2degrees Wins Excellence in AI Innovation at 2026 YouTube NZ Marketing Awards
Summary
2degrees has won the newly introduced Excellence in AI Innovation in Marketing award at the 2026 YouTube NZ Marketing Awards, held in Auckland on 2 September, for its "My internet is bung: pivoting to people language" campaign. The category rewards strategic, responsible AI use across marketing functions rather than simple adoption or scale. The win, one of two Excellence Awards for 2degrees that night, signals judges are prioritising visible customer-facing impact of AI over technical novelty.
Our Analysis
• We see judges rewarding plain-language, customer-facing AI work over flashy generative showcases.
• In our experience, telcos win trust by simplifying support language, not by automating it invisibly.
• This signals 2027 award entries should emphasize tangible customer impact, not tool sophistication.
• Our team expects "AI Innovation" categories to quickly become a standard benchmark industry-wide.
Full Story
Telecommunications provider 2degrees has won the Excellence in AI Innovation in Marketing award at the 2026 YouTube NZ Marketing Awards, held at Auckland's Spark Arena on 2 September. The category was newly introduced this year to recognise organisations applying artificial intelligence in a strategic, responsible way across marketing functions, and 2degrees claimed the inaugural title for its campaign "My internet is bung: pivoting to people language."
The 35th annual awards, run by New Zealand Marketing magazine and sponsored by YouTube, expanded its programme in 2026 specifically to capture the growing role AI now plays in local marketing operations. Judges said the new award was designed to celebrate thoughtful application of AI across customer insight, personalisation, creative development, media optimisation, automation and broader marketing operations, rather than simply rewarding novelty or scale of adoption.
2degrees' winning campaign centred on translating technical broadband and connectivity language into everyday, colloquial terms Kiwis actually use when something goes wrong with their internet, such as describing an outage as their connection being "bung." The approach reflects a wider shift among New Zealand brands toward using AI tools not just to produce content faster, but to better match tone, language and customer sentiment across large volumes of communications and support material.
The win adds to a strong night for 2degrees, which picked up two Excellence Awards across different categories at the ceremony. It also signals judges' growing willingness to reward AI use cases tied to customer communication and language adaptation, rather than purely production-efficiency plays such as automated ad generation or programmatic media buying.
For New Zealand's digital marketing industry, the award result reinforces a theme that has been building through 2026: brands are increasingly judged not on whether they use AI, but on how visibly it improves the customer-facing experience. A telco choosing to spotlight a campaign about plain-language customer communication, rather than a flashy generative-content showcase, suggests award juries are placing weight on tangible relevance to everyday customers over technical sophistication alone.
The category's debut also reflects pressure many New Zealand marketing teams have felt this year to demonstrate credible, real-world AI applications rather than experimental pilots. With the Excellence in AI Innovation award likely to become a fixture of the awards calendar, agencies and in-house marketing teams are expected to treat it as a benchmark for what "good" AI-assisted marketing looks like in the local market going into 2027 entry cycles.
New Zealand Marketing magazine's full winners list, published alongside the ceremony, confirmed 2degrees' win and detailed judges' commentary on other categories spanning data-led growth, marketing teams and campaign excellence, underscoring how AI-related achievements are now assessed alongside, rather than separately from, mainstream marketing performance measures.