Authentic Media Partnership: Mai FM & The Culinary Collective

Just a couple of weeks ago the team at D3, the UP Education marketing team and the Mai FM Morning Crew spent the afternoon making pasta and creating cocktails.

You may well be thinking what on earth has that got to do with media, and you may well have a point, but bear with me...

Media partnerships happen all the time, and 95% of them are pretty average - a tenuous at best link between programme and product. But when we started working with UP Education and MediaWorks we knew that for our partnership between Mai FM and NZMA to work it really needed to be authentic and go beyond what a typical media partnership looks like. And for that to happen the breakfast crew at Mai FM needed to get to know the NZMA campus, the students and the teachers.

So for the last six months we have been organising events and visits to the NZMA campuses across Auckland for the Mai FM team to see what a difference NZMA makes to the South Auckland community, and for them to understand how best to communicate the importance of further education to their audience.

So, this month it was the turn of The Culinary Collective campus at Sylvia Park which trains the future chefs, baristas, waiters, and cocktail makers of Aotearoa. The whole D3 team who work with UP Education joined the Morning Crew, and to begin with we made some lovely fresh pasta - much harder than it looks on Masterchef! And then we got a lesson in cocktail making, followed by 20 minutes to create our own. Again, much harder than it looks at a bar!!

The day was an absolute blast - the students were thrilled to see the Mai FM crew at their school, the professors were stoked to show off their campus, and the Mai team loved getting closer to the community. And for us, the team at D3, we certainly learnt that pasta is hard to make, and we'll certainly appreciate cocktail makers much more in the future!