Samsung sponsored the Oscars, but the winner was…Apple

The star-filled selfie that host Ellen DeGeneres snapped in the audience was taken on a Samsung phone, but she used her beloved iPhone to take photos backstage.

If you didn’t notice—and it was hard not to—Samsung was a sponsor of Sunday night’s telecast of the 86th annual Academy Awards ceremony.

In fact, the most documented moment of the night, in which host Ellen DeGeneres gathered a group of stars together for a selfie that broke the retweet record as well as Twitter itself, involved the use of a Samsung Galaxy Note 3. It was in many ways an ad for the phone.

Though Samsung could dictate which phone DeGeneres used onstage (or, in this case, in the audience), the host got to say which phone she used for photos backstage, and DeGeneres opted for an iPhone for those photos. Her tweets say it all:

Sploid notes that DeGeneres is a well-known iPhone fan who even made her own game for Apple’s popular gadget. “PR people will never learn,” writer Jesus Diaz bluntly stated.

Slate put it this way: “Samsung shelled out big money to sponsor the Oscars and still managed to come out of the event looking like the brand that people only use when they’re forced to.”

This is just another example of how tricky social media can be. Should Samsung have to force the host of the Oscars to use its phone the whole night? Is there really much of a difference between the stage and what goes on behind the scenes anymore?

Social media turned out to be pretty slippery for the audience, too. Some analyses that used social media to predict who would win Sunday night were almost completely wrong, though at least one (from the firm Farsite Forecast) nailed it.

Topics: PR

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