Reunion P*rn and That One NZ campaign

The funny thing about being a late discovery adoptee.

One NZ (formerly Vodafone) is an Aotearoa New Zealand telecommunications company.

Their latest commercial is all about the fun of human adoption.

You can’t turn on your television in New Zealand without seeing this ad.

For those not in Aotearoa New Zealand, let me describe it:

A Māori man stands beside a Highland cow. They appear to have matching hair. We learn he’s searching for someone who might look like him.

He’s looking for his mother.

We flash back to a hot tub, where two middle-aged non-Māori people casually tell their adult “son”, “Oh, by the way, you’re adopted.”

Jump cut to a friendly person at One NZ showing the young man how to use his phone to make connections.

There’s a fast-cut sequence alluding to inebriated sex that presumably led to his conception.

The ad plays out as an amusing, sentimental story, ending on a poignant moment of recognition, and the possibility that a mother and child reunion is only a moment away.

What’s not to love?

Your answer might depend on your place in the adoption constellation. Over 100,000 New Zealanders are adopted. Factor in adoptive and birth parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren, and around 16% of the population is affected by adoption.

The creative behind the ad initially agreed to speak but then declined: “Sorry, I had second thoughts. This would effectively be me talking to the media, and my contract doesn’t allow that.”

Fair enough. The questions I wanted to ask were simple:

• Where did your inspiration come from?

• And why choose adoption, particularly the late discovery adoptee (LDA) experience, to sell the product?

Also known as NPE – Not Parent Expected – the trauma of late discovery is well-documented.

Research consistently shows that adoption causes identity confusion, trust issues, emotional distress, genealogical bewilderment and much worse.

Studies note that LDAs often experience the news as a profound psychological shock. Self-identity destabilises, and family relationships rupture. Reunion – if it occurs – is often complex or retraumatising.

As a peer-reviewed study from earlier this year concluded:

“This [LDA] is an expanding, vulnerable, and under-researched population… at high risk of developing psychiatric disorders. There is a need for tailored clinical interventions and specific self-care resources.”

But the disconnects in the Onenz ad go further.

The protagonist is Māori. His whakapapa, genealogy, cultural memory, and ancestral connection are all erased and reduced to aesthetics: “someone who looks like me.”

No mention is made of iwi, hapū, whenua, or the intergenerational trauma of cultural dislocation caused by adoption. His inheritance is treated as sentiment, not sovereignty.

This is also a Pākehā redemption narrative. A Māori man’s story is framed for a general audience so that the dominant culture can consume a fairytale without accountability.

A One NZ customer champion specialist (a real job title) describes the campaign as a fun, engaging, light-hearted, fictitious story about human connection.

Yet, the commercial normalises disconnection for all adopted people, as though being severed from truth, family, and culture is just another quirky backstory. It implies that reconnection is heartwarming, sentimental, and lucky.

This is adoption romance. Or, as many of us prefer to call it - reunion porn.

Many adopted people are aware that somehow our experience invites the voyeuristic consumption of our trauma. Our often lifelong search for truth is commodified and packaged to sell sentiment, and in this case, telecommunications.

The campaign also trades on the welfare myth and the belief that adoption is a win-win. However, as the 2000 NZ Law Commission clarified, adoption reflects property and contract law more than family law.

Adopted people are given no provenance, and many don’t even know they’re adopted. Adoption in Aotearoa is a legal process, not a social service. Adopted people carry amended birth certificates that don’t show they’re adopted. With no legal requirement to disclose a person’s adopted status, the entire architecture is built for concealment.

False closure is the final note in this “lighthearted story.” Reunion resolves everything.

Except it doesn’t. Many adopted people never reunite. For those who do, outcomes are complex, contradictory, and sometimes devastating.

Mainstream portrayals rarely reflect this. The Onenz campaign leans on levity and pathos. It trivialises the lifelong consequences of adoption: erased ancestry, lost belonging, and a culture of institutionalised silence.

Annalisa Toccara-Jones, a senior comms strategist & adoption and media researcher who helps organisations communicate ethically on adoption & identity, says:

Framing adoption like this erases loss, displacement, and the structural conditions — including poverty, racism, and lack of support — that often lead to family separation in the first place. Advertisers must think more critically about the stories they use, especially when those stories come from communities still living with the consequences.

For 70 years, adoption in Aotearoa New Zealand has operated as a statutory scheme to change a person’s identity from “illegitimate” to “legitimate”, despite illegitimacy no longer existing in any legislation. Adoption is a lifelong legal fiction. The children and all descendants of the adopted person must then inherit the state-assigned identity.

While adoption has been described as a statutory guillotine, it is the casual amusement of the Onenz ad that is so disturbing.

The question for Onenz is this:

Why would you use the last cohort of people actively, systemically and legally discriminated against to sell a cute story about connection, when connection is the very thing the law denies them?

If you know of any other marginalised group used in this way, I’d love to hear about them. Perhaps Onenz can use them next.

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