Ellen Degeneres surprised her studio audience Friday during her daytime talk show — by giving every one of them a new Kindle Fire tablet! In a daily segment called “12 Days of Giveaways,” she’s been treating her audience each day to a big bundle of Christmas presents. Friday’s bundle was worth over $2,000 , but she saved the Kindle Fire tablets for last! As her audience cheered with excitement, she smiled and said “Have a wonderful weekend…”
But I liked the way Ellen teased the audience first. She’d introduced an a capella singing group to perform the song “Silver Bells” — but after several false starts, they just couldn’t find the right key. Suddenly a real bell went off — the signal for Ellen’s gift giveway — and a giant dancing Christmas wreath appeared on the stage. The audience cheered as an Andy Williams song played in the background — “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” — as stagehands came out dressed in candy-cane pin strips and elfish-green skirts, and Ellen danced with the wreath.
In fact, the Kindle Fire almost got lost in the excitement, since Ellen handed out so many other gifts. She’d already told the audience that each of them would receive a $200 gift card for coffee brewers, tickets to a new Cirque du Soleil show, a GPS system, and a trip to a new resort spa that’s opening in Carlsbad, California. And then she told that audiece that, finally, they’d be getting a copy of her book. (“I might be biased, but if there’s one book you should read this holiday season, or year, or really ever, it should be my book…”) But of course, she still had one more gift…
“Now, how would you like access to over 18 million movies, TV shows, music, magazines, apps, games — and especially my book? Now you can have it all on this season’s hottest e-reader, the Kindle Fire, everybody!”
(The audience cheers)
I have to wonder if Ellen is secretly a fan of the Kindle, or if the bit give-away was Amazon’s idea? I know Oprah Winfrey was always a fan of the Kindle, and she’d made a point of giving them away to her audience. In one show, Oprah even tracked down the audience for a show she’d taped two and a half years earlier — because she felt like they’d been disappointed because she hadn’t given them enough gifts. Now that Oprah has retired, maybe Ellen’s just trying to continue that Kindle-giving tradition.
Ellen seems to have a good relationship with Amazon, since she wrote a “guest blog post” on Amazon’s Kindle blog back in October to promote her new book. Amazon later named it one of their “best books of 2011l,”
and even two months later, it’s still ranked #236 on Amazon’s list of the best-selling items in the Kindle Store. The title of Ellen’s book?