Hasta La Creative!

In 2017, over 500,000 New Zealanders heard Google Maps mispronounce Maori place names on a daily basis. With only 3.7% of the population able to speak Maori, our country couldn’t afford for our precious native language to erode any further.

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 the Maori language.

So, we created ‘Say It Tika’ (Say It Right); a campaign powered by Vodafone and Google, 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. In just 14 days, half the country engaged and 67,000+ pins were placed. Vodafone and Google then worked with linguists to fix these phonetic errors.