• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, October 26, 2022

Earlier this year Bill Morrison of MAD magazine and Bongo Comics fame and his creative team  (including Dick DeBartolo, Tom Richmond, Ian Boothby and others) joined  experiential and word-of-mouth marketing firm The Integration Co., which is led by Saul Colt, out of Toronto. Morrison and company essentially became Integration’s in-house creative team.

Now the agency has announced that the creative team and others are hitting the road to put on a series of “Idea Bootcamps” for brands.

The main idea, says Colt is “to teach brands everything we know about design, traditional and non-traditional marketing, and creativity.”

The sessions take two different approaches, including a crash course (full-day or half-day) on the above referenced topics. Or a client can present the agency with a specific challenge “and our team comes in an fixes it for you,” said Colt.

The agency has been testing the idea in a pilot program over the past couple of months with positive results and feedback, says Colt. “The concept isn’t new,” he acknowledges, “but we ran with it based on requests from our clients. There is much uncertainty with the current economy, and marketing strategies require a unique and new approach.”

One participant during the pilot program was ServiceEcho.com, which describes itself as a “native Salesforce field service management tool.” It chose the fix-a-specific-problem option, and CEO Jason Silva says the agency provided a solution and offered new directions to take its marketing next year. “It was a great use of our time and end-of-year [leftover] budget,” he said.