In 2017, over half a million New Zealanders used Google Maps every day. But the automated voice wasn’t pronouncing Maori place names correctly. In fact, our native language wasn’t just declining; it was being butchered.

With Vodafone connecting half the country to Google Maps – and with aural and oral assimilation the best way to learn a language – we saw this as a prime opportunity to contribute towards a revitalisation of Te Reo.

So we created ‘Say It Tika’ (Say It Right); a campaign that rallied the nation to help Google Maps find and fix its pronunciation blunders at sayittika.co.nz.

This interactive site enabled locals to listen to every Maori place name in the country on a digital map, and drop a pin wherever Google Maps was falling short. Vodafone and Google then worked with linguists to fix these phonetic errors.

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 used this as a fresh angle to tell regional news outlets their towns were identified as the most poorly pronounced. This secured a wave of earned coverage.

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

In just 14 days, Say It Tika became Vodafone’s most successful social communication ever:

- Organic reach hit an incredible 60%

- The video received an engagement rate of 4% (4X the industry norm).

- Positive sentiment hit 99.8% (6X Vodafone’s benchmark).

- And, over 40% of the population were reached (double our target).

On top of this, 7,500+ Kiwis auto-shared their pins from sayittika.co.nz, helping us reach an even bigger audience through word-of-mouth.

Moreover, 130 earned news items were generated across top tier media channels, reaching over half the population.

But, most importantly, we exceeded Vodafone's target of 2,500 place name pins. Instead, we blew this objective by 2,591%, with a total of 67,800. De-duped, this resulted in 9,598 unique place names being identified as mispronounced.

Google Maps have now set about fixing these. We see this as the campaign’s most defining result.