Who was the big winner in Ellen DeGeneres' epic Oscar selfie? Samsung!

Ellen DeGeneres’ celeb-studded selfie from the most-watched Oscars telecast in a decade was a landmark social media moment. But guess who gained the most? Samsung.

According to reports, Samsung spent an estimated $20 million on ads to run during breaks in the Academy Awards broadcast on Sunday night. But what was the brand’s golden moment? WhenOscars host Ellen DeGenereshanded a Samsung device to Bradley Cooper and asked him to take a picture with several other stars crowding around.

[caption id=“attachment_78428” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Ellen DeGeneres’ mega Oscars selfie that sent Twitter into a tizzy.[/caption]

Besides Cooper and DeGeneres, Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Spacey, Julia Roberts, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt also crowded into the frame. Ellen asked viewers to help her set a retweet record, and they quickly complied.

By Monday afternoon, it had been retweeted some 2.8 million times, shattering the previous record of 810,000 retweets for the photo of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama hugging after the 2012 election. Twitter was humming at 254,644 tweets per minute after DeGeneres’ request, andbriefly crashed too.

While the stunt felt spontaneous, it wasn’t entirely unplanned, notes Wall Street Journal. As part of its sponsorship and ad pact for the Oscars with ABC, the TV network airing the show, Samsung and its media buying firm Starcom MediaVest negotiated to have its Galaxy smartphone integrated into the show.

Samsung insists Ellen DeGeneres’s mass celebrity selfie at the Oscars was not an orchestrated marketing stunt, but says it is “delighted” with how it went.Samsung says it was Oscar host Ellen DeGeneres’s idea to use their product forthe selfie seen round the world. They just provided the hardware.

“She captured something that nobody expected,” a Samsung spokesperson said.

But then, would the world’s most retweeted photo have been shot by an iPhone if Samsung hadn’t been a commercial sponsor of the Academy Awards?

Samsung, was a big presence at the Oscars besides being a commercial sponsor. The company gave its phones to student presenters and encouraged them to tweet and post on Instagram with them. Dozens of Samsung phones, tablets and TVs were used to make a digital photo display in the backstage green room.

ABC said Samsung did not pay specifically for use of the camera in DeGeneres’ selfie segment and the company wasn’t explicitly named on the air as the stunt unfolded, but it is a noticeably larger device than an iPhone.

A spokeswoman for ABC Nicole Marostica said once producers decided to do the segment, it made more sense to use a Samsung product because the company was an Oscars sponsor.

“They were just lucky beneficiaries of the whole thing,” Marostica said.

Samsung said Monday that it was donating $1.5 million each to DeGeneres’ favorite charities, St. Jude’s and the Humane Society. The company, in a statement, did not directly address its role in seeing that its phone got the starring role.

“Ellen was given a choice of what she wanted to do,” said Oscars co-producer Craig Zadan. “One moment she wanted to do the iPhone, the next moment the Samsung. I think it was nothing except it was an arbitrary last-minute decision, let’s go with the Samsung. Believe me, everything was given a lot of thought. The telephone was not given any thought.”

Even more spontaneous was the galaxy of stars surrounding Ellen in the selfie shot. It was just supposed to be Streep, Zadan said. “I don’t think that Ellen even knew that all of those other stars would get out of their seats and jump in and be in the picture,” he said.

The use of the Samsung phone “is a wonderful example of product placement,” said Tim Calkins, marketing professor at the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern University.

“It worked because it’s not a formal placement,” Calkins said. “The best product placements seem natural and this seemed natural.”

Samsung is the worldwide leader in smartphones but trails Apple in the United States, and the company has been aggressively going after the U.S. market.

And what a win this was for Samsung!

with inputs from Associated Press