Publicis Groupe CEO Maurice Levy said the famous selfie arranged by his firm that Ellen DeGeneres took at the Academy Awards ceremony was worth from $800M to $1B in “earned media” for client Samsung due to the massive press and social media coverage.

Her photo was a group shot of actors Bradley Cooper, Brad Pitt, Jennifer Lawrence, Meyrl Streep among others. It reached more than 37M in the Twitter community.

During his April 8 presentation at the MIPTV conference in Cannes, Levy also said Publicis was behind the controversial selfie taken by baseball slugger David Ortiz earlier this month during a White House visit by the World Series winner Boston Red Sox. Another member of the team also took a picture of Ortiz and Obama.

Ortiz tweeted the image of the two and Samsung retweeted it with the message that it was “thrilled to see the special, historic moment David Ortiz captured with his Galaxy Note 3 during his White House visit."

The White House says it didn’t know anything about the Samsung promotion and expressed its objection to the company.

Levy declined to provide details about Publicis' handling of the product placements, refusing to provide the “recipe” to journalist and interviewer Kate Buckley.