Tag, You're It: Pepsi and MTV Networks Urge Fans to Live for Now

Pepsi's new global platform — the "Live for Now" cross-platform campaign — has found a friend in MTV. Given that Live for Now is music-based, with tie-ins with Nicki Minaj, Katy Perry, even Michael Jackson, it makes perfect sense for the beverage giant to tie in with MTV Networks, in addition to MTVN's siblings across the youth-skewing Viacom empire, in order to maximize the exposure of the effort.

With social and digital threaded throughout Pepsi's Live for Now (and Viacom's DNA), the upfront-inked partnership means fans will be able to tweet images with individual hashtags, relevant to various Viacom-owned TV shows and digital properties, for a chance to win prizes and get their photos featured in those shows and in Pepsi's advertising efforts in keeping with these Pinteresting, photo-tagging times we live in.

PepsiCo and Viacom are going into this knowing it's a summer-only fling, but what a summer it will be, with plenty of chances to engage. For example, fans who tweet images with hashtag #playnow enter to win a chance to be featured throughout the summer on VH1's national daily music show, Top 20 Countdown. 

Fans who tweet images with the hashtag #mtvnow all summer long enter for a chance to be one of 3 Pepsi NOW Photo Correspondents at the MTV Video Music Awards on September 6. The winners' experiences will receive on-air national exposure and will be available for viewing online at mtvlivefornow.com.

Besides MTV and VH1, the tie-in will also encompass CMT (Country Music Television), Comedy Central, and extend to the Pepsi Summer Concert Series.

"Pepsi has a long history of inviting fans to feel inspired through relevant and exciting new experiences," stated Heidi Sandreuter, a Pepsi beverage executive. Viacom ad exec Rachel Baumgarten added that Viacom networks' audiences "are constasntly connected and always on the cutting edge of culture."