The Selfie That Shook the World
WAS ELLEN DEGENERES A White Glove candidate or not? The marketers
at Samsung disagreed.
A dedicated iPhone fan, she’d be hard to convert, some thought.
Internal profiling had shown that iPhone fans typically didn’t want to invest
the time to learn Android.
But the comedian was likable and had influence. And the timing was
right. Ellen was going to host the 2014 Oscars. Approaching her was risky,
they decided, but worth it.
Samsung was in its fifth year as an Oscar sponsor, going back to 2009.
In 2014 Samsung had spent an estimated $20 million on ads, giving
Pendleton’s marketers five and a half minutes of airtime.
Backstage, just off the main Oscars stage, in an iconic cocktail and
coffee lounge called the Greenroom, stars were greeted by a giant Oscar
statuette and a wall mosaic of eighty-six Samsung televisions, smartphones,
and tablets. On the other side of the lounge, celebrities could take a selfie
with the Twitter Mirror, a mount consisting of a Galaxy Note and a rococo
frame, and then send it out from the Academy’s Twitter account.
Two Samsung marketers were dispatched to try to obtain the ultimate
product placement: a photo of a Galaxy in the hands of the Oscar host.
“These things are like a lightning strike—you can’t plan for something
like that to happen,” said a marketer in Pendleton’s office, “but what you do
is to put yourself in the position to be able to take advantage of things like
this when they do happen.”
“Todd provided the leadership,” he said. Todd sent Jo Lovato to
negotiate the amount of time Samsung product placements would appear on