If you watch CNN, ABC, BBC, CBC Newsworld, or any of 120 other radio and TV stations, then you'll know that the 2003 Rock Paper Scissors World Championships will be held at Toronto club the Kool Haus on Oct. 25. What you might not have realized is that the whole thing is a great lesson in how savvy PR can achieve millions of dollars worth of publicity on a shoestring budget.

"From day one, this has always been a big mass experiment for us," says Graham Walker, who with his brother Doug, conceived of the tournament last summer during a routine argument at the family cottage. "Doug and I have had lots of thoughts and perspectives on viral marketing and how that can work and what doesn't work. This whole thing has been a test-bed for a lot of ideas and concepts around viral marketing."

One year later, the pair find themselves at the helm of an empire. Competitors from as far away as New Jersey and London, U.K. are scheduled to appear. Talks are in the works with a media sponsor and other sponsors are currently signing deals (Xbox and Molson signed on last year). An official referee certification program is underway, and the prize pot has tripled from last year, to $7,500.

How did they get this far?

For starters the pair - both veterans of the Toronto advertising biz - were pretty sure their story would be a perfect novelty news item in the mainstream media, "kind of like the water-skiing squirrel you see at the end of the news." They also knew the event could have mass underground appeal.

Doug's wife, Lisa Walker, an account manager with Toronto's Hill & Knowlton, assisted with traditional media relations which lead to appearances on both Canada AM and Regis and Kelly, front page stories in the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen (twice), a six-photo spread in the Toronto Star and a double-page spread in the Boston Globe.

"To a large extent, we realized that there was so much negativity in all of the news when this came out - people were still scared of 9/11, there were terrorist acts, impending war, a terrible economy - and this was kind of just pure fun. A real feel-good, positive, no-real-strings-attached kind of event," says Doug.

A thorough Web site, worldrps.com, provided up-to-the-minute news to event attendees and the press alike and served as a link with their other media push: a PR campaign targeting the blog (i.e. Web log) community. This presented a learning curve to the brothers.

"It has to be a pull mechanism," Graham says. "The bloggers, in essence, have to find you. If you start trying to seed them, they feel they're being sold to. You have to present a compelling proposition that they instantly want to talk about. And once you find out what the proposition is that people respond to, then you can actually start pushing it on people because you realize what they're naturally interested in."

So right now, for example, the brothers are concentrating on promoting the idea of being world champion among a group of bloggers in the greater Toronto area, because "who doesn't want to be the world champion of something?"