The archive · Public & Social · Marketing decision · 2023
Forest & Bird's Bird of the Century: pūteketeke wins global 350,000-vote campaign
NZ conservation NGO Forest & Bird's centenary bird poll went global when a comedian backed the pūteketeke — 350,000+ verified votes, record donations.
Forest & Bird
What it had to solve
Forest & Bird has run New Zealand's Bird of the Year contest since 2005, inviting people to vote for native species to raise awareness — more than 80 percent of the country's native birds are threatened. For its 100th anniversary the contest was renamed Bird of the Century, and the organisers wanted far more than the usual national audience.
How it works
New Zealand's Forest & Bird, a conservation organisation founded in 1923, has run the annual Bird of the Year contest since 2005 — a lighthearted national vote designed to make people care about native birds, more than 80 percent of which sit on the threatened-species list. In 2023, its centenary year, the contest was temporarily rebranded Bird of the Century, and the stakes were raised accordingly: dozens of campaign managers signed up to champion their favourite species.
The campaign then acquired an unexpected patron. John Oliver's HBO show Last Week Tonight asked to back the pūteketeke, the Australasian crested grebe, which Forest & Bird chief executive Nicola Toki called an 'underbird' — odd-looking, prone to vomiting, and nationally vulnerable. Oliver's self-described 'alarmingly aggressive' campaign ran billboards in Paris and Tokyo, included a giant pūteketeke puppet, and reached The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, where Oliver appeared in full grebe costume.
The scale of response crashed the vote verification system and delayed the winner announcement by two days. When Forest & Bird counted manually, it discarded thousands of fraudulent ballots — 40,000 cast by a single person for the rockhopper penguin, and 3,403 arriving from one address in Pennsylvania — while 45 people formally voted under the name John Oliver. The final tally was a record 350,000+ verified votes from 195 countries, about six times the previous record of 56,733 set in 2021.
The pūteketeke won in a landslide, taking more votes than the rest of the top ten combined. The publicity converted into support: donations tied to the contest reached NZ$600,000, six times the previous record, and the celebrity 'interference' became the story New Zealand's own media joyfully amplified. The joke had done what decades of earnest conservation messaging could not — put a threatened lake bird's name, and the plight of the country's birds, in front of a global audience.
Why it lands
- The centenary rebrand made an annual ritual feel like a once-in-a-century event, raising both stakes and news value.
- Inviting a global comedian to champion an 'underbird' created an outsider-versus-underdog conflict that ordinary conservation messaging cannot generate.
- Letting the campaign be silly — puking, a burnt-orange mullet, a giant puppet — removed the barrier between a threatened-species list and a worldwide audience.
- Transparent verification, discarding tens of thousands of fraudulent votes, kept the result credible through the chaos.
- Forest & Bird co-signed the joke instead of defending its dignity, so the humour amplified the cause rather than mocking it.
What it did
A record 350,000+ verified votes arrived from 195 countries, six times the previous record of 56,733 in 2021. The pūteketeke won in a landslide — by the campaign's own account it collected more votes than the rest of the top ten combined — and donations tied to the contest reached NZ$600,000, six times the previous record. A 'Nationally Vulnerable' bird with fewer than 1,000 individuals left in New Zealand became a global ambassador for the country's threatened species.
What you can take
Let a serious cause be playable: invite an outsider with a huge audience to hijack the contest, co-sign the joke, and participation and donations scale beyond anything your own channels could raise.
Since then
The pūteketeke's win made global news, and Oliver devoted a follow-up episode to celebrating it. Forest & Bird reported Bird of the Year-related donations of NZ$600,000 — six times the previous record — and 2023 remains the biggest year in the contest's history, a reference point for pairing an engagement format with an unexpected, high-reach collaborator. For the bird itself, the fame supported conservation: its slow recovery, aided by volunteer nest platforms on Otago lakes, continued, and the pūteketeke became an ambassador for New Zealand's threatened wildlife.
Sources
- Puteketeke won Bird of the Century 2023 in New Zealand
- Donations soar after Bird of the Century publicity
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