Whether clambering into a sweaty mascot suit, trying to source an owl bust carved from watermelon, or recording 200 clips of armpit fart sounds for a Super Bowl commercial, there’s rarely a dull day for Duolingo’s marketing team.
Just ask Zaria Parvez, the language learning app’s global senior social media manager. “This morning, I was putting a mustache on our CEO,” she told ADWEEK with a laugh.
The reason for Luis von Ahn’s new facial hair? The boss was starring in a spoof of the Apple TV+ series Severance for Duolingo’s 16.8 million TikTok followers. “He was like, ‘I only have 30 minutes to do this because I have a meeting with our biggest investor,’ but he still prioritized it,” said Parvez.
It might sound like merely an amusing anecdote, but this is symbolic of the reverence and trust Duolingo’s marketing department has built at the highest levels of the business.
Its 51-strong marketing team has spent the last four years fine-tuning the brand’s social-first approach on platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and X by planting it at the center of culture—whether that’s a Charli XCX concert or the Barbie movie premiere—and listening closely to its followers.
“The mantra for our team is that the comment section is our social brief, and the community really drives what we do,” said Parvez.
This strategy has driven an increase in monthly active users from 40.5 million in 2021 to 116.7 million now.
As people have flocked to Duolingo to learn over 40 languages, app revenues from ads and booster purchases have also increased. The business logged $192.6 million in billings last quarter, a year-over-year boost of 40%.
Its core business is evolving, too. Math and music courses have been part of its curriculum since 2023. Duolingo has also baked in generative AI tools, including a video call feature powered by machine learning that lets people converse with its mascots in languages including Japanese and Italian.
“Our content is fun, entertaining, it’s authentic—those are the facets of our brand that differentiate us,” said chief marketing officer Manu Orssaud, adding that posting daily on social was a big “retention driver” for the business by entertaining current customers and attracting new ones.
“When you see an owl twerking on TikTok, the first thing that comes to mind is, ‘Oh, I haven’t done my Duolingo today.’ This approach is driving a lot of engagement for us,” he added.
Debuting Duo
When Orssaud arrived from Spotify in 2020, Duolingo’s advertising was built around big TV campaigns. But they weren’t driving much response. “We realized we were missing something,” he said.
That something turned out to be a giant, passive-aggressive but kind of cute green owl overlord: the brand’s mascot, Duo.
At the time, the character had already earned a reputation among users for his slightly menacing push notifications, reminding them to complete a lesson so as not to lose their streak.
By 2021, the business started experimenting on TikTok without putting “too much pressure” on the outcome.
Duo stepped into a creator role, fronting the quick, reactive content. Within the first two years, he featured in a parody of Netflix’s Squid Game; revealed a crush on pop star Dua Lipa; and conceived a spongy “love child” with Scrub Daddy’s mascot.
These experiments were spearheaded by Parvez, then a 23-year-old graduate who took over the brand’s dormant TikTok account post-lockdown. TikTok had just hit 1 billion users, and Parvez realized that if people weren’t spending time on Duolingo, they were most likely to be found there.
“Because it started more as an experiment and less of a huge strategy, we were able to keep it a little under the radar,” said Orssaud. “It meant we didn’t necessarily have to adhere to all the brand consistency guidelines that we had, or try to make everything look perfect.”
The tests paid off, quickly racking up millions of views and comments from fans. Since then, the brand’s TikTok following has more than tripled, driving, in Orssaud’s words, a “big intake of users.”
Speaking fans’ language
Duo has Gen Z in the palm of his wing, fronting quick-fire reactive content that capitalizes on the trends the demographic is already leaning into on social.
“He’s pure and nice, but with a diva personality,” Orssaud explained. “We’ve used [these traits] as a source of inspiration to build narratives and turn him into an influencer.”
In February, Duo’s biggest and most successful stunt came when the brand made the bold decision to kill him off by way of a reversing Cybertuck.
Over a series of days, the team dropped clues about what had happened to Duo. The company staged a funeral on TikTok watched by 66 million people; CEO Ahn read his eulogy on YouTube. Everyone from the World Health Organization to Netflix sent their condolences.
Within the week, Duolingo asked users to take a language lesson to help bring the mascot back to life. A dedicated site was updated with stats showing which countries earned the most experience points, the currency Duolingo awards for practicing a language. The U.S. topped the list, followed by Germany and Brazil.
Parvez said though the campaign had been discussed previously, decisions on what content to post ebbed and flowed based on how fans were reacting in the comments.
“Whenever we come up with a social-first campaign, we have a narrative, but we’re flexible and okay to shift and move things around or create new content on the spot,” she explained. The effort is bracketed by guardrails in the way of an ongoing Slack chat with Orssaud as well as Duolingo’s legal and PR teams.
“If something is high risk, we send it to them, and I know they’re going to respond within five minutes,” she added. “That is a priority to them.”
Structuring for success
As evidenced by its CEO cameos, Duolingo’s C-suite has truly bought into its social-first approach to marketing. The team has been name-checked in every quarterly shareholder letter published since its 2021 IPO because they’re delivering results, be it headlines, engagement, or user growth.
Orssaud has organized the marketing team with a flat structure to allow it to be as nimble and reactive as possible. It’s a tight operation: Parvez has three people supporting her in creating social content.
“The biggest enemy of creativity is those lengthy, rigorous approval processes. I believe in giving the team as much creative freedom as possible,” he said, subscribing to the philosophy that creativity is a common responsibility across the whole department. The ideas, scripting, and vision can come from anyone on the team.
Most of Duolingo’s campaigns are done in-house, apart from regional work. A recent collaboration with McDonald’s in Brazil was created by local agency Galleria.ag.
Global senior creative director James Kuczynski leads a sub-team of 5 people focused purely on creative, including art directors and copywriters.
This in-house agency jumps on reactive work where needed. However, their time is mostly spent on larger, more long-tail, and global campaigns.
The team masterminded Duo’s Super Bowl debut in 2024, with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it five-second ad that showed the owl, fresh from butt-lift surgery performed by TikTok star Dr. Miami, farting.
“Buttception” aired in cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Detroit during the Big Game; at the same time, 99% of eligible learners were sent a push notification to open the app within 5.7 seconds of the ad airing.
It was born from chatter around a recent change to the app’s smartphone widget, which Duolingo frequently plays with to drive conversation. The new illustration showed Duo with his face coming out of his butt.
“That was still social first for us,” explained Kuczynski, noting the execution had to be “memeable,” given the limited budget they had to buy a short slot. “We aligned on the media placement before we had any media ideas.”
Building a brand universe
Social impressions are the main measure of success for Kuczynski’s team. New viewership metrics have become another important KPI.
The business doesn’t just want to entertain its existing members, who complete 13 billion exercises a week. It also wants to capture a bigger share of the online learning market, which is poised to reach $325 billion by 2025, per Research and Markets, with languages being one of the fastest-growing segments, notching 900% growth since 2000.
New users fill out a “how did you hear about us” survey when they download Duolingo. It lists key media channels, including TikTok and YouTube, “that also showcases the tactical correlation between content, impressions, and growth,” said Kuczynsk.
As Parvez looks to drive more user growth, the idea of creating more “lore” around the brand on social is top of mind.
Duolingo’s approach has inspired a host of other unhinged mascots by brands including Jack in the Box, Planters, and Pop-Tarts. So to keep things fresh, the brand has been expanding its own universe.
This has included Living With Lily, a YouTube Shorts series focused on the brand’s other, “emo mascot.” Launched in 2024, the show was the brand’s first attempt at serialized content; it garnered 10.5 million views and brought 100,000 new followers to the brand in its first run.
“We treat our socials like a sitcom. Everything we put out there is new lore. It’s new things that the community can bite into,” Parvez said.
In the face of a looming TikTok ban in the U.S., YouTube Shorts is becoming an increasingly important channel, with viewership growing 430% year-over-year for the brand.
While TikTok is trend- and audio-driven, YouTube is a space to play and learn. Parvez describes it as a platform where people can “escape their own algorithms” and Duolingo can expand into longer-form content (as it did with Duo’s eulogy).
Duolingo’s director of marketing campaigns Michaela Kron-Hags, known internally as the “April Fools queen” for her work on prank campaigns including the Cannes Lions-winning Love Language (a fake reality TV show pitch produced with Peacock), said another big priority for the business in the next few months will be bringing product and marketing closer together.
This will include a promotion around its Lily AI video call feature scheduled for Q2.
“It’s a moment of evolution for us as a brand. We’re in a great spot where we have cracked a lot with the mascot-driven content,” she observed. “But we’re also trying to think about what else we can test and iterate and experiment.”
As for Orssaud, he wants to expand the app’s presence internationally, focusing on markets such as Korea, Brazil, and Mexico.
He also wants to see more Duo in the real world, and fans do too. The brand debuted its first pop-up in New York in August, selling Duo plushies, T-shirts, beanies, and backpacks. Fans gave it a “lot of love,” said the CMO.
Orssaud also sees long-form content as the next frontier, which may seem ironic for a brand so interwoven with TikTok. But fans may like what he has in mind.
“Imagine a Duolingo game show, for example,” he teased.
Double Duo or Nothing? Duo or No Duo? Name That Language?
Whatever form the idea may take, and wherever it might run, it would surely score the business some points among its already devoted fandom.
SUITING UP
Duo is brash in the way cartoon birds can be. The lurid green owl crashed Charli XCX’s 2024 Brat tour. After Super Bowl 59, he weighed in on the Kendrick Lamar-Drake beef (one guess whose side he took). When TikTok was almost banned in January, he unmasked himself, revealing the human behind the suit.
“We were kind of worried that would ruin the Disney magic of it all,” said Parvez, “but it’s built into lore now.”
The man inside the suit was originally marketing manager Mark Pavic, who at 5’7″ is the perfect height to wear the costume. The brand has also hired dancers and other actors to fill Duo’s boots. Parvez assures ADWEEK it’s dry cleaned between activations: “It gets hot in there. It is a sweaty mascot suit.”
Duo has his own closet in Duolingo’s New York headquarters for his OOTDs, including a pink bikini, Halloween costumes, and a muscle suit (recently donned to spoof fitness influencer Aston Hall’s slightly bizarre morning routine).
Like any good diva, Duo has his own costume designer and seamstress in Laura Riviere, whom Parvez admitted has done “the weirdest things” in her role, including designing a cult robe and Duo’s famed post-butt lift bottom.
“If you look at our TikTok, it’s not really a brand channel—it’s Duo’s channel,” Orssaud added. “That’s novel for a brand; we don’t really talk about our product on social; it’s about what the owl has been up to.”
Correction 8/4 at 9.44 am ET: This story was updated to reflect that Duolingo’s pop-up event happened in August 2024, not October 2024, as initially reported. Zaria Parvez’s job title was also updated to senior global social media manager.
This story appeared in the April 8, 2025 issue of Adweek magazine. Click here to subscribe.
This story appeared in the April 8, 2025 issue of Adweek magazine. Click here to subscribe.
