Honda is rallying people around a Civic Nation mix-off to re-energize the brand with its more youthful tuner demo.

Leveraging the ‘United We Drive’ effort it launched four years ago, the latest program invites Civic fans to create an ‘Anthem for the Nation’ on a soundtrack mixer using samples crafted by Toronto-based hip hop celeb Saukrates.

‘The Civic tuner culture is very much into music,’ says Ravi Dindayal, director, interactive at Toronto-based Grip, which developed the campaign. ‘You pimp your ride by adding speakers to your car, for example. This is another derivative of that culture.’

The campaign includes TV, online, radio and OOH in a youth/music-centric media plan from Toronto’s PHD designed to drive 18- to 34-year-olds to Civicnation.ca. There, users can create a 30-second track in categories such as electronica, hip hop or electro pop.

The anthem with most votes wins the prize: airing for two weeks as the intro to DJ Starting from Scratch’s show on the Traffic Flow Mixshow on Flow 93.5, which Dindayal says is big enough to create strong incentive via its diverse fan base. About 250 songs had been created at press time, and the site has received over 30,000 unique hits.

Grip has also created a piece of player code, available on the microsite, which enables users to plug their tracks via blogs, Facebook, MySpace or Twitter.

A second phase to the campaign introduced broader music loops and styles last month for a chance to win cross-internet exposure: top voted tracks are played on flash banners streaming from the Honda microsite.

A recently green-lit third phase will feature a larger social community-based site and will culminate in the creation of a full Civic Nation anthem.

‘Civic owners are high creators of content,’ says Dindayal, ‘and I think it’s going to eventually become expected for the brand to be involved and have conversations. We’re taking baby steps to become part of the conversation.’