| Winner | 2degrees |
| Marketing initiative | My internet is bung: pivoting to people language |
| Marketing partners | OMD |
| Finalists | Skinny Mobile, The Optimisers, Trade Me |
| Judges’ comments | “This entry demonstrates a highly effective and strategically integrated application of AI, transforming both how marketing operates and the results it delivers. “By linking customer language, AI search visibility and commercial performance, 2degrees has created a scalable model that enhances decision-making, customer outcomes and business growth, setting a strong benchmark for modern marketing practice.” |
AI helps get the lingo right
When AI search results made 2degrees invisible, there was only one thing to do. Start speaking the same language as their customers.
Most customers don’t shop for broadband using industry terms. They ask whether wireless will work in their house, where to put the modem, why the wi-fi drops out and whether fibre is worth the price.
Yet 2degrees’ broadband content was organised around product naming – fibre, wireless, plans, speeds – not the messy, situational decisions customers actually make.
Two things made this a strategic problem, not just a content problem.
First, broadband is commercially decisive for 2degrees. Wireless broadband generates roughly 2.5 times more margin than fixed, and customers who pick the wrong product churn faster, contact support more and cost more to serve.
Second, generative AI changed the rules of discovery. ChatGPT now holds more than 80% of LLM market share in New Zealand, and Google’s AI Overviews are routinely surfacing answers above traditional results.
The customers asking “is wireless broadband good enough for my house” were no longer landing on telco product pages. Instead they were getting answers from AI engines that often didn’t cite 2degrees at all.
Two problems are the same problem
The strategy was to treat both problems as the same problem. The content that helps a customer make a better broadband decision – clear, structured, honest, written in their language – is also the content most likely to be retrieved and cited by an answer engine.
AI was the only practical way to do this: to listen to real customer language at scale, identify the questions worth answering and produce broadband content built for humans, search engines and LLMs simultaneously.
First, 2degrees built a custom 100-prompt taxonomy to run across the four LLMs that matter in New Zealand. These are ChatGPT (>80% market share), Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. It captured visibility, sentiment, rank, mentions and citations for every prompt.
It then combined customer-language research, long-tail SEO data, on-page analytics and internal churn signals to identify the broadband questions where 2degrees had both a customer-need gap and an AI-visibility gap.
AI drafted page modules, FAQs and comparison blocks in formats already proven with answer engines: short sections, clear headings, FAQ blocks, definition-led paragraphs.
At each stage, AI augmented human judgement rather than replacing it.
This approach saw a jump in 2degrees’ AI visibility: the OMD AI Search Visibility Audit (April 17, 2026) placed 2degrees as the second-most-visible NZ telco brand in AI search at 28% visibility. This was ahead of One NZ and within striking distance of Spark.
It also boosted the bottom line: fixed prime margin increased significantly year-on-year, wireless broadband sales grew and total fixed revenue was also up.
This story comes from NZ Marketing magazine issue 88, Sept-Nov 2026. Why not subscribe? Get four issues a year for just $50 (including delivery) if you autorenew.
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