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 Tomorrow’s inauguration of the Burj Dubai – that big pointy thing near Defence Roundabout, for Dubaians that don’t know – will be watched live by “an estimated 2 billion people”, according to a press release from Emirates news agency WAM.
Two billion people. That’s, um, quite a lot.
To put it in context, around 2.5 billion people watched the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, while 2 billion viewers saw Pope John Paul II laid to rest. An estimated 1 billion sports fans watched the Men’s Basketball game between China and the US at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and viewership bods think around 4.7 billion people around the world watched the 08 games overall.
So 2 billion viewers would put the Burj Dubai inauguration into the big leagues of TV audience figures. The very big leagues.
We suspect – and we’ll be honest here, we’re not doing much to find out, because we could do without the hassle – that the figure represents the maximum number of potential viewers, based on wherever the live high-def feed will be going to around the world. As such, the 2-billion figure might represent a teensily over-large assumption, from the point of view of a live TV audience.
However, if you consider that the opening of the world’s tallest building, in a city which has been high up the news agenda lately, is likely to draw a fair amount of media coverage – and be on pretty much every TV news report on the day – then a non-live audience of 2 billion may not be far off at all.
And as the figure comes from a single sentence two-thirds into the WAM release, it’s only thanks to pesky outlets like AdNation and ArabianBusiness.com that haul it up to headline-level and examine it (or, in the case of AB.com, don’t examine it) that it’s turned into news.
However many people actually end up watching it, the opening of the Burj Dubai is a significant and impressive achievement.
Emaar, the developer of the tower, isn’t revealing the final, record-breaking height – but that won’t stop the Burj Dubai being certified as not just the tallest building in the world, but the tallest man-made structure ever completed (I still maintain my Lego mega-tower would have been taller, but I ran out of yellow bricks).
But more than just being very, very, very tall, the Burj Dubai is innovative, technologically challenging and – we’re going to come right out and say it – classically and strikingly beautiful.
We’d hope that the opening of the Burj Dubai might draw some favourable publicity for the emirate – but, sadly, we suspect many media outlets may use the inauguration to highlight the more negative aspects of Dubai’s recent experience, then throw in the word “hubris” in there as well, for good measure.
AdNation has made its position on such coverage very clear in the past, but for the record...
To any media outlets that want to come out with outlandish, exaggerated and unjustified portraits of Dubai, here is our considered response: Thhhhhrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp.
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