A few hours before mtvU was scheduled to invade, Mother Nature staged her own invasion. A fierce 4 a.m. storm moved through Boca Raton and rearranged the plans of everyone involved. MTV’s newest subsidiary mtvU, a channel devoted entirely to college students, and airing on college campuses, staged the invasion with promises of an outdoor village full of sponsors and a nighttime concert with Muse and Razorlight.
This was the second forced change for MTV – the first was the September 2004 Rock the Vote tour. The bands that were scheduled to play cancelled due to Hurricane Jeanne and were replaced by local musicians.
High winds and lightning damaged the stage that had been set up several days in advance behind the University Center. The entire rear section of the stage’s roof had collapsed.
The bad weather caused more problems for mtvU who were scheduled to set up a “Day Village” in the Housing Lawn. Because their sponsor booths contain some pricey electronic equipment, some booths were moved into the Grand Palm Room in the UC. The switch was done at 7 a.m. when clouds still threatened to drop rain onto the high-tech booths and end the whole Campus Invasion tour before it even started.
Lori Raimondo, Senior Director of Marketing for mtvU, said, “We come prepared for this type of thing.” She explained, “there is a bit of a Campus Invasion curse.” Several of the starter Universities have gotten rained on over past years of the Campus Invasion series. “We plan for one rain day for each tour, hopefully this one is it,” Raimondo said.
MTV has for years reduced the amount of music that is featured on its main channel. For years they have specialized their channels, introducing MTV2 and an MTV in almost every continent. Now they have continued to “invade” campuses with mtvU. A day long festival is concluded with music, instead of an entire day of music.
“mtvU is something we’ve wanted to do for the past ten years,” said Stephen Friedman, General Manager of mtvU. Friedman explained that MTV feels students are more “experimental” and “open” to not only new bands, but also new forms of music.
“Having sponsors helps to keep our cost low,” he said. “Not many bands are playing for under $10 these days.” U2 charges over a hundred dollars for tickets these days, and other “big name” bands can cost around $150.
While tickets cost $5 for students, the t-shirts after the show were selling for $30.
The sponsors that set up shop indoors were Herbal Essence, Butterfinger, Nintendo, Ford and Big Red. Each erected a steel framed booth and set their products out.
Herbal Essence had a booth that allowed the average student to have their picture taken, and then digitally change their image to look slightly better than they appear in real life. The Nintendo Lounge offered gamers a chance to kill each other repeatedly while seated in plush chairs.
Big Red was ironing images and Greek letters onto free t-shirts, while Ford got the creative juices flowing with the retro return of Shrinky-Dink technology to custom make key chains on the spot.
Several challengers showed up for the Butterfinger booth. The peanut-buttery candy bar producers unrolled an inflatable drag strip where competitors were bungeed to the back wall and ran away as fast as possible trying to grab beanbags.
Across campus in the now sparse Housing Lawn where all of this was scheduled to happen a lone obelisk stood. The air-filled structure was labeled CitiBank and covered in glossy photos of designer credit cards.
A young man in an mtvU t-shirt braced himself as Nicoi Ladouche climbed his way towards the CitiBank card that marked the peak. “Touch the logo,” he yelled.
Ladouche, a Nursing major, smacked the credit card image and dropped to the ground quickly. He turned to his friends, “That was hard, yo.”
By noon mtvU workers realized the stage was not fixable and made the call to bring the show indoors. Raimondo said, “Muse puts on a great light show, from our perspective it’s going to be a great show.”
Students were recruited to push rolling boxes full of gear from the stage into the auditorium of the UC alongside mtvU roadies. Within a few hours the mtvU crew and FAU students managed to move an entire venue several thousand feet.
“FAU has a great relationship with music,” Friedman added, “We have a great relationship to FAU.”
In the end mtvU and FAU delivered exactly what they promised, a village full of sponsors that branded students with their corporate logos in exchange for cheap admission to a concert featuring two bands that are fairly new to the U.S. scene.
