New Zealand’s indigenous Maori language is a unique part of our national identity, but sadly it’s in decline. How badly? Well, besides only 3.7% of the population being able to speak Te Reo (the Maori language), some experts say that “if it had a heartbeat, it would be dead.”

Vodafone New Zealand, who have been a long-standing advocate for Te Reo, wanted to contribute to its preservation. So, in 2017, our brief was to find a meaningful way to utilise Vodafone’s extensive mobile network to protect the language.

To drive response, we needed to grab the attention of the nation.

So, we launched with a targeted social video calling on locals to help. But it wasn’t just any video. We enlisted well-known Maori actor, Temuera Morrison (Jango Fett), to star in a content piece people couldn’t ignore; Tem using Google Maps while riding a cow.

Within hours, it got the media buzzing and thousands flocked to Vodafone’s interactive Say It Tika site to hunt down mispronounced Maori place names.

Then, as planned, we used these preliminary responses to identify the most ‘pinned’ place names. We then used this as a fresh angle to tell regional journalists their towns were identified as the most poorly pronounced. This secured a wave of earned media.

Once the campaign was over, Vodafone, Google and a team of linguists set about fixing every phonetic error Kiwis had found on Google Maps.