People are still talking about Samsung’s advertising campaign that took over the 86th annual Academy Awards. Some might say money can’t buy this much press, but clearly that’s not the case — beyond all of the Samsung commercials that ran during the Oscars, host Ellen DeGeneres also used a Samsung smartphone while on stage and while mingling with the crowd on Sunday night. People just can’t seem to stop talking about it.
At one point Ellen handed off her Galaxy Note 3 to actor Bradley Cooper, who used it to snap and tweet a star-studded selfie that has now been retweeted more than 3 million times.
Long story short, Samsung’s Oscars spend was a bet that paid off big time.
So how much did all this cost the South Korea-based consumer tech giant? $20 million, which for Samsung is next to nothing. It amounts to just one-quarter of one percent of Samsung’s fourth-quarter operating profit, which totaled $7.7 billion.
We would say that’s money well spent.
That $20 million bought Samsung a slew of ads that aired during the biggest awards show of the year. It also bought Samsung the promotions that saw Ellen take an on-stage Oscars selfie and the aforementioned Cooper selfie, which is the most retweeted photo of all time by a landslide.
Beyond that, it bought a mountain of coverage in the mainstream media and on tech blogs that is still growing. Good press… bad press… remarkably, unbelievably, annoyingly stupid press… the coverage just won’t stop.
And all for a sum that, to Samsung, is mere pennies. In fact, it might be the equivalent of you or I buying lunch at Applebee’s.
