Did David Ortiz dupe President Obama on selfie?

Red Sox slugger David Ortiz took a selfie with President Obama Tuesday when the World Series champs visited the White House. Turns out, he was doing it for Samsung.

|
Larry Downing/Reuters
President Obama poses with star player David Ortiz for a 'selfie' as he welcomes the 2013 World Series champion Boston Red Sox to the South Lawn of the White House in Washington Tuesday.

The Boston Red Sox visited the White House this week so President Obama could honor them for their 2013 World Series victory. Such big league sports team appearances are always a festive occasion for administration staffers and the players themselves, and this one was no exception. Everybody was laughing and having a good time and Mr. Obama himself poked fun at the fact that many of the BoSox appeared shorn of the Amish-quality beards they sported during last year’s playoffs.

“Now, I thought I invited the Red Sox here today, but there must be a mistake because I don’t recognize all these clean-shaven guys,” said the president.

In the scrum after the remarks everybody got to shake Obama’s hand and so forth, and then slugger David Ortiz whipped out his cellphone and took a selfie with the president. Maybe you’ve seen it on Twitter or Instagram. It was an instant classic of the genre, with the two men holding up an “Obama” Sox jersey (number 44, get it?) while the rest of the team grinned in the background.

But here’s the problem: Ortiz had just signed a promotion deal with Samsung. The electronic giant thanked him on Twitter and picked up the shot for all its social media feeds. In essence, the player had suckered the president of the United States into appearing in his ad.

And as an ad, it worked. The photo was retweeted over 34,000 times from the Samsung Mobile USA twitter feed alone. To anyone who asked, Samsung officials replied that the picture had been taken with a Galaxy Note 3, according to The Boston Globe.

But as a matter of public relations, this may have been a big mistake. Reaction on sports radio and elsewhere to Ortiz’s move has been pretty heated. Over at Business Insider Joshua Green had a pretty typical reaction.

“Duping the president of the United States into participating with your social media campaign has to be a new low for advertising,” writes Mr. Green, adding that Ortiz should be embarrassed for “a Yankee move.”

OK, calm down, here are some thoughts on this.

First, if Obama wants this to stop, it will. The president of the United States controls their own image for licensing purposes. A call from the White House counsel’s office to Samsung is all it takes. That’s what happened in 2010 when a clothing firm posted a giant photo in Times Square showing Obama wearing one of its coats.

But, second, does Obama really care? He’s got lots of better things to worry about, and in any case all presidents are complicit to some extent in publicity for particular firms, if it suits their purposes. Broadcast appearances on talk shows, for instance, are huge for the broadcasters involved, and often occur only after specific lobbying, as Politico made clear Wednesday in a piece about how Obama ended up on actor Zach Galifianakis’s satirical “Between Two Ferns” talks show.

And third, the Red Sox are really popular. Really, really popular. This kills us to say, as we are not fans of either the Sox or the Yankees, to put it mildly. But as Nate Silver writes Wednesday on his new FiveThirtyEight site, if you take the number of Google searches related to each major league team, and divide it by the size of its metro TV market, Boston wins. It beats the Yankees, the Mets, the Braves, everybody.

“The Red Sox are a clear No. 1 and are about three times as popular as you’d guess from the size of the Boston media market,” writes Mr. Silver.

Sob. Well, at least they lost on opening day to the Baltimore Orioles.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Did David Ortiz dupe President Obama on selfie?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Decoder/2014/0402/Did-David-Ortiz-dupe-President-Obama-on-selfie
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe