Tech bloggers do plenty of annoying things. Sometimes they tell multi-billion dollar companies what they “NEED” to do, sometimes they completely miss the big picture when reporting on a story, and sometimes they focus on “speeds and feeds” instead of considering how most users will actually respond to a new product. BGR is sometimes guilty of various annoyances just like every other site that covers the tech space, but there’s one blog crime we try to avoid that again reared its ugly head on Sunday night.
As we’re sure most of you know, The Oscars took place on Sunday night. And as anyone who watched undoubtedly knows, Samsung dumped a ton of money into sponsoring the event.
The vendor’s commercials aired throughout the night, its logo was seen all over the place, and it even paid Oscars host Ellen DeGeneres to use a Galaxy smartphones on-stage during her performance on Sunday night.
In fact, one of the “selfies” Ellen took with a bunch of celebrities quickly became the most retweeted tweet of all time.
If only Bradley’s arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars pic.twitter.com/C9U5NOtGap
— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) March 3, 2014
The photo, of course, was captured with a Galaxy smartphone.
As is the case with many celebrities, Ellen uses an iPhone as her personal phone. While backstage between monologues, Ellen tweeted a few times from her iPhone, as many sites including Business Insider and MarketingLand noted.
Whenever Samsung, Nokia, BlackBerry or any other smartphone company uses a celebrity to hawk their wares, tech bloggers immediately search for instances of that celebrity using an iPhone. Then they tweet about it. Then other tech bloggers see those tweets and they post about it.
This, of course, is ridiculous and annoying.
Here on planet Earth, companies often pay celebrities to promote their products. These promotions are intended to help the company increase sales by tying a familiar and beloved face to said products or services.
Still with us?
Often times, the celebrities paid to promote these products in a TV commercial, at an event or in some other advertisement don’t actually use the products they are promoting in their real lives. Shocking though it may be, this is how the world works.
Shaquille O’Neal, believe it or not, does not drive a Buick. Michael Jordan probably doesn’t always wear Hanes undershirts. Beyonce and Jessica Alba almost certainly don’t use L’Oreal hair dye. Bob Dole might not even have erectile dysfunction.
And Ellen DeGeneres, as it turns out, doesn’t use a Samsung smartphone.
Guess what — many of the actors in Apple’s various iPhone and iPad commercials probably don’t use Apple’s mobile devices in real life. In commercials, however, they are paid to show them off, pretend to love them, film home movies with them or even climb mountains with them. It’s called advertising.
