Jake Coyle

AUSTIN, TEXAS — A charitable marketing program that paid homeless people to carry Wi-Fi signals at South By Southwest has drawn widespread debate at the annual Austin conference and around the country. BBH Labs, a unit of the global marketing agency BBH, gave 13 people from Austin’s Front Steps Shelter mobile Wi-Fi devices and T-shirts that announced “I am a 4G Hotspot.” The company paid them $20 up front and a minimum of $50 a day for about six hours work, said Emma Cookson, chairwoman of BBH New York. She called the experiment a modernized version of homeless selling...

NEW YORK — MTV debuted its inaugural O Music Awards eschewing award show traditions and even its own broadcasting power. A newfangled, multiplatform event, the O Music Awards aired Thursday night on not any of the MTV Networks but on Facebook, MTV websites and mobile apps. The live, hour-long webcast was billed as a fan-friendly celebration of digital music — an attempt by the ever-youthful network to officially fete the new arenas of music culture. Embracing the amorphousness of the digital world, MTV kept things so unstructured that even the “O” in the show’s title was intentionally left undefined...