Who killed Duo? How Duolingo built a brand on entertainment

0:06Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Uncensored CMO. Now, in this episode, we're talking about entertainment and just how important entertainment is to drive brand growth. And I'm joining this episode by James, the creative director of Duolingo, one of the most entertaining brands on the planet and the most talked about brands in the world. How have they gone about growing their brand so successfully and especially with their brand mascot duo? And as a bonus as well, I'm also joining this episode by Dan from Small World, who's done some research on the power of entertainment and how it builds grand growth.

0:36and some of the tactics that you can deploy as a brand to use entertainment to grow your brand. This episode is full of packs of great stories. It's very entertaining and lots of practical advice. Here it is. James, great to have you on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Good to be here. Good to be in Austin as well, South by Southwest. First time here, actually. Is it your first time? Yeah, yeah. Ah, mine as well. Yeah. So we just finished our panel, which seems to go all right, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of energy. There was a lot of energy. Yeah, indeed. And a lot of love for Duolingo as well, which is great.

1:05In fact, interestingly, most people in the room were aware of the death of Duo as well. So a few people kind of discovered that, didn't they? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's great to see that killing a mascot for your brand will create some good conversation. Indeed. Well, before we get into that, I'd love to find out a bit about you and how you got here today. So what's been your kind of path to this point? You know, I actually, I started off going to school, actually, at the School of Visual Arts in New York. And what got me going there was actually loved, I was really big in the emo rock scene, emo band scene, and I was designing t-shirts for bands at the time.

1:44And I was like, looking, how could I actually, you know, do a little bit more of this design and kind of get a little bit closer to music and artists. So I started, you know, jumping into a lot of t-shirt designs and that got me into design, went to School of Visual Arts. while I was there really getting into advertising and coming up with the ideas behind the actual design. And from there, I landed an internship at BBDO New York, which is, you know, a big creative agency at the time and was able to sign an internship intern for about a year, which is very long time worked on a lot of different projects there.

2:17Everything from TV, some Super Bowl work to, you know, a lot of digital campaigns, things that really didn't feel like advertising eventually. Yeah, spent about six years there. Jumped over to my first brand experience, actually, to ZocDoc. And at the time, they were the third largest startup in New York. I jumped into the brand side, did not know what I was getting myself into. The first time was a very different vibe of a place from where I am now. And I learned I needed to learn so much more than I actually did coming from a creative agency where creative is first. You jump into brand side and they're like, performance marketing.

2:55How do we sell hospital networks? I'm like, Oh, what did I get myself into? So I spent a year there, then finally jumped over to learn a little bit about all the different areas that I didn't know that much about on the brand side. So I jumped over to VaynerMedia, working with Gary and his team there for about four and a half years and worked on a lot of different brands from PepsiCo to Anheuser-Busch, a lot of Budweiser work and some GE and a few other few other brands um over the course of the time there yeah and when did the call come in for duolingo what what's uh yeah and what tempted you to to join yeah i got a call from uh recruiter actually from duolingo who spent some time at uh at droga actually another agency back in the day and i knew her from from the past there and she's like hey i think you should like come in for this and i was like you know i was looking for brand side like opportunity to go back to to take some of that knowledge from both, you know, both agency experiences and really go into a brand that I think, you know, I would love to sort of be a part of and actually have good impact.

3:56And yeah, that just hit. I kind of took the first interview, not really expecting to be that excited about, to be very honest. And then once I learned a little bit more about the business, the product, the opportunity and, you know, just the audience and how much people love the brand without even doing any marketing for me, it was like a no brainer. like the opportunity potential was all there. This is what people, I guess, like so many people have heard Duolingo as well, but for anyone who hasn't yet heard, I'm sure there's not that many people out there, but it's one of those brands that have become incredibly successful.

4:28We'll talk about why. What does Duolingo do and in how many countries and how many users are there? Yeah, so we're the number one way to learn a language in the world. We have, right now, we have about 110, a little over that now actually, monthly active learners on the platform. and we span the entire globe. So, you name it in terms of languages, we teach about 40 languages, a little bit more than that. Those including the ones that you can imagine, English, Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, but then also some fictional languages such as High Valyrian. We teach Klingon as well and a few other fictional languages.

5:09We cover the spectrum. And for us, in terms of learners, we split our audiences up in what we call the English divide. There's people that are learning English from other languages. And in most cases, they're learning English to better their socioeconomic status. So while we're a very fun brand, we kind of have a bit of a serious mission as well, which is to create the best education world and make it more accessible. But we believe in the best way in doing something is through fun. and you know the best way that it'll you know you want to learn anything when you have fun doing it you're more likely to go further that makes a lot of sense randomly i i didn't study french when i was at school because you know i'm old enough that you didn't have to do languages at school yeah and so i ended up like doing um doing french when i was in my mid-20s and i was learning back then with a cd where they they taught you to music and the problem is now i can't order anything in a french restaurant without singing it you know because that's how i learned but Because it made it fun and tuneful.

6:10And I used to study while I was in the car, commuting, doing a sales job. So I was going to sales calls or whatever, you know, for an hour or two in the car. I'll be listening to this kind of music French kind of thing. But it's hilarious when I go and order in France now because I sort of, they fall out laughing at me because I'm singing the tune, I'm singing the phrases. Yeah. I mean, that's definitely a new product to test out, right? A musical, a musical. A musical approach to it. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And one of the things I think is fascinating about what you've done on the product side, though, is you've kind of gamified, haven't you, kind of the experience.

6:41So how have you used gamification to help people learn more and kind of stay on the platform and get better? I mean, to what I just said, you know, when you're having fun learning anything, you're more likely to continue doing it. So for us, the idea of a gamified product, right, utilizing some of the, let's say, mechanisms that keep you addicted to social media, right, scrolling, getting the dopamine effect of some reward system, right, for us is pretty amazing opportunity to be able to take that and use it for something that you want to get better at, right, learning something. So, you know, for us, there's, you know, there's a lot of different mechanisms that we use.

7:18We have the streak, which is probably one of our most popular gamified features, you know, that really keeps you coming back every day. We have about, I think it's about over 3 million people who have a streak longer than one year with us, which is, you know, people who love the product, they're coming back every day. We have other features such as leaderboards, which is again, allowing you to rank amongst other learners. we have friend streaks actually now so you can continue learning with a friend and you know or family members and and kind of challenge each other to to keep going so there's a lot of gamified features that really are just there to keep you hooked and learning which again you know no one can really get upset at you for yeah for that so yeah a lot of a lot of dopamine uh moments i would say even with our sound design and and other touch points yeah it's amazing like these kind of cheap not cheap insights but I mean behavioral science insights are so simple and yet so effective I know for me like I'm trying to get fitter so I'm on um on Zwift for example and uh you know the amount of like you know we're same thing it's like streaks every week that you you know completed a workout or the the statistics or you get kind of you know feedback from other riders you know communication that kind of thing it's great when it gets put to good use isn't it I mean yeah it's it's like when you think about again scrolling through your feed you know you're just losing all this time like you could be learning and you could be taking the same the same uh you know um yeah the same dynamics and and helping yourself it's sort of like a no-brainer when you think about it in the time you scrolled you could have ordered a pizza in italian you know exactly exactly and honestly it just takes a few minutes a day as well right like when you're learning anything you need to kind of stay with it for you to you know keep it fresh top of mind for you so it's uh yeah we do what we can to keep everyone learning and you know we we have a mascot as well who uh You know, it does a great job at keeping you motivated, whether it's passive aggressively or, you know, or just trying to shame you into learning.

9:16You know, there's a lot of mechanisms that we have. And can you assess your personality and work out exactly what kind of prompts are going to get you to do more? We know what works for certain people. We used to send a newsletter out that was duo crying and it's like you made duo upset. and that turned into a meme you know earlier on in our first few years of of the company and people really did not want to make duo sad my mom actually still still texts me occasionally she's like oh i got i'm making duo sad today i didn't do my lesson i'm like yeah you got to do it mom like you got to do it i love that and then talking about technology as well what to what extent is ai you know changing the experience or helping learning yeah you know i think what we've started to implement now is actually we just launched a feature called video call with Lily.

10:02So Lily is one of our, one of our characters, actually our second most loved character outside of duo. And you're what we've launched is a way to use generative AI GPT to be able to, in real time, understand what you're saying back to it. So it'll prompt you so you can speak to Lily. And in real time, it actually could have a conversation with her. So you're really able to practice speaking for really the first time. And, you know, when you finished having a conversation with Lily, you know, you'll get a notification and an update of like a transcript of like your conversations, things that you did right, things that you did wrong, things for you to improve on the next time.

10:39And what's actually interesting is there's a bit of a retained knowledge too. So she'll remember some of the things that you talked about in the next conversation. So, you know, if you say something like oh you really love sushi she'll ask you like oh well you know oh you you like sushi right like so you could really start to build a bit of a relationship with um with the characters and well you know it again to the gamified notion of keeping people you know coming back you know really starting to build a relationship and a feature of like you really are invested in learning and wanting to come back um that's a yeah that's another motivational tactic though Love it.

11:14Well, I'm immediately thinking how I can save money on Spanish tutors for my daughters. It's a really good hack. Do you see AI as a threat at all? I mean, I had a meeting early today, actually, and the guy had those new Ray-Bans. And he was like, yeah, talk to me in Italian and I'll be able to hear you in English kind of thing. Is that going to be a threat, do you think, to what you do? You know, I would say translations, especially with like Google Translate and other, you know, companies in that space. They've been good for several years now. We honestly have not seen any change in those wanting to learn a language with us.

11:47You know, there's a lot of motivation, such as learning for love or relationships or family or other areas outside of even wanting to speak, such as just brain training. Right. For for for some. And so, you know, we don't really see an impact there. And again, as I just mentioned, there's features that we have now are actually taking that technology and making it more immersive to to learn. And we're seeing a lot of engagement on that front. So again, making it more accessible for everyone to learn. Now, he talks about your mascot, Duo, right? And I think probably Duo is like probably the best case in the world right now of a brand mascot.

12:23But it's really funny because if you look at the data, mascots are well out of fashion. I mean, a colleague of mine, Orlando, has been tracking. He calls them fluent devices, but basically like things associated with your brand that come to mind easily, right? So he uses the term because it covers lots of different things. It could be sound. It could be look. It could be characters or something. But anyway, he's been tracking it for many years. And they're really in decline massively. They're really not used anymore. What was the thought behind developing this character and the role that it plays?

12:54Yeah. I mean, I love this question because I didn't realize there was a mascot tracker. There is. I know. I don't know. Who knew? I know. I'm very interested in hearing more. I must be down the rabbit hole of research. I happen to know this. But yeah. Yeah, you know, for us, we, you know, at the time when Duo was developed, I think it was about a year or so into developing Duolingo as a learning platform. And, you know, for us at the time, it was just like, we should get a mascot, right? It was kind of like a no-brainer thing. Like, sure, let's just do this, create a character. This is definitely before my time, so I'm sure others can maybe speak to it a little bit better than I can.

13:28But, you know, for us, it was, okay, great. It was an owl that we created who's, you know, wise owl, all-knowing, right? owls are known to be wise. And he's green because her co-founder hated the color green. And, you know, the CEO and others thought, why not make this character green? And, you know, Duolingo was the name. So Duo was actually part of his eyes. At the old time, I'll have to share an old rendering of what Duo used to look like because it was not good. He definitely got a glow up, like for sure. But you know, we, we developed this character and we started to build out moments within the product that almost again was, he was there to be your motivator, right?

14:10His, his goal was to, he won't, won't stop at anything for you to do your lesson for you to get better. And we started to lean into that on different touch points, as there's newsletters, even push notifications. And then we started to see, well, how crazy could we get push notifications of like, Like, oh, he was a little sad. He didn't do your last sin today. Or, you know, now he's crying. And now he's like, uh-oh, like what's happening now? He's like very passive aggressive. And I'm listening to these human states to a mascot or to, you know, a character. And we saw that people actually loved this human nature because it's almost like a friend, right?

14:44Pushing you to be better. So, you know, I think that that really resonated. And that took on a life of its own, especially on social media, whether it was YouTube and some of the content that we created earlier on. And we really just seen the Internet take off and really become attached to Duo and some of these like mechanisms of wanting to keep you motivated. This is what I think is so interesting about it as a case of almost Duo's taking on human personality. Because, I mean, the logic of like a distinctive brand asset usually is the role of it is to be remembered. So I can point out the McDonald, Ronald McDonald, if it was back in the day, you know what I mean?

15:20It becomes associated with your brand and it does that thing of triggering memories and associations, that kind of thing. But you've taken that to a whole nother level, which is like there's a whole world around Juro. There's personality and like what Juro says on, you know, in social media can catch fire. There's a massive great world you created. Was that always the plan or is that kind of like emerged as you've kind of kind of created him and engage with, you know, the audience? Yeah. You know, I think I think it's it's a little bit of both. There's ideas that we had around around Duo, but really what started to really work was, you know, for for fans to really just take take our brand and have fun with it.

16:03So I would say our first moment that this happened was around an April Fool's project. Again, we saw people starting to be like, wow, Dio is just harassing me, right? Like I'm getting notifications, I'm getting emails, I'm getting all of these like Dio crying, like this is a toxic relationship at this point. And, you know, we started to see people really fall in love with that. So we said, okay, what if we just created a mascot suit and, you know, actually have like in, you know, in real life and go around, create a video of like, do is now coming into real life to now harass you. Like he's taking a form in, you know, he's coming after you now and he wants up at anything.

16:41So that went super viral in April fools. And people started then commenting around all these different topics. There's a phrase that kind of came to life of Spanish or vanish, right? If you don't do your Spanish lesson, you're going to vanish. Do is going to come after you and kidnap you. And we just started to lean into all of these things that we started to see. So we saw half of our social posts where people were commenting Spanish or Vanish, do your lesson now, now, now. And the brand really just started to kind of create its own meme. And it became like a meme pretty much. We're like a memeable brand.

17:14And when we looked at the marketing, especially when I joined about five years ago, this is just on the heels of some of this work. And we're just like, wait a minute. We just got to lean in. This is already what people are talking about. this is what people love. Let's lean into that and start to develop content that allows other people to actually tell us what they love about our brand. And the social media landscape is just ripe for that. So we've honestly been able to have a lot of fun with that. I love the fact you learn from April Fool's because most brands will kind of use April Fool's as a temporary, you know, joke, and then they'll go back to what they did before.

17:53But you've done, you've used it as almost an experiment to go, whoa, that works. Let's do more of it. So what are you doing this April Fool's? Can you, I mean, we're recording this just in the run up to it, but anything you can, uh, we, we are, so we're known to really, you know, kind of really commit to the bit is what we say, right. For April Fool's, I think that, you know, now there's a lot of brands that are, you know, you know, the fake scent that smells like this and it's, you know, it's, it's very straightforward. So our most successful project that we've done, whether it was creating a fake reality TV show, um, love language from a few years ago to last year that we launched a fake multilingual musical on ice and partnered with SeatGeek to sell tickets that you can get.

18:33You know, there's a landing page and everything. We're really committed to the bit. All the details are there. The track list of everything that we have, who the producer is, the creators of the music, right? We really go all the way down even to like legal disclaimers. So for us, it's really about finding opportunities and ideas that you can really make it feel like this is, is this real? Is it real? I think it's real. Boy, no, it's not. But it would make so much sense if they did do this. So sorry, this is a very big preamble. So for what we're doing this year is we're launching a five-year cruise.

19:02It's the first multilingual cruise that will take you into the next decade in 2030. You could ring in 2030 with your new multilingual background. So we're partnering with Carnival Cruise Lines to launch a five-year cruise where we'll stop at 130 countries around the world and you're able to yeah walk off fluent if you don't do your lessons you may not finish the cruise you can imagine all the chaos that happens over five years there's college degrees that we're offering up on the cruises because it's more than four years there's it's yeah everything imaginable is going to happen on that's amazing have you worked out the price you like is it i think so there's there's there's different tiers i think there's some type of diamond how far do you take this idea like we've got the price got terms conditions oh yeah there's there's there's ads for it it'll be out of home billboards there's um yes there's there was filming on cruise ships involved really that's amazing yeah yeah it's a good one and of course talking to you very recently you announced his passing yes which um yes was pretty tragic right i know we didn't receive any flowers from you which you know i was kind of like you know you know it's so devastated i yeah i can imagine a lot of people felt this you know just well what do you do i mean you know it's but you know yeah you know we actually really did get flowers though from you did actually from people into the office they sent flowers and what was you know yeah it was we we we had this idea to kill duo it was around maybe for about three years or so and we were thinking at the time we're like look maybe we'll do this one day it was something that was floating around for quite some time.

20:43The issue of why we didn't do it earlier was we couldn't affect the product at that moment in time. It was too many touch points of Duo everywhere, right? How can you kill off a mascot if he's in the app, you know, on all the different touch points, he's in the lessons, right? It's the experience. It's like, wait, what do you mean you killed him off? He's still here. So what we ended up doing this time around was we had an opportunity to create our, update our app icon. So that in and of itself now is reachable to about 110 million people. a month. And what we wanted to do was we said, look, there's no other moment to actually affect product than this moment now.

21:19So we said, okay, great. We are updating it. We had Duo with little X's over Duo's eyes in terms of the artwork. And we got into a room and we said, hey, how do we go ahead and kill Duo? It was the social team, a lot of our brand marketing team all coming together. And it was just, okay, we had some ideas from before. Duo gets killed by Cybertruck or is this a like whodunit sort of like storyline right and if you know a ton of different ideas flowing and I think within three days we had outlined okay here's the plan for for what's going to happen and we're killing off duo on Monday so it was three days notice I think we were telling our marketing managers across the globe like hey by the way FYI if I go into the weekend we're killing off duo uh our mascot everyone's like what um I think in Brazil actually we're having a collab launching with McDonald's and literally on TV.

22:12And she's like, what do you mean? What do you mean you're killing our mascot? We have a collaboration with McDonald's and duos on TV. We cannot kill our mascot. But yeah, I mean, it's an idea that, you know, that came to life again, one that we had, but then really resurfaced and it just, the team kind of all rallied together around it. And, you know, yeah, did, didn't say numbers for us right now. We're still, we're still calculating all of it. Yeah. Cause this was around Superbowl time, wasn't it as well because i i remember this everyone was talking about it like in the run-up to superbowl like more than they're talking about superbowl to some extent it was yeah it honestly was crazy we did our first post during um that kind of alluded to drake actually we made a comment about this and then the next day we killed off duo so everyone was making connections to what happened during drake because we were dissing drake at the time you know jumping into cultural conversation and they're like yeah drake killed duo and we're like oh okay great so people think drake killed duo now now let's create this whole narrative of like who actually killed duo right and we had we had a video of like a cyber truck you know getting getting killing duo we then had a ton of creators you know fans creators all coming in with their own versions of like who they thought killed duo We had Mr.

23:26Beast actually do a video of him, that he was him in the cyber truck that actually maybe killed him. And everyone started to get on board. And it created this like real world whodunit story. And the best part is none of this was planned. It wasn't none of the – You worked with the influencers and stuff. No, it was all organic. All organic. So we created all this conversation. All the brands that jumped in to create all this conversation, everything was organic. the campaign I think we spent maybe like 20k on like shipping costs for things that's the most insane ROI isn't it on any campaign ever yeah I think right now again we're still like crunching numbers now because I think we're still getting a few things coming in but I think we estimated at least over 20 million dollars of earned media like impressions like worth three Super Bowl spots now the one person I really want to know how she responded of course was Dua Lipa Yes, yes.

24:18I skipped over that one. She was one of our biggest creators. I mean, half the reason why we maybe faked her death was to get her attention finally. So we sent her a box with matcha powder, which looked like it was Duo's ashes, straight to her. And she didn't acknowledge the ashes. But yes, we sent it to her. Yeah, interesting way. Yeah, we apparently found her address. I found this out today, actually found out her address. because she was trying to do renovations in her basement for a pool. And she had to apparently, you know, create a document, a legal document, the word somewhere, it's somewhere on the internet.

24:59So that's how we found her address and sent her Duo's Ashes. And did you get a response? Not yet to that. She did tweet at us though. Oh, she did, yeah. Yeah, yeah. When we first announced sending her love and condolences. Oh, brilliant. That's amazing. I mean, talking in partnerships as well, one of the things I love about what you do is how you partner with other, You know, like you talk about Game of Thrones earlier, weren't you? So who have you partnered with and what role does that play in kind of extending the brand to new audiences? Yeah, you know, for us, the way that we look at brand partnerships has been really focusing on finding the core intersection of a fandom or of, you know, what people are really passionate about.

25:35And then the intersection of where we come in of like, how can we help them get the most out of what they love? and whether that was partnering with Game of Thrones for House of Dragon around teaching High Valerian Insider app, which is, again, a great way for people to connect to their IP or most recently what we did for Squid Game with Netflix. In the first season that launched, actually, we saw a 40 % increase of people learning Korean when Squid Game launched. We're like, whoa, there's something really here. People really love this content. They're really immersed in this. in this and they wanted you know they wanted a better way to actually connect so for season two we were talking with netflix for for quite some time around wanting to collaborate we were reaching back out to each other and we said hey i think we're ideating together and we said you know all right so what if duo joins the pink guard and now he's trying to get everyone to do their lessons now you know it's learn kareena else right this this the storyline and it just everyone was like, yep, Duo is just so memeable, iconic in a pink card suit.

26:35Like this is just visually like internet worthy. And for us, it was a bit of a no brainer. So we, we, we find partnerships that again, allow people to connect with the fandom that they love and in a way kind of pull a bit of their audience and, you know, allow them to also leverage us for our social media presence that we have and building affinity for, for both brands. So it's in a way it's, it's, it's a value exchange yeah so to speak and you know we really try and time after that audience and again to the point earlier around you know going after fandoms and really kind of creating content that they want to share that is really a bit of the the reason why we do a lot of our our brand partnerships i'm guessing that like your leverage now compared to when you started must be incredibly different i mean because like everyone must want a bit of the duo platform now yeah i mean our our reach now i mean when we first started with our our game of thrones was i think we maybe had a few hundred thousand followers on social we have 16 million on on just tiktok and yeah if you're including our global channels you know i think we're pulling in about half a billion impressions a month like organically which is quite substantial i think when it comes to most global brands so our reach now is pretty massive you know our followers and our fans really are global as well but they span the spectrum of still like skewing younger more gen z and a lot of brands are looking to partner with with us because you know they really want to reach an audience that you know that has very similar interests in mind yeah this is what i think is wild about it because if you did a list and said like here's 16 and a half million followers on tiktok name which celebrity it is i mean people like you'd be picking a list celebrities like you've got your brand mascot it literally in a list territory haven't you yeah i mean duo is duo what i say right now is like in duo's creator kind of like a moment right now, like duo's creator era, right?

28:27You know, I think we're starting to think about, okay, what would a world look like as duo as a creator or as a large sort of like celebrity? And, you know, and we've seen this come to life over the last several years of duo walking the pink carpet for Barbie or again, showing up to the premiere for squid game, right? It's, you know, duo is showing up on a lot more prominent places and, you know, we don't know where it can go, but maybe there's, you know, other red carpets in the future or something, some other events or anything that honestly a creator could launch you know i'd love to i'd love to know what duo is worth as if you put a value on it'd be crazy wouldn't it in terms of just the brand value of one mascot must be insane that's actually a good thing we should probably yeah get the cfo to work it out i mean you created something of huge value and what'd be lovely go back to like the early days of tiktok so like there aren't many brands that have done what you've done right because um you know most brands kind of treat their you know social media is almost the corporate comms department, you know, like the official response from the brand is this and, you know, whatever.

29:27What's been the kind of lessons in how you've built up that kind of social media following? Because 16 million is pretty a rare achievement. For sure. You know, I think it goes back to having the right people with the right experience, with the right autonomy and trust. And I think that, I think it was about, our first foray actually into TikTok, Most people may not know this, but we actually launched a partnership with TikTok around education on their platform. And they were showcasing they wanted to find more collaborators around learning. And I think we partnered with several creators on their platform around creating content.

30:06This is how you say this in this phrase in Italian. This is how you say this in Spanish. And the content did okay. It was like 50, 60, 70K. I mean, numbers most people would be very excited for. I think for us, it was like, okay, that's fine. And we actually didn't do anything with that afterwards. We stopped putting focus on TikTok. And about, I think it was about a few months later, it was actually IPO. We were about to IPO. And we had an opportunity of what's, you know, Duo has been known to send reminders to everyone, including other mascots. So we're like, what if we just send Duo to Times Square at the time and got other mascots to do their lessons?