through the company. There's no outside investors,

there's no raise or anything like that. So we're going all in and, you know, I'm either going to, you know, be bankrupt or live comfortably, you know, lower middle class for the rest of my life. But we're going to do some incredible work for people. And, you know, like there's something, you know, and I don't deserve pats on the back or anything like that. We haven't figured it all out yet. And we're sort of figuring it out as we go along. But these are some of the most talented people I've admired forever. And it's, you know, if there's any way I can, you know, help them or add a little shine or, you know,

make sure they're fed and happy, that's something I take, you know, I'm very proud of, you know, and, you know, I don't own Mad Magazine, you know, we don't own the brand, the brand is the brand, but I'm self-appointing myself as the caretaker of the MAD sensibility, because that is what we're really trying to keep alive. You know, MAD was about, you know, teaching people to sort of question everything. And MAD was about, you know, holding a mirror up to society. And that's kind of what advertising was supposed to be founded on. And so we're really trying to, to do some really cool things with some really talented people. Yeah. I mean, these guys were funny. I mean, super funny.

I mean, why didn't magazine magazine close down? I mean, it's, it was just age out. Well, people don't read magazines maybe anymore. I don't know the exact story. So in fairness, it's actually still publishing. They don't do any new story. So in fairness, it's actually still publishing. They don't do any new material. So once a year or twice a year, they just released something called Mad in the 90s. And they basically just recycled a bunch of 90s movie parodies and stuff like that. But there is no Mad team. There's no people working in mad, as far as I understand. But maybe it's one of those things that just sort of aged out or just sort of ran its course.

75 years for anything is pretty impressive. But I still think that there's a spot in the world for mad and the Simpsons because it's not just mad who's on our team. We've got a handful of people from The Simpsons who've come on. And when you talk about these people are really funny people, I'll tell you a quick story. We produced a three-page comic strip kind of about how the relationship came together. I've already told you about it, so I won't bore you with the story again.

But I wrote the first draft of that comic just to, you know, move the project along and make sure we were hitting timelines. And then we handed it over to Ian Boothby, who's a, you know, member of our team and a writer on The Simpsons. And when he brought the script back to me, I think maybe 10% of what I wrote was still in the script. And it was 100 times funnier. You know, there is a difference between, you know, funny people who, which I consider myself and professionally funny people. And, you know, and I think that that difference is really important for people to grasp. Like, you know, a great example, I don't know if you saw this, you know, maybe you did, maybe you didn't,

but I don't know, two, three weeks ago, Pabst Blue Ribbon put out a tweet that said, you know, dry January, question mark, try eating ass. And it's like, yeah, it's like, whatever. It's obviously like a kid who's running their social media, probably didn't get permission for that. They took it down like two hours later, but you know, social media as it is a thousand screen grabs. So, you know, eating ass, it's, you know, it's a funny concept. I then so you know eating ass it's you know it's a funny concept i don't i would never suggest a brand associate themselves side by side with you know licking assholes but that's what comes with being professionally funny you don't have to go to the lowest common denominator you'll find the insight and and put out something that doesn't need to be removed in shame when people lose their jobs.

You've given me a – I've been developing a cinnamon company for cinnamon buns. And you've given me a new name for it, Eating Ass. So that would be – what do you have in there? A cinnamon bun. Where is it from? Eating Ass. What? What's going on?

I don't know. Yeah, it's interesting. But no, I like how you take things to the umpteenth level because you have to stand out. It's so hard to get traction. It's so hard to get noise. You know, like you, my inbox is filled with 20 billion PR agents. You know, will you write about this? Will you write about that?

Will you write about this? It's like, dude, if I had time to write about everything, like, I would be freaking rich. Well, I'd have to be rich to write about everything or people to cover it. But, yeah, you just can't cover it. And events are – I love your ideas of events. I mean, I go to so many events, you know, well, now that the coronavirus is over, hopefully. You know, CES and different things. And it's really hard to stand

out because it's all kind of the same and you're just kind of, but what a captured audience though to hit upon. Yeah. It's like, you could try your best to find these people all around, you know, North America, or just wait till they all come to you, but you have to really do something amazing for people to care, to notice, to, to jump on to jump on you know and you know follow a parade all sorts of things one of the the the funnier things i've done or cooler things i've done and a lot of the stuff we do is ask permission or ask for forgiveness uh later or i don't know, whatever the cliche is. Yeah. But at CES, maybe you saw this, but I guess it was 2018, I think. We were working with a company called Woosh, who you've actually had on the show. I saw when I was doing my research on appearing here, we went and put a 11 by 17

sort of like removable sticker on the back of every bathroom stall in CES. So there was about 900 bathroom stalls. And the sticker was telling people how their phone is dirtier than the toilet they're sitting on. And if they come to, you know, booth number, whatever, they can get their thing clean. So by, you know, hiring a bunch of college kids and going around and stickering every toilet. And we made sure that the labels were removable. They weren't like permanent sort of adhesive. We got written up in ad age.

The booth was crazy busy. They booked multi-millions of dollars of orders. And again, it all comes down to being able to – this isn't my line. This is a line by the great Andy Nelman. But he says, you know, I've got the guts. You don't. That's sort of how we roll. Like, you know, nothing is off the table.

It's like, you know, we'll always come up with something incredible. We just make sure that it fits into your brand. And, you know, we never want to offend people. We never want to, you know, our job is to cross the line, but cross it, you know, in a way that you can't not come back from. Or in a way you can come back from, whatever it is. Yeah. You don't want to be that too far of a line where you never come back. So this has been awesome.

The funniest things, and I'll just one more minute, the funniest things are the stuff that really make people shake their head. We were doing a party, an event at South by Southwest, I don't know how many years ago, it's a number of years ago, but our party was the day after Whitney Houston passed away. And part of the way to really capitalize on these things is to just, to quote, you know, everyone's favorite shoe company, you got to just do it. Just do it. So Whitney Houston passed away on a Tuesday. We hired a Whitney Houston impersonator to sing at our party Wednesday night, a day after she passed away. And we introduced her.

We just go, ladies and gentlemen, a surprise for you, Whitney Houston. And we never broke character. As far as everyone was concerned, she was Whitney Houston. Half the room knew she was passed away. Half the room thought they were seeing Whitney Houston. And lots of people were taking pictures because they were like, man, this is a ballsy move. And when I was negotiating with the singer or the performer, the lady wanted to charge me double because Whitney just passed away. I go, I'm the only person with the balls who will hire you right now.

Like you got to give yourself a six month break. Did you put her in a tub? I did not put her in a tub. She was in a long flowing gown. I'm getting hate mail emails now. That's okay. Too soon. It's only been nine years.

Nine years. I think I have to wait until 10. Is that a legal requirement? Maybe. There you go. Well, it's been wonderful to talk to you, Saul, and get to know your company and what you do. Anything more you want to touch on or tease out before? I'd love any brands or really anybody who is

looking to do something interesting and stand out, you know, it's like, don't be intimidated by some of the stories I've told, you know, those are, these are my favorite stories, but we do all sorts of stuff and man, you know, like I can't stress enough how, you know, sort of magical it is to work with the mad team and the people from the Simpsons. So even if you don't want to, you know, do skywriting or anything that crazy, there's some real opportunities to do some really like cutting edge and memorable work for your brand with our team. And, you know, I hope you'll reach out at theideaintegration.com. There you go. Thank you very much, Saul, for being on the show. We really appreciate it, man. Yeah, I appreciate you having me.

I know that this is not an easy spot to get, and you get lots of requests. So I'm truly grateful you picked us. Thank you very much, Saul. And thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfast. Go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisfast. See everything we're reading and reviewing. All of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram.

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