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Add Twitter, Samsung Electronics and Coca-Cola to the list of winners at Sunday night's Oscars ceremony for their product-placement coups. Twitter, the microblogging site, was flooded with traffic after host Ellen DeGeneres waded into the audience for a photo during the Los Angeles event, telecast on Walt Disney's ABC.
She gathered up Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Spacey, Jared Leto and Lupita Nyong'o, and handed her Samsung smartphone to Bradley Cooper to take the shot. The impromptu selfie set the record for the most-retweeted post ever and temporarily disrupted Twitter's service, bringing the microblogging site lots of publicity. "We crashed and broke Twitter," DeGeneres said later from the stage. "We made history."
The awards themselves were dominated by 12 Years a Slave, which won three Oscars including best picture and best supporting actress for Nyong'o, and Gravity, which took home seven statuettes. Leto was recognised for his supporting role in Dallas Buyers Club. Brad Pitt, who produced 12 Years a Slave, was in the photo too.
By Tuesday, the selfie had been retweeted more than 3 million times, crushing the previous record set by US President Barack Obama after his re-election in November, 2012. His 'Four more years' post has been retweeted more than 780,000 times.
"If only Bradley's arm was longer," DeGeneres posted on Twitter, and "Best photo ever" to go with the photo. The photo also got almost 1.9 million likes on Facebook.
Pizza Party
Coca-Cola also got some unexpected publicity when DeGeneres ordered pizza for the show's attendees. The box, with a logo of the brand printed on the side, was shown on the telecast. The telecast attracted an average of 43 million viewers, up by about 6 per cent from last year, for its biggest audience in a decade, according to ABC, which cited Nielsen data.
Coca-Cola pulled out of this season's Oscars after years of hawking Diet Coke to the show's female-skewed television audience. PepsiCo filled the void, pushing its Pepsi-Cola mini cans with a cast of big-name stars like Cuba Gooding Jr.
So, it was a boon for Coke that its logo caught the cameras as Ellen and a starstruck delivery man carried pizza from Big Mama's and Papa's Pizzeria to the likes of Pitt, Harrison Ford and Kerry Washington.
'Surprised, Delighted'
"Big Mama's & Big Papa's Pizzeria is a long-standing Coca-Cola customer," Lauren Thompson, a spokeswoman for Atlanta-based Coca-Cola, says in an e-mail. "We were surprised and delighted to see them appear during last night's Academy Awards and think they did an outstanding job of bringing some extra fun and excitement to the show."
Big Mama's, a Los Angeles-based chain, was not forewarned. The restaurant's Hollywood outlet received the pizza order that night much as it often does, according to Wayne Grigorian, who works in the corporate office for the privately-held chain. Normally, he says, the delivery people drop the pies off at the backstage door. This time the employee was invited into the theatre.
"Ìt was a pleasant surprise," Grigorian says in a telephone interview. "We're getting bombarded by telephone calls and e-mails." The company is featuring shots from the Oscars on its web page.
Product Integration
However, Ellen's use of a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 phone for the group photo was not happenstance. Samsung, based in Suwon, South Korea, was a sponsor of the Oscars and used the show to introduce its 'One Samsung' campaign highlighting a range of products, including the Galaxy Note Pro tablet, the Galaxy S5 phone, the Gear 2 smartwatch and a curved ultra-high-definition TV.
The Oscar sponsorship included the use of Samsung's products during the show, says Ashley Wimberly, a US spokeswoman for the company.
However, "what that product integration was going to be, we weren't 100 per cent clear on," Wimberly says.
Samsung has phoned DeGeneres and suggested making a $1 donation to her favourite charities for every retweet, Wimberly says. She agreed, and Samsung is donating $3 million to be split between the Humane Society and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
"We wanted to say thanks for doing this," Wimberly says. "It was an incredible moment."
There were 17.1 million Oscar-related tweets in all during the show, San Francisco-based Twitter claims. ABC had, last month, reached a deal with Twitter's Amplify, which promotes televised events in real time, becoming the last of the four major American networks to sign on.
The Academy, which organises the awards, said on its Twitter account, "Sorry, our bad," taking credit for the outage.
