The royal coronation was the biggest media event of 2023. It was impossible to avoid.

Everywhere you turned, local and international news peddled royal gossip on 24-hour rotation.

But for Māori, and other indigenous cultures across the globe, the sensationalism of the monarchy was an unwelcome reminder of a painful colonial past.

Kōpū O Te Rangi wanted to reshape the cultural narrative and raise the profile of Māori voices, at a time when they were actively being squashed by the very family who colonised Aotearoa.

Our objective was to earn media coverage and conversation behind our cause in Aotearoa and beyond, while elevating Māori voices in the media during the coronation conversation.

Pīkari Mai is an online web browser tool that instantly replaces royal gossip, with indigenous content pulled from a range of news sources.

The plug-in works by using a data scrape to automatically scan web pages for keywords and visuals relating to the royal family. It then switches this content out for indigenous articles, sourced from multiple indigenous publishers.

The more articles the royal PR machine pushed, the more Māori voices Pīkari Mai elevated, weaponising the power of the Royal PR machine against itself.

Pīkari Mai. The browser plug-in that unplugged the royals.

When many would've seen the coronation as a lost cause for Māori interests, we saw it as an opportunity to stand up and give Māori voices a seat at the table. The royal coronation was the biggest media event of 2023, so we needed our idea to lean into the mountain of media coverage.

Our strategy was to weaponise the the Royal PR machine against itself to elevate Māori voices when it was at its most powerful.

Kōpū O Te Rangi’s credibility gave our idea a solid foundation – but without support from Māori communities, Pīkari Mai wouldn’t have gotten off the ground. We knew that garnering the support of these passionate voices would give Pīkari Mai the greatest chance for success, so we partnered with a collective of Māori publishers, from whom we could source engaging content to create a highly regarded, indigenous news database.

Pīkari Mai was easily accessible and available to download on every major web-browser, including Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

The plug-in was designed to work anywhere New Zealanders get their news updates — from local publications like NZ Herald, Stuff, 1News & Newshub, to international media juggernauts like CNN, The Guardian, The Sun, Fox News, NBC, The NY Times and countless others.

Pīkari Mai paired technological ingenuity with loveable espionage to create an artistic intervention that elevated Indigenous voices at a time when they were struggling to be heard. As an art collective that promotes and empowers Indigenous creators, this aligned perfectly with the ethos of Kōpū O Te Rangi.

We designed the look and feel to uphold the spirit of the digital intervention, blending 8-bit graphics from the digital world, with Indigenous design. We added mischief to the aesthetic by animating a redaction over King Charles’ mouth in the style of a taiaha (a traditional Māori weapon).

The ‘business’ of the monarchy use events and fanfare to bolster popularity numbers and the coronation is the crown jewel in the royal family’s event arsenal. So, we went live with the plug-in right when royal fanfare reached its peak – the week before the King’s coronation.

In just 48 hours with a paid media spend of $0, our campaign reached 23 million people across traditional and social media. Our website was visited by people in over 1100 cities around the world and the plug-in was downloaded by over 9000 people from 98 countries.

While the technical capabilities of the plug-in prevent us from being able to measure the exact number of articles that were replaced by Pīkari Mai, royal coverage was wall-to-wall. The more coronation content media published, the more opportunities we created for a Māori voice to be read instead.

Further validation of our success came as people from other indigenous nations reached out asking for the plug-in to cover content from their people. So, in partnership with indigenous media from around the world, we created a global version of Pīkari Mai.