MDS wins Student ORCA third year in a row

Media Design School students Bella Rakete & Courtney Andersen took top honours in the 2021 Student Outstanding Radio Creative Awards (ORCA) competition for their campaign Language of Now, aimed at encouraging Kiwi’s to learn and integrate te reo Māori into their daily lives.

Each year The Radio Bureau set out to recognise outstanding radio creative with the ORCA. TRB aims to encourage creatives in the advertising industry to let their talents loose and explore the many options afforded by radio.

“It’s fantastic to see these talented creatives explore the audio space and push what can be achieved with radio. We’re particularly proud of the Student ORCAs and impressed by the breadth of imagination shown – the future is bright,” says TRB General Manager, Peter Richardson.

This year MDS students scored four of the top five finalist campaigns, with AUT rounding out the top five.  

The briefs challenged the student teams to come up with a radio-first integrated campaign to either: encourage Kiwis to learn te reo Māori with the tools provided by Te Taura Whiri I Te Reo Māori (Māori Language Commission); increase foot traffic to a local café or restaurant struggling in the aftermath of lockdowns; or advertise a dating app of their choice.

“The whole competition from start to finish was a great experience for all the students. The brief to make a radio-first integrated campaign opened up the students’ thinking to how a strong insight can effortlessly lead an idea into other media,” says Creative Advertising Programme Director, Kate Humphries.

“The winning radio-first campaign was worked around the insight that people think te reo Māori is impractical to learn because it is a regressive language. In a campaign of three radio ads the team showed the ways in which te reo is a more progressive language than English- with all three ads ending with the call to action that when we reach the limits of some language, maybe it’s time to look back to a more progressive one.

“The team extended the idea into other media by using display ads alongside topical content that illustrates how te reo is the language of now and an OOH launched during Māori language week, that corrects the AI used in Māori Google translate to give more accurate, in depth translations of te reo that point out why it is the language of now,” says Kate.

Congratulations to our three other finalists:

• Callum Bately and Alex Erkklila for Brush up on Te Reo
• Jonno Entwistle and Alyssa Yeoman for Date For Your Kids for the Plenty of Fish dating app
• Sam Taunton-Clarke and James Greig for Scary Love for the Hinge dating app

And MDS alumni winners:

• The Grand ORCA winners for 2021 - Adam Redmond and Emerson Hunt (FCB) for their PAK’nSAVE campaign Meat Hijack
• People’s Choice Award winners - Maraea Walker, one of our previous Student ORCA winners, who was part of the winning team from FCB for their NZ Police campaign Enjoy The View.