Mark Shedletsky, part of the original team that launched free youth daily Dose earlier this year, has moved to MTV Canada to oversee its marketing division.

The global music station brand, which had been available on digital and satellite in Canada, ceased broadcast here in June. However, it now has CTV and Bell Globemedia behind it and is giving it another go. The entire MTV Canada senior management team will be announced in coming weeks.

‘How MTV looks on a global scale is what MTV will look like here,’ he says, but with about 70% Cancon, as required by its CRTC licence. CTV’s analogue station, talktv, currently available in 4.4 million Canadian households, will be re-branded as MTV. Programs on MTV in the U.S. and internationally such as the MTV Movie Awards, Pimp My Ride and Punk’d, which aired on CTV, will run on MTV Canada. The station will also have space on CTV in the form of a branded block of programming.

To gear up for the marketing push, Shedletsky says he’s currently looking to build a marketing team of five: two people under the consumer-marketing banner will be responsible for media planning and grassroots initiatives, partnerships with record labels, movies studios

and promotions.

A second team of two will handle integrated or brand partnerships with agencies and marketers, and help find creative ways to integrate products and brands into programming and events. A communications manager will round out the team.

The station, which is expected to launch in the first quarter of 2006, will be packaged as a multi-platform brand, not dissimilar to Dose. ‘We’re going to come out of the gate with some decent mobile offerings [as well as] TV,’ Shedletsky says, hinting at a launch strategy. He also says that because the two brands have a similar target, future partnerships are a strong possibility. ‘We’re certainly going to have a close working relationship. Their commitment to great content and design is very similar to how we view the channel.’ He adds that the partnership would have happened regardless of his ties with the daily.

Prior to Dose, Shedletsky, a Toronto native, spent two years at MTV in New York after graduating with an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management.