Mitsubishi NZ’s surprise Jacinda Ardern and Stephen Colbert cameo

Jacinda Ardern’s visit to the United States has seen the prime minister make several high-profile appearances.

These include her delivery of the Harvard University Commencement Speech, meetings with representatives from Amazon and Microsoft, and a meeting with the governor of California.

Arguably though, Ardern’s most high profile appearance was as a guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

With the episode filmed on the same day as last week’s Uvalde school shooting, most of the attention was on Ardern’s message around gun control and how New Zealand mobilised regulation following the country’s deadliest mass shooting in Christchurch in 2019.

But, the PM also discussed other more light-hearted topics. One of these was her looming wedding to fiancé Clarke Gayford, of which Ardern was happy to invite Colbert.

Short of giving the talk-show host a neatly printed and formatted invitation to her wedding, Ardern instead scrawled the invite on the back of a piece of paper seemingly torn out of a magazine.

The rough and ready invite was amusing news for Mitsubishi Motors New Zealand, who noticed that the back page of the invite appeared to be a local advert for the all-new Outlander PHEV.

“Of all the places you might imagine your PHEV magazine ad appearing, it being used for a hand-written wedding invite by NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, probably wasn’t one of them. But hey, we’ll take it,” it wrote on social media.

It’s thought that the ad appears in the latest edition of Air New Zealand’s in-flight magazine, Kia Ora. Ardern may well have arranged the invitation during her flight to the US.

Ardern has appeared on Colbert’s show on two previous occasions, with the PM famously inviting Colbert to New Zealand as part of a tourism campaign that saw the former Daily Show contributor document his time down under to his audience of almost three million viewers.  

The wedding invitation chat can be viewed below: