Back in April, PepsiCo announced a global marketing platform, a music-based initiative dubbed Live For Now, with Nicki Minaj as its launch brand ambassador. Already incorporating Twitter as its key social partner for Live for Now, Pepsi is now looking to tap into music fans tuning into the Video Music Awards by signing up for MTV's advertising product, Reverb, which places ads on television, MTV's website and its new WatchWith social TV app simultaneously.

The year-old app, downloaded close to one million times, lets fans follow Facebook comments and tweets about a particular program (along with information about past episodes) and as of three months ago, banner ads were introduced. So tonight, during the MTV Video Music Awards, rapper Minaj will appear in a new Pepsi commercial at 8:30 pm and anyone on the mobile app or MTV.com will see the interactive ad, too. (Minaj recently held a Live for Now concert in New York with Pepsi and Fuse.)

"It is a little bit of the Wild West but what we know the adoption and usage is only growing. We are going to have to have a solution," observed Chad Stubbs, senior director of media for beverages at PepsiCo, to the Wall Street Journal.Continue reading...

Trending on YouTube: The Spike Jonze-directed new single from the Beastie Boys' Hot Sauce Committee Part 2 album, "Don't Play No Game That I Can't Win" featuring Santigold. As MTV.com notes, there's a NSFW 11-minute version. (Update: you can now purchase the action figures for $750 — for charity.)

Detroit's year of bad news just got worse: the car industry isn't only losing sales from current buyers depressed by the economy -- it's losing the future.

A new J.D. Power report says teens and twenty-somethings lack what was once thought to be the genetic desire to own a car.

The study, which analyzed hundreds of thousands of conversations on blogs and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, showed young people have a poor image of the auto industry. The bad economy and high gas prices could be to blame. But J.D. Power blames social media itself: "with the advent of social media and other forms of electronic communities, teens perceive less of a need to physically congregate, and less of a need for a mode of transportation.”

Of course, research done among social media diehards that finds social media is more popular than driving may be suffering from an echo-chamber effect. People chained to Facebook and Twitter may indeed be too busy to go out. But the trend is real, and has been building: The New York Times reported last year that fewer 16-year-olds now rush to get their licenses as soon as they're eligible.Continue reading...