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Advertising in te reo Māori isn’t supported by some big tech companies (Photo: Getty Images; additional design: Tina Tiller)
Advertising in te reo Māori isn’t supported by some big tech companies (Photo: Getty Images; additional design: Tina Tiller)

ĀteaSeptember 22, 2022

Why you can’t advertise online in te reo Māori

Advertising in te reo Māori isn’t supported by some big tech companies (Photo: Getty Images; additional design: Tina Tiller)
Advertising in te reo Māori isn’t supported by some big tech companies (Photo: Getty Images; additional design: Tina Tiller)

Social media advertising is big business but, as Reweti Kohere explains, it’s not possible for companies to reach tangata whenua in their own reo.

The next time you scroll past an advertisement on your Facebook or Twitter feed, take a few seconds to ponder the NZ$255bn worth of revenue that social media advertising generated globally in 2021. Take another moment to realise that amount is expected to rise to NZ$420bn in four years. Social advertising accounts for a third of all digital advertising spend, and snappy TikToks, Instagram reels and other short-form video ads are driving an increase in sales by tens of billions of dollars. Used by well over half of the world’s 7.8 billion people, social media has become highly monetised. 

Businesses in Aotearoa can capitalise on this global opportunity, but if they want to reach tangata whenua in their own reo, some big tech companies can’t help. Here’s why.

Available languages

Search engine giant Google’s paid online advertising platform, Google Ads, enables people to advertise and promote their products and services when users search relevant keywords. Under its “pay-per-click” model, search results will return paid advertisements from marketers that have targeted and paid for such key terms. Who gets the top spot is determined by the “quality score” of marketers’ ads and their bid amounts, or how much they’re willing to pay for the ad. When users see an ad and click on it, the marketer pays a small fee for that click (thus, pay-per-click).

Marketers can craft their Google ads in a myriad of ways, including targeting potential customers based on the languages they understand. But “language targeting” depends on whether Google supports a particular language. While Māori businesses could target New Zealanders by writing their ads in British English, an available language, they can’t target tangata whenua by using te reo Māori in the ad copy because it isn’t supported. And creating ads in an unsupported language will result in Google rejecting them.

A Google New Zealand spokesperson confirmed it didn’t support te reo Māori advertising, but pointed to other supportive initiatives such as the company’s Māori search engine, and ensuring Māori place names in Google Maps are spelt correctly with macrons. “We’ve worked to ensure the New Zealand government can use Māori words and phrases in their ads in critical moments such as the general election and through the Covid-19 pandemic response,” the spokesperson said.

Who else doesn’t support te reo Māori advertising?

LinkedIn, Microsoft’s business and professional networking service, also doesn’t support advertising in te reo Māori. Its advertising works similarly to Google’s pay-per-click model, and it allows members to use only a list of “supported languages” in any advertising campaign or marketing solution. Te reo Māori isn’t listed as a supported language.

“While it’s not possible to support every language at this time, we’re constantly looking at ways we can help organisations to reach their audiences,” said a LinkedIn spokesperson, who encouraged members to still post in te reo on its social media platform.

Google Ads doesn’t support advertising in te reo Māori (Photo: Getty Images)

Why isn’t te reo Māori available?

Neither Google nor LinkedIn answered as to why te reo Māori wasn’t available. But a Google Ads query hints at two possible reasons – one response explained that Google supports only those languages that are “commercially” helpful. For instance, India has 22 official languages, and anywhere between 450 and 1,700 other languages. Google Ads does support the country’s two major languages, English and Hindi, which are used for business, but it also supports other languages spoken in India, such as Marathi and Telugu. Another response suggested that using Māori words without their tohutō (macrons) could make them acceptable, and said: “Yes, it is less than perfect but it shouldn’t affect how your ads perform.”

What about Meta?

Facebook and Instagram’s owner, Meta, fares better. Nick McDonnell, Meta head of policy for New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, said the company has no language restrictions on advertising products so te reo Māori is available to use. However, while Meta allows users to create ads in multiple languages, and can automatically translate them using machine learning technology, automatic translations for Māori aren’t available so users must still write a separate ad in te reo.

What do robots have to do with translations?

Artificial intelligence is destined to transform many industries and areas of life – and it’s already starting to have an impact on language. Google Translate has existed since 2006 (te reo Māori was introduced in 2013), and the 20-year-old Microsoft Translator also supports te reo Māori. At least since 2018, Meta’s artificial intelligence arm has been developing high-quality machine translation capabilities for most of the world’s languages. In 2021, Meta expanded its data set to cover 200 languages, including te reo Māori, and then recently made its latest translation model, “No Language Left Behind” (NLLB), freely available so others could build on its work. 

The effort is part of Meta’s ambitious plans to create a universal translator, which it views as important for continual business growth. But low-resource language communities view with cynicism the attention that big tech gives them, and local companies are coming to the fore with alternative solutions. Earlier this year, it was revealed Google lacked the right technology to fulfil promises made in a 2017 campaign to improve Māori pronunciation in Google Maps. But since then, the likes of Auckland-based FranklyAI and media outlet Te Hiku Media have stepped up to develop a suite of reo Māori voice recognition tools.

Māori development minister Willie Jackson (Photo: Dom Thomas/RNZ)

What’s the government’s view?

Māori development and broadcasting and media minister William Jackson (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Maniapoto) is calling on big tech to embrace te reo Māori. While the language is being revitalised locally, “it’s not happening internationally, except when our national teams perform haka,” he said. “Maybe it’s time for the big companies like Google and LinkedIn to take up that challenge.”

The government is aiming to have at least one million New Zealanders speak basic-level Māori by 2040, as part of its “Maihi Karauna” Māori revitalisation strategy. Jackson believed businesses would change their policies and practices as a result of the increased proficiency in te reo Māori. Then, he said, perhaps large global technology companies could make similar shifts.

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(Photos: Getty / Image: Archi Banal)
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OPINIONĀteaSeptember 21, 2022

The real reason Māori are on both sides of the tangled pine forest debate

(Photos: Getty / Image: Archi Banal)
(Photos: Getty / Image: Archi Banal)

The complex pine forest debate is a chance for the media to pit Māori against each other and ignore the far deeper issue of climate change and its direct connection to colonisation. 

If you’ve been following the news recently you might have heard the government announce it was planning to exclude pine trees from earning credits under the permanent forest category of the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). 

Loosely translated, it meant landowners who plant pine forests with the intention of leaving them in the ground forever couldn’t profit from doing so. But a number of Māori were upset and warned that this move could potentially breach the Treaty

In response, the government – tentatively at least – appeared to backtrack. Then it was suggested by opposing voices that keeping pine in the ETS could also constitute a Treaty breach. (A very good one-stop analysis of both sides of the debate can be found here).

I’m not sure about you, but I was sitting there scratching my head. Surely Māori would be united in fighting for native regeneration?

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The first thing to understand when it comes to reporting of “Māori issues” in the media is that conflict and confusion is the daily bread (fyi, Pākehā have issues too). Journalism is an industry that has inherited (and still operates within) a culture that has a long tradition of racism and hostility towards Māori. Racism has always sold newspapers, led headlines, and provided fodder for cartoonists, and it still does.  

People might bristle at the suggestion that coverage of climate change is racist, but analysis of things like the ETS controversy suggests otherwise. 

Reports of climate change rarely look past the most obvious environmental indicators (global warming and extreme weather events) in order to accurately represent the causes of climate change. Without deep and critical analysis of colonisation and its impact on climate change, it’s all too easy to misrepresent where the conflict around solutions really lies. Whether this is deliberate, ignorant or just slack, the result is, Māori are portrayed negatively. And that’s pretty racist. 

That box of useless cords

When it comes to climate change, Māori are caught between a rock, a hard place and a cliff face falling into a rising tide.

As a population, Māori contributed little to global warming. The land that was turned from native forest into pasture was stolen. Here’s an interactive to see just how aggressive and quick that transition was. (Fun fact, “colony” comes from the Latin colonia meaning farm or settlement).

Now that scientists and politicians and pretty much everyone agrees that the decimation of native forests and draining of wetlands to make way for intensive agriculture was a foolish idea, the plan (or one part of it) is to put the forests back. It’s still farming, but instead of livestock or forestry, what is being traded is carbon – in other words, Tāne Māhuta’s potential to sequester carbon.

Māori, on every side of the ETS, are trying to make decisions for the long-term collective benefit of whenua and mokopuna, with only tiny portions of often vulnerable and marginal land remaining to them. There is disagreement about the best way to do this (more on that in a bit). But the conflict is caused not by a difference of opinion, but by the mechanisms the government is using to reduce carbon emissions.

Picture a box of old cords and wires for defunct 90s technology that you’ve either lost or no longer works. You don’t even know what half the cords are for. You pull one and it drags all of them. You might think you’re making progress untangling one knot, but you’re really just tightening an invisible chokehold somewhere else in the system.

The cords and wires for the machinery of Government, picture not to scale. (Photo: Nadine Hura)

This box is government policy. Climate change affects every single cord in the box, from health, to education, to housing – everything. The ETS is just one cord in a very chaotic tangle. 

The critical point is that Māori did not want this box. Māori wanted nothing to do with these cords for machines and government departments that we didn’t ask for. This box is the same box that Māori said “yeah, nah, we’re all good bro,” when presented with the Treaty.

But the Treaty was very badly translated, Māori got swindled for their land and the government set up its equipment and machinery, much of which is now defunct, and here we are. At the mercy of chaos.

And it’s complicated.

On the one hand, carbon farming is extremely lucrative because the cost of polluting is going up. The more expensive it is to offset emissions, the more likely companies are to reduce them, and this is good because it means New Zealand might have a chance at meeting its net zero targets by 2050.

For investors, pine is the best way to get into carbon farming, largely because it grows quickly (that earlier link has some graphs). As for natives, no one’s really sure how much carbon they’re capable of sequestering, because they got felled into oblivion before anyone could properly study them. Unlike pine, which has heaps of research (the ETS has multiple formulas – kind of like price lists – to assess the level of carbon sequestration by exotic trees, versus only one for natives.)

Some, however, think these calculations could be inaccurate. Or at least misleading. There are a few projects underway to investigate, like this one in Tāmaki (featuring two semi-retired Pākehā gangstas championing indigenous forests under what could become a catchy slogan Give The Natives a Chance) – but it’s slow, and the government is running out of time. 

More to the point, trees do so much more than just suck up carbon. Forests support and sustain the well-being of countless other living species, not just humans. 

But under the ETS, the government has narrowly distorted the value of Tāne Māhuta to something that can be weighed, traded and profited from: carbon. 

For those in favour of keeping pine in the ETS, it’s largely with the hope of a long-term vision of native regeneration. The early cash returns from pine can be redistributed in the short term to support better health, housing, employment and social outcomes, and for most, this is not a question of wealth generation. It’s a question of survival against the odds in an environment exacerbated by the much less visible, historical impacts of climate change (i.e. colonisation). 

With the income from carbon farming generated almost immediately, the much more complex project of native regeneration can get underway sooner, if not simultaneously.

But if leaving pine in the ground forever sounds disastrous, it’s probably because there’s a good chance it will be. Predictions are that transitioning to native from pine will be tricky, expensive and risky. Even on paper, it seems wild to think that exotic forests are the solution to indigenous survival.

A pine plantation in the Wairau valley, Marlborough (Photo: Getty Images)

When you boil it down, practically speaking, carbon farming and the ETS looks a lot like gambling. And there is very little support for Māori to study the odds and assess the risks. The government isn’t neutral, or “caught in the middle,” either. The government flip-flopping on pine is about demand and supply. Too many pine forests flooding the market will push the price of carbon down, and then it’ll be ineffective as a tool to reduce emissions. In other words, the government’s policy is not actually about cutting harmful climate gases, it’s about Planting Trees and Carrying On.

So what’s the key message?

In short, Māori are faced with absolutely crapshit “climate” decisions every day of the week, on every front.

As a layperson, what’s important to understand is that the more pressure the government comes under as climate change intensifies – the more it pulls those cords – the tighter the knot becomes on Māori communities, many of whom will remain invisible to the media covering the issues.

Just look at that box of tangled cords: Māori have borne the brunt of responsibility for past excesses environmentally, socially and economically. These excesses have disproportionately benefited Pākehā on every indicator you care to look at.

While the government fusses around with the cords, making sure powerful lobby groups are happy, Māori communities are sitting in the environment court trying to prevent ongoing exploitation and extraction, just in an effort to protect what little remains.

As Māori, we have no choice but to get our hands in that box too, but we’re disadvantaged by a lack of power, access to resources and autonomy. This is not an equal situation, it isn’t just, and it’s a far cry from the partnership that was promised in 1840.

If the ETS reveals anything, it’s that the government still hasn’t relinquished its unwavering faith in the market as a mechanism to deliver positive outcomes for Papatūānuku, even though it never has before, without any great sacrifice or radical shift away from the core values that caused the environmental destruction we urgently need to reverse. 

Whereas whānau and hapū, on the other hand, want the same thing our ancestors who signed the Treaty wanted: to protect, serve, sustain, and be sustained by, our own land – now, and for future generations. 

It is a mission at the best of times, let alone in a system that is suddenly panicking because it has only just realised that the climate is changing and its values are completely unsustainable. 

Let’s get rid of the box

Climate Change continues to be a tool of colonisation because it constantly shifts the conversation back to the box. The mess of cords and what to do about it. The dominance of these conversations in the media, and oversimplification of them, deflect responsibility and attention away from the Crown. 

The day that the government admits defeat and chucks out its chaotic, immoral, and illogical box of wires and starts over – i.e. constitutional transformation – is probably a long way off, but we have to hold fast to the future vision that Moana Jackson never let us lose faith in. 

If Moana believes we can chuck out the box and start over, I know we can and will. 

We just can’t put it in landfill. 


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