14 DAY TRIAL // The Ellen DeGeneres celebrity selfie at the 2014 Oscars may have broken Twitter and become the most shared photo on the social media platform, but now it's being speculated that the entire thing was not a spontaneous thing aimed at capturing a joyous occasion of awesome people being awesome, but a carefully planned marketing event to push Samsung products.
This rumor is not only making the rounds on the Internet and being picked up by more and more outlets, but it's also supported by some cold hard facts which we'll enumerate, so you can draw the conclusion for yourself.
The most obvious piece of evidence is the fact that the phone she took the photo with helped by Bradley Cooper was a brand new Samsung, when it was proven that Ellen's phone was actually an iPhone. People are saying that the phone was carefully inserted in the photos relating the event, in order to maximize its exposure.
The Wall Street Journal thinks this is not a coincidence, as Samsung Electronics has spent over $20 million (€14.4 million) on ad breaks during the Oscars ceremony, but it may have received some promotional mileage for it.
It now appears that Samsung had negotiated for its phone to be featured in the show, according to people involved in the ceremony. In order to achieve this, DeGeneres was given a smartphone and coached on how to take photos with it, in order to make the selfie shot possible. This coaching took place during rehearsals for the actual show.
Specialists in the market think that this ended up as great media exposure for the electronics giant, the kind you can't buy with commercials. This kind of viral exposure is the stuff that advertisement agencies and their clients can only dream of.
Another proof to support this myth is the fact that Ellen, after her Oscars show hosting, went on Twitter and further pushed the Samsung phones by saying, “I gave everyone in my audience a @SamsungMobileUS Galaxy Note 3. Anyone else want one?”
So why are people getting so worked up over the Samsung Oscar plug? It's not like product placement on TV was invented last month, it's been around almost as long as television has.
The problem is that people still like to believe in fairy tales and in the fact that celebrities are very similar to us, normal folk, and every once in a while they feel the unresisting and spontaneous urge to mark a special event with a selfie. They don't want to know that everything that appears on TV is highly scripted and done for consumerist reasons, even if it is.