Happy, shiny, very marketable people
Hollywood’s annual ode to cinema this year was as draggy, bloated and self-congratulatory as ever – leavened only by the light-hearted shenanigans engendered by Ellen DeGeneres, the “hostess with the mostest”.
We use that cliched epithet quite literally: Ellen will go down in the annals of pop culture history as the owner of a self-portrait that’s been crowned the most retweeted tweet of all time.
Some context, in case you’ve just emerged from the rock you’ve been cowering under: Midway during the live broadcast of the 86th Academy Awards, Ellen was somehow compelled to dive into her A-lister audience to take a group selfie (and if you need to Google “selfie”, this story probably isn’t for you.)
The result is truly one for the road. The smartphone-taken snapshot showcases the seemingly genuine grins from the who’s who of Hollywood today: Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Kevin Spacey, Bradley Cooper, Channing Tatum, Jared Leto and Lupita Nyong'o – the latter’s stratospheric rise to fame being an entire sociological module unto itself.
When Ellen uploaded the picture onto her Twitter account, it promptly went viral: More than 2.2 million users retweeted her post. As the social media engineer of the phenomenon put it herself: “We crashed and broke Twitter. We have made history," Ellen very helpfully informed the assembled crowd later during the broadcast.
Here’s the key takeaway from this otherwise cutesy and harmless episode: Like applying no makeup-makeup, it takes a lot of planning for something so stage-managed to come off as “spontaneous”. (To be fair, Samsung denies any involvement in the selfie, but admits it is “delighted” by the publicity.)
The host must have been acutely aware that Samsung was a major sponsor of this year’s awards; no prizes for guessing the manufacturer of the smartphone she was using to take the by-now iconic picture. Ellen DeGeneres and her handlers are no fools, and neither is Samsung.
Pause for a moment and consider the selfie’s dizzying digital feedback loop: Oscar viewers witnessed Ellen taking a photo using a sponsor’s smartphone on live television; who then proceeded to upload it onto a social media platform; which was then viewed and retweeted by her followers; leading her to announce live, on the very same show, of the tweet’s record-busting status.
Surely, marketers couldn’t have wished for anything more buzz-worthy than that. Social media and – not to blow too loudly on our own trumpet – online publications have never been in a better position to capture the eyeballs of the people who matter. It’s exciting times ahead!