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 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.

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).

- It achieved positive sentiment of 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 social media audience through word-of-mouth.

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

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.

Google Maps does a terrible job of pronouncing New Zealand’s Maori place names. Vodafone wanted to do something about it. But with over 15,000 Maori place names out there, we needed to identify which ones were wrong before we could correct them. So we launched Say It Tika; a campaign that directly targeted patriotic New Zealanders, asking them to help protect their native language by finding Google Maps’ pronunciation blunders at sayittika.co.nz. In other words, it was a local campaign that rallied thousands of individuals to help change a global platform.

Social media is undoubtedly the place where people most often wear their beliefs and passions on their sleeve. With a limited media spend, we used this to our advantage.

To maximize response, we set out to target New Zealanders who were most likely to engage and share the initiative with friends; a social media audience with an interest in Maori culture and an open mindset. This helped create a groundswell of support around Say It Tika, and positioned it as an important project to get behind from the outset.

To drum up wider public interest and get people visiting the Say It Tika site, we then planned to use preliminary website data to identify the most ‘pinned’ Maori town names. We would send these to individual journalists in those towns to spark regional pride and a surge of earned PR calling on more Kiwis to participate.

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.