Duolingo’s “unhinged” method to its viral advertising has labored to “encourage” the remainder of the organisation and enabled advertising to have extra affect throughout the organisation, says the agency’s CMO.
Famend for its success on social media, particularly TikTok, Duolingo’s owl model mascot Duo has been delivered to life utilizing darkish humour and cultural references.
Talking on the Cannes Lion Pageant of Creativity right this moment (16 June), Duolingo CMO Emmanuel Orssaud famous that, traditionally, there was some separation between advertising and product inside the enterprise. That was most likely most noticeable in how Duo was utilized in communications on social and thru promoting, versus how the owl appeared on the app.
Duolingo’s “unhinged” method to its viral advertising has labored to “encourage” the remainder of the organisation and enabled advertising to have extra affect throughout the organisation, says the agency’s CMO.
Famend for its success on social media, particularly TikTok, Duolingo’s owl model mascot Duo has been delivered to life utilizing darkish humour and cultural references.
Talking on the Cannes Lions Pageant of Creativity right this moment (16 June), Duolingo CMO Emmanuel Orssaud famous that, traditionally, there was some separation between advertising and product inside the enterprise. That was most likely most noticeable in how Duo was utilized in communications on social and thru promoting, versus how the owl appeared on the app.
Orssaud described using Duo on social channels as “unhinged”. A notable current instance was content material created when Duolingo “killed” the owl, which included holding faux funerals and asserting Duo was killed by a Tesla Cybertruck. In contrast, how the owl has appeared within the app has historically been “healthful”, seen as an encouraging mascot to encourage language learners.
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Whereas removed from standard, that “unhinged” method has proved in style with audiences and gained the model loads of consideration.
For instance, Orssaud stated the demise announcement, which occurred the Monday after Tremendous Bowl Sunday (9 February) and solely price the model a number of thousand {dollars}, gained twice as a lot user-generated content material as a few of the best-performing Tremendous Bowl advertisements.
That kind of success has labored to “encourage” the remainder of the organisation.
“Now what you begin to see is […] that a few of these unhinged parts are flowing into our product,” he says, explaining it is because advertising has been in a position to show this method works.
This success is enabling advertising to have extra of a seat on the desk in different discussions and affect product particularly.
“It’s not unusual for advertising to work with product to assist form new options and new merchandise straight,” he says. “We now have earned a seat a desk via this method.”
Permission from failure
For these solely lately acquainted with Duolingo, it may be simple to assume the agency has all the time been a social-first inventive model, born with viral advertising in its blood. Nonetheless, that is removed from the case and 6 years in the past its method to communications and promoting regarded very totally different.
Orssaud defined that, due to its success, outsiders are inclined to assume Duolingo has enormous budgets. Nonetheless, the model’s advertising spend as a proportion solely hovers round 6% (the typical determine for 2025 was 7.7%, in response to Gartner). The advertising perform additionally has a reasonably lean crew, with solely 48 members throughout the worldwide enterprise.
It’s not been scale that has made Duolingo the viral success it’s right this moment. Certainly, the corporate’s unorthodox method to advertising was born out of a necessity for a extra inventive use of small budgets.
Going again 5 or 6 years, Duolingo’s communications focus was huge above-the-line campaigns, carrying product-oriented messages about why individuals ought to use the app.
The issues of those kinds of campaigns had been threefold. Firstly, they had been costly. With solely round a tenth of Duolingo’s customers paying for a subscription, spending quite a bit on a giant marketing campaign was exhausting to justify, Orssaud stated.
“The second drawback is that these campaigns weren’t optimised in the direction of both consciousness in constructing the model or driving high quality,” he stated. “As a result of we had been spending some huge cash, we had been saying to ourselves: ‘Hey, let’s do every part.’”
The effectiveness of those advertisements suffered because of this.
The third drawback was that Duolingo’s earlier method to promoting was not driving individuals to speak in regards to the model, Orssaud famous.
The “failure” of the model’s earlier method, gave it the permission to strive one thing new, specializing in virality and earned media as key objectives for the advertising organisation.
The position of experimentation
Duolingo knew huge above-the-line campaigns weren’t working for the model and needed to deal with driving earned media. Nonetheless, it nonetheless needed to determine which method to take.
The model took cues from its personal viewers. Sparked by the persistent notifications Duolingo sends its customers to remind them to finish a lesson, the model had lengthy parodied the Duo mascot, animating him in a sinister approach, for instance, holding a knife and threatening customers to finish their classes.
“That does sound like a PR nightmare, however as a model, we didn’t truly attempt to defend ourselves or push again,” he stated. “We determined to lean into this and we determined to go along with that darkish humour that our group was already having fun with on the market.”
When it comes to how Duolingo brings that to life, Orssaud highlighted the position of experimentation within the enterprise. The model prides itself on being agile and culturally attuned to the world, however with the intention to preserve being that approach experimentation is important.
The model spends 70% of its finances on issues it is aware of works effectively for Duolingo and are confirmed successes, and the opposite 30% on experimentation.
“When one thing works, we scale it, we discover methods to truly double down and make it greater,” Orssaud defined.
