On September 20, 2021, the United Nations in New York organized a virtual event called SDG Moment. The UN Secretary General, President of the UN General Assembly, and other bigwigs delivered speeches about the importance of poverty reduction and how the pandemic stunted five years of progress. Then, Korean boy band BTS performed Permission to Dance, in a pre-recorded music video using UNHQ as the location.
Presumably, this was an attempt to get young people to care about the UN Sustainable Development Goals and attract a more diverse audience to watch the plenary that ran from 8 am to noon. Events following the BTS performance included intergenerational dialogues, plans on how to accelerate SDG implementation, addresses from African and Asian heads of states, as well as a moderated session including Melinda Gates.
Just 48 hours after the session first went live, the video has amassed over 6 million views. But how many of those viewers watched the more impactful segments of the event and how many were only there to check out the four-and-a-half-minute long BTS music video?
I have some data. I foresaw that this was going to happen, so I noted minute-by-minute viewer numbers while the event was live. The graph shows that there were nearly one million live viewers at the end of the BTS music video at 8:44 am, but that number dropped to just 285,066 after ten minutes. There were only 36,032 viewers by 10:05, fewer than 15,000 people were watching at 11 am.
Do I think it’s a complete failure? No, it’s not a complete failure. Any attention the SDG gets via the BTS performance must be welcome, but I’m unsure of whether this attention has enough depth. Had a vast majority of viewers understood the challenges to poverty reduction that the pandemic has caused or the global benefits of having more women in the workforce? Probably not. I know it’s normal for YouTube live videos to lose viewers as it drags on, but very few videos lose over 70% of views in just 10 minutes and 98.5% of viewers by the end of the video.
It’s a good first step. That said, the UN has partnered with the BTS to fundraise for UNICEF in 2017 and inviting them to speak at UNHQ at UNICEF events in 2018 and 2020. It seems like the UN is stuck with using BTS for attention without being able to follow-up with meaningful public education on the mandate of UNICEF or impact that achieving the SDGs will bring. It’s good to get eyeballs, but it’s better to get brains on the same scale. Money and attention only goes so far, it takes a paradigm shift to attain global goals.
