In case you weren't tipped off by the perfect placement of a shiny new Samsung Galaxy Note 3 in the center of the TV frame when Oscars host Ellen DeGeneres "spontaneously" decided to take the now-famous celeb-packed selfie that temporarily broke Twitter - that was big for Samsung, though the company denies it paid for product placement.

Apparently the blatant marketing move - by the South Korean company that coincidentally sponsored the Academy Awards telecast and also ran ads during commercial breaks - went right over many peoples' heads.

To be clear, while the selfie was semi-spontaneous, the phones were supplied as part of the sponsorship agreement for the Oscars between Samsung and ABC. According to the Wall Street Journal, Samsung's media buying firm Starcom MediaVest negotiated with ABC to have the Galaxy Note 3 integrated into the show.

DeGeneres reportedly had previously mentioned she wanted to take selfies during the Oscars, and ABC suggested she use one of the smartphones Samsung gave the network. During rehearsals for the live Oscar telecast, Samsung execs even trained Ellen on how to use the phone, according to WSJ's anonymous sources. The rest was Oscars history -- and a big marketing win for Samsung.

The Most Retweeted Selfie In History

If you somehow missed it, Ellen's turn at hosting the 86th Academy Awards involved several wacky spontaneous bits. In keeping with her "nicest person in the world" personality, Ellen toned down the jabs at celebrities and made up for it by doing spontaneous audience-participation segments, like when she ordered pizza for the front-row megacelebs and later collected a sizeable tip for the unsuspecting delivery guy.

The other major audience-participation bit was of course the celebrity selfie. It included Bradley Cooper, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Kevin Spacey, Ellen, herself, and at least the partial faces of half a dozen other movie stars. After taking the photo on the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, Ellen tweeted it and announced that she wanted everyone to retweet her. Twitter was flooded by so many retweets -- a record of more than 1.3 million retweets, just within the first hour -- that parts of the social network actually crashed.

Later, discerning eyes noticed that Ellen's personal backstage photos with Oscar winners were being tweeted from an iPhone, which later was revealed to be Ellen's personal device. At that point, it became clear -- if the simple optics of the telecast weren't blatantly clear enough -- that the "best selfie ever" that broke Twitter was pretty much a product placement by Samsung, even if it wasn't completely staged or explicitly directed or paid for by Samsung.

Even without Ellen's help backstage, Samsung pulled off a marketing coup with that single picture. According to Latin Post's previous report, data marketing company Kontera said the selfie had been retweeted more than 3 million times since after the telecast, and even without #Samsung being in Ellen's tweet, mentions of the "Samsung" name multiplied "27 times over" with over 900 per minute during the Oscars stunt.

Samsung didn't comment to the WSJ report, but advertising tracker Kantar Media said it estimated that commercials during the telecast cost about $1.8 million per 30 seconds this year, suggesting that Samsung might have spent a record $18 million on commercial time during the Oscars telecast alone. No word yet on how much the product placement might have cost (though Samsung claims it didn't pay Ellen, and the entire stunt was "organic") -- or whether Ellen got to keep "her" Galaxy Note 3 after the show.

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