“It may seem odd that a poorly framed, slightly blurry, group portrait
taken on a smartphone should have generated more buzz than the Oscars
themselves,” opined The Telegraph’s Harry Wallop. Time later included the
image in its one hundred most influential photos ever.
“Hey, @TheEllenShow!” Twitter employee Lauren Mitcheom tweeted
at The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “We painted a picture of you at Twitter HQ.
Come take a #selfie with us!” Twitter had commissioned a painting of the
Oscar selfie and hung it in the lobby.
“I thought it was a pretty cheap stunt myself,” President Barack Obama,
the previous record holder for most retweets, teased Ellen on a telecast
from the White House. About a year and a half earlier, upon his re-election
victory in 2012, Obama had had his staff tweet a romantic shot of him and
Michelle Obama in a romantic embrace.
“Four more years,” read the tagline; the image captured the world
record at the time by surpassing 500,000 retweets.
How much was it worth for its copyright owners, Ellen DeGeneres and
Bradley Cooper, who ended up snapping the photo? “The earned media—
all the buzz which has been done around the Oscar [selfie]—represents
roughly a value between $800 million to $1 billion,” Maurice Lévy,
chairman of the global PR agency working with Samsung, Publicis Groupe,
estimated, “because it has been all over the world.”
The number was contentious. In the traditional world of commercials, a
thirty-second nugget of airtime cost about $1.8 million. So why would a
selfie fetch an infinitely higher value?
“It does seem high, but if you think about the value of customers and
social shares, then potentially that valuation is correct,” Jonah Berger, an
associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s
Wharton School of Business, told NBC News.
In an age when anyone could skip commercials on video devices,
studies were suggesting that a word-of-mouth or a social-media ad was
worth perhaps ten times more than a paid one. NBC pointed out that
Samsung would have had to pay a “king’s ransom” to get all those stars into
the same advertisement. And while the Samsung logo wasn’t visible in the
selfie, the company still got nine hundred Twitter mentions a minute during
the Oscars.
“Samsung is telling better stories and just plain out-innovating its arch-
rival in Cupertino,” Advertising Age wrote. Adweek determined through