Future Tense

Ellen Flogs Samsung All Night, Switches to iPhone Backstage

Samsung paid Ellen DeGeneres enough to turn Sunday night’s Oscars telecast into an extended commercial for its Galaxy phone, which she used to take a selfie that succeeded in breaking a Twitter retweets record:

Ellen Degeneres selfie tweet

Screenshot / Tweetbot

But apparently they couldn’t pay her enough to use it backstage. Like so many celebrity smartphone shills before her, DeGeneres apparently switched to her iPhone when she thought no one was looking. She sent this tweet 12 minutes earlier—note the “via Twitter for iPhone” stamp:

Ellen DeGeneres backstage tweet

Screenshot / Tweetbot

And this one a little before that:

Ellen iPhone tweet

Screenshot / Tweetbot

To recap, 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. The only question now is whether DeGeneres will stay mum about the switcheroo, like Oprah did after she tweeted her love for the Microsoft Surface from an iPad, or blame it on a Drake-obsessed hacker, like BlackBerry “creative director” Alicia Keys did when people noticed she seemed to prefer tweeting from her iPhone. Sorry, I mean former BlackBerry creative director Alicia Keys.

 Previously in Slate: