Days after Reese Witherspoon received a best actress Oscar nomination for her role in Walk The Line last year, she received another gift: A $900 Nokia 8801 cell phone. Attached was a letter that read, "Congratulations on your nomination, who are you going to call?"

Nice gesture? Absolutely. Altruistic? Not at all. Rather, Nokia executives were hoping that by giving its phone to Witherspoon, along with other Oscar nominees, its products would get a free boost of buzz.

In Hollywood parlance, this practice is called celebrity seeding, and it's nothing new: Consumer product companies have always wanted to be associated with certain celebrities. But cell manufacturers really, really want a star's luster to rub off on their phones. In part, that's because the phone business is ultracompetitive, and in part, because phones are perfectly designed for this kind of endorsement. You may not be able to fit into Mischa Barton's clothes, and you probably can't afford them either. But the pink Motorola RAZR she carries? Practically free with certain service plans.

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Some manufacturers turn to outside marketing firms to get their phones in stars' hands. Palm, for instance, hired Avantgarde, a San Francisco-based marketing company, to outfit stars like Matthew Broderick, Mario Batali and Peter Gabriel, among others, with its line of Treo smartphones. Others go in-house: Motorola runs its own invitation-only showroom in West Hollywood, designed solely for A-listers.

But while the end goal is always the same, seeding strategies vary. Among them: the gift bag approach, which is particularly popular during award season. Though the technique dates back to the 1970s, the bags have become more prevalent and their contents more elaborate in recent years. And in some cases, the concept has evolved from the gift bag to the gift suite, where products are laid out for the taking--and, unsurprisingly, photographed as soon as their snatched--care of gifting firms like The Silver Spoon and Backstage Creations.

Take Research In Motion's BlackBerry, a Tinseltown favorite on offer at this January's Backstage Creations Golden Globes suite. Set amidst a throng of other products, including Lladro sculptures, Bolzano handbags and Bora Bora getaways, the BlackBerry Pearl went home with 30 Rock's Tina Fey, Dreamgirls' Jennifer Hudson and Medium's Patricia Arquette, among others.

Getting goods into a gift bag or gift suite will set a company back $50,000, at most, in entrance fees, plus the cost of the products. That's a bargain when you consider that one shot of a star holding the item could land in tabloid destinations like CBS' Entertainment Tonight, which charges $115,000 for a 30-second spot, or Time's People magazine, where a full-page ad costs $240,000.

But not everyone is a fan of gift bags. Just because a celeb picks up a bag with your phone in it, there's no guarantee they'll use it, says Jon Maron, who runs entertainment marketing for LG Electronics MobileComm. "It could end up with the makeup artist, the next door neighbor or even Grandma," he says. "You just never know who is going to end up with the product when you stick it in a gift bag."

Motorola's David Pinsky, who oversees his company's entertainment business, has a similar complaint, which is why his company has set up a private Hollywood showroom.

"We invite celebrities into our office--we deal with them directly, we don't deal with their assistants, publicists or managers--and they look at the products that we have to offer," he explains. "They find something that they find visually appealing, technologically appealing and that suits their lifestyle, and they walk out the door with a product they want."

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Whether any of of that will translate to sales is harder to measure. While some seeded phones have performed well in the market, most notably the now-ubiquitous RAZR, others have done better at garnering publicity than actual sales. You may see young Hollywood playing with T-Mobile's Sidekick phone, but you are less likely to find a regular citizen with one. The company has just 373,000 users, according to research firm M:Metrics.

Still, celebrity seeding comes at a fraction of the cost of hiring an A-list endorser, taking out a full-page ad or placing the product in a big budget flick. And it can certainly jazz up a company's image.

"You never read about Motorola in People magazine or saw us on Entertainment Tonight before," says Pinsky, of his move to Hollywood. "I wanted us to take a big step forward ... to put us in a place where we weren't before because we should be there. Consumers are there."

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