Every TV station wants a Canadian Idol of its own, but CHUM’s MuchMusic realized it already had one. The company that prides itself on bringing the party to your living room is going one step further and taking its own parties on the road.

This fall marks the first year the station is taking the wildly popular MuchMusic VJ Search to 14 malls and campuses across the country, and the first time it’s bringing advertisers along with it.

The music station has always had an internal department called Creative Media Solutions, which looked for ways to tie advertising messages into station initiatives, says Susan Arthur, CHUM’s director of marketing. ‘We can do that on-air and we do that all the time,’ she says. ‘But we sensed a real need from our clients in the marketplace and the industry saying, how can we extend our brands together off air and leverage it together as a property?’

To that end, the company invited six event marketing companies to make a pitch last summer. The agencies were given a list of five key MuchMusic properties – the annual Flake and Bake (formerly Snow Jam), the MuchMusic Video Awards, MuchMusic Video Dance Parties, the VJ Search and their Big Shiny Tunes CDs – and asked to come up with ideas on how to turn these properties into revenue-generating events.

Toronto-based Consumer Impact Marketing (CIM) emerged the winner and got started with a test-run during last winter’s Flake and Bake, held at Blue Mountain. The event was small, but successful enough to use as a learning experience for the real launch of the strategy: 2003’s MuchMusic VJ Search.

In essence, the VJ Search is a Canadian Idol, complete with heartbreaking performances and cruel eliminations. The project invites ordinary Canadians to submit demo tapes that showcase their unique VJ talents. In the past, MuchMusic kept most of the material to itself, showing a few audition tapes on-air but generally restricting coverage to the finals, when VJ hopefuls were invited to compete in studio. This year, MuchMusic is taking the entire production on the road and hosting live auditions.

Michael Smith, president of CIM, which has worked with clients from Pepsi to Hewlett-Packard, agrees that the success of Canadian Idol has had a big impact.

‘It’s more an integration of my product, my brand, into your lifestyle, and you just happen to see it on a medium that’s called TV,’ he says. ‘The whole CHUM group has really been doing it for a while. You see it on MuchMusic and that’s what really sets them apart: The on-air content clearly reflects the culture of what people are doing in their lives. The VJ Search is just an extension of that.’

RadioShack is one of four sponsors. The company is supplying prizes for karaoke competitions and is also giving out VJ applications in its stores. ‘We look to this event to really provide brand identity,’ says Marilyn Guest, Toronto-based VP marketing. ‘The youth market is 6% of our business and this is a perfect opportunity to reach that market.’

Smith agrees that it’s a perfect match. ‘Consumers are smarter than a 30-second spot. What RadioShack wants is something integrated with what people do. On the road, RadioShack is hip and cool because ultimately, it’s part of the culture of Much that is being communicated. We’re not just saying, ‘RadioShack is cool.’ We’re having people say, ‘Yeah, I know RadioShack is cool.”

Samsung is on board to provide plasma screens and other equipment for the production, as well as donating some prizes. Chevrolet is using the event to launch its new Vaio economy car, which will lead a caravan of decaled vehicles as the crew makes its way down the Trans-Canada Highway. Toronto-based Party Time Karaoke is also sponsoring contests that will make up a good part of the action on location.

Conveying the excitement of the events back to the viewer at home is something MuchMusic already has plenty of experience with. They’ve been covering live events – their own and other people’s – for years. They’ve also done live event coverage for the purposes of advertising before.

For instance, this year’s Labatt Home Town Bash got some great coverage. For starters, Labatt ran TV spots announcing a contest where lucky winners would get to attend a good old party at Wasaga Beach. MuchMusic thought the party, and its headlining bands, would make a great show in and of itself and sent a crew out to shoot an hour’s worth of footage for the station. But it didn’t stop there. The footage was later cut into 30-second TV spots.

‘We took the content and made ads out of it. It’s a new world,’ says CHUM’s Arthur. And it’s the kind of world that advertisers seem to want, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t challenges.

CHUM’s hardest challenge might be getting incremental advertising dollars without eating into current advertising. Traditionally, the station works with media buyers who evaluate everything on a media basis, in terms of viewers, demographics and measurable eyeballs. More and more, they’re selling something above and beyond media: real, off-air relationships.

Some of the outdoor evaluation models still apply, based on signage at the events or ‘billboards’ on the vehicle convoy that is covered in advertising decals. And in this case, Much will also be measuring event attendance, the number of Web hits its VJ Search site gets, and total audience for the programming.

Arthur hopes that eventually the broadcaster will be able to grab onto event marketing budgets in addition to broadcasting budgets. For now, however, the big question at MuchMusic is: Who will be the next VJ?