Is this Dubai's greatest marketing ploy yet?

Ellen delights her audience with a trip to Dubai – see them truly freak out about it here..

We’ve had Real Housewives in the city, top Hollywood movies have been filmed in Dubai and plenty of videos produced here in the emirate have become global viral sensations.

Well, yesterday the worldwide marketing for the city of Dubai went into overdrive when Emirates gave every single person in the audience at Ellen Degenres’ talkshow a flight to the city:

The video was viewed on Facebook over 300,000 times after being online for just eight hours (and the Ellen show itself averages 3.9 million viewers per episode. That’s more than the whole of Dubai).

After the audience found out that they’d won a trip to Dubai, pictures of the city’s greatest icons popped up on the screen – from the Burj Al Arab to The Dubai Fountains and The Palm (and of course The Burj Khalifa).

Top tip Ellen audience: Come here in your winter (our winter too), not your summer. Well, unless you’re from Dallas and love the heat.

Ellen herself visited Dubai last March with Portia De Rossi, and the pair had a private dinner at The Act while here: 

This isn’t the first time Ellen’s given her viewers a trip to the UAE, in April last year she gave away an all expenses paid trip to Abu Dhabi. The winner of the holiday claimed her prize from actor Vin Diesel, star of Furious 7, the blockbuster movie set in the capital.

And in 2010, Ellen herself actually called the Burj Khalifa (then the Burj Dubai) and got called ‘Ms Helen’ in the process…