‘More famous than Mickey Mouse’: Inside Duolingo’s ambitious plan for its viral owl mascot

On a Friday morning in mid-October, crowds of people—many in elaborate costumes—poured into the Jacob Javits convention center on Manhattan’s far west side. They were attending day two of New York Comic Con 2024, looking to pick up new releases of manga, get their hands on the latest Funko collectibles, and maybe even see a few celebrities. It was a star-studded event, after all, with guests that included WandaVision’s Elizabeth Olsen, Star Wars’s John Boyega, and Josh Brolin from Dune 2. But there was another celebrity with a long line of admirers: the Duolingo owl.

Duo, the bright green, lovable-yet-devious mascot of the language learning app Duolingo, attended the event, posing for photos with adoring fans (and occasionally twerking). His appearance was part of a promotion for Duolingo’s new collaboration with the popular web-comic platform Webtoon on a five-episode series called Duo Unleashed!, starring Duo and his cast of friends.

Lily, a 28-year-old Comic Con attendee from San Diego, waited patiently in a half-hour line for her chance at a photo with Duo. “I think the owl is hilarious. I’m chronically online, so I’m constantly seeing him on TikTok, on Instagram, on every platform that I have,” she said, adding that she couldn’t wait to flaunt the photo to her friends on Instagram. “We all want to dress up as him for Halloween, so they’re just gonna die when I show them this,” she said.

Like Lily, most people who’ve opened TikTok in the last few years will be familiar with Duo. His antics on social media have run the gamut from declaring his love for Dua Lipa to confessing to holding the Teletubbies hostage in his basement. Duo’s chaotic TikTok persona blossomed during the pandemic, and he’s since amassed a head-turning 13.3 million followers on the platform. But over the past few months, Duo has become more ubiquitous outside of TikTok—so much so that he almost feels unavoidable. He’s been featured in a wacky Super Bowl ad; spotted in the crowd of Charli XCX’s Sweat Tour; and, now, appeared at Comic Con. 

Like Lily, most people who’ve opened TikTok in the last few years will be familiar with Duo. His antics on social media have run the gamut from declaring his love for Dua Lipa to confessing to holding the Teletubbies hostage in his basement. Duo’s chaotic TikTok persona blossomed during the pandemic, and he’s since amassed a head-turning 13.3 million followers on the platform. But over the past few months, Duo has become more ubiquitous outside of TikTok—so much so that he almost feels unavoidable. He’s been featured in a wacky Super Bowl ad; spotted in the crowd of Charli XCX’s Sweat Tour; and, now, appeared at Comic Con. 

Since 2023, Duo has been transforming from a standard brand mascot to a celebrity in his own right with his own dedicated fanbase. As the Duolingo app expands its reach, its mascot is becoming more and more integral to the brand. On a recent episode of the Acquired podcast, Duolingo cofounder and CEO Luis von Ahn acknowledged that roughly 15% of the app’s users on any given day are there because of the owl, which he estimates to be worth “hundreds of millions of dollars” to the company. 

Today, Duo has layers of lore and motivations, which build him into a compelling figure on socials, in the app, in brand partnerships, and even in the real world. He’s setting a new playbook for the modern mascot—and dragging language learners along with him.

Behind Duo’s ambitious plans for global domination 

Duo’s transformation in recent months is part of the app’s playbook for  exponential growth. The company, which was founded in 2011, went public in July 2021 with 38 million monthly active users and 2 million paying subscribers. Today, it has more than 113 million monthly active users and 8.6 million paying subscribers, and is the world’s most popular education app. For the first nine months of 2024, revenue was up 42% year over year, from $380 million to $538 million. The company’s stock, meanwhile, has surged more than 40% this year. 

Duolingo has been driving this growth with an ambitious strategy. First, the company is leaning into generative AI features through a partnership with OpenAI, which has allowed it to add an AI-powered subscription tier and create new course content in less time. In September, Duolingo launched a video call feature for its highest subscription tier, which allows users to engage an animated chatbot in a “spontaneous, free-flowing conversation” in whatever language they’re learning. The chatbot takes the form of an eye-rolling emo girl named Lily, yet another character in the Duo universe. (The company is so bullish on this feature that it allowed Lily to deliver the opening remarks in its most recent earnings call.)  

@duolingo i am vengeance I AM THE NIGHT #batman #duolingo #languagelearning ♬ original sound – contact.high

Duolingo is also investing more in global markets, directing resources toward English learners in countries like China, India, Mexico, and Japan. Finally, it’s branching out beyond language learning and applying its popular streak-based gamification model to other subjects, like math and music, which were both launched on the app in November 2023. 

As Duolingo expands into new territories and educational categories, it’s leaning on Duo. In the process, it’s rewriting the playbook for modern mascots.

Step 1: Get weird on main

When Duolingo was founded, the company didn’t have a grandiose master plan for its owl mascot. In fact, it was Duolingo’s fans who initially started turning Duo into a more fleshed-out character. The app was an early pioneer of gamification techniques, using push notifications from the owl to encourage users to complete their lessons. But those notifications sometimes felt more like coercion than encouragement, and users began to see them as an opportunity to generate memes about Duo’s passive-aggressive personality. 

In 2017, a Tumblr user posted a now much-circulated meme of Duo pointing a gun at a neglectful user, garnering hundreds of thousands of likes. A couple years later, a Duolingo parody account on X posted a series of tweets including, “It’s simple, Spanish or vanish,” and “Beg for your life in Spanish,” which garnered 113,000 and 91,000 likes, respectively. The internet began widely riffing on this trend, building up an Evil Duo persona who uses increasingly creative threats to lure learners back in.

Instead of rejecting fans’ interpretation of Duo, the company leaned into the internet’s dark humor. Under senior global social media manager Zaria Parvez, who joined Duolingo in 2020 and served as the company’s first true social media coordinator, Duo began courting a growing fanbase of Gen Z and Gen Alpha users. Kat Chan, Duolingo’s senior director of brand marketing, says Parvez “shifted the Overton Window on what ‘quirkiness’ might mean” and made Duo’s humor “more culturally relevant.”

Popular recent TikToks from the brand have included an animation of Duo performing the popular “Maps” dance trend (set to a sped-up song by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs), getting literally roasted and eaten, and promising that if you “end your streak, I’ll end you” as Zara Larsson’s bright pop ballad Symphony blares in the background. Before other brands like Nutter Butter and Pop Tarts started getting weird online, Duolingo was one of the first companies to play into what Fast Company has termed “DGAF branding,” or the use of wacky, irreverent humor to build an online persona. 

Letting Duo take flight is risky, but it’s proven effective. Over just the past year, the brand’s TikTok account has grown by 4.8 million followers. Perhaps even more notably, on YouTube, where Duolingo has been investing more energy in short-form content, the brand has gained 2.7 million subscribers—reaching about five times the audience it had a year ago. Overall, Duolingo’s year-over-year social media impressions have risen by 80%. 

For many brands, engaging in internet trends can be a slippery slope. There have been plenty of think pieces written about how, as soon as corporations try to join in on the party, a meme has well and truly died. But Duo has remarkably managed to maintain a spot in the internet’s good graces without being labeled “cringe.” Chan says this boils down to a few different factors: maintaining a Gen Z-based team that’s “super TikTok native,” rolling out trend-based content quickly, and giving the social media team freedom to pursue their own ideas without jumping through too many hoops.

“My philosophy is, let’s take the shortest line from idea to post,” Chan says. “I think that probably has a lot to do with [our success]. You can just tell when creative has been shuffled through a committee of, like, legal, and PR, and 10 different bosses who don’t even know what the trend is. I think people can sense that.”

@duolingo in my winter arc where have u been #duolingo #winterarc #gymtok #motivation ♬ original sound – Xuvsp

Duo’s out-there online persona has been steadily attracting attention. But now, Chan says, the brand is ready to build him into something more all-encompassing.

“We have a very ambitious goal of making Duo more famous than Mickey Mouse,” Chan says. “In order to do that, you really need to build emotional depth to the character. I think, right now, he’s probably still mostly thought of as a meme.”

Step 2: Bring that weird energy to the product 

Transforming Duo from a meme to a Mickey Mouse-like character is a tall order. One of the biggest challenges is the gulf between online Duo and in-app Duo, which has been widening. While Duo has become increasingly unhinged to appeal to users on socials, his in-app persona has remained primarily wholesome and motivational. 

In order to present a more consistent Duo across the company’s platforms, the team had to find some kind of deeper lore for the character.

“It befuddled us for a minute internally, because we had these two ends of the personality spectrum, and Duo lived on both,” says Ryan Sims, Duolingo’s chief design officer. “We didn’t have a great story as to why that was. We knew why he was wholesome in the app: He wanted you to come back every day and put in the work to renew your streak, even if it was hard. We knew this unhinged personality on TikTok was really resonating with people. But we couldn’t quite figure out how to connect them.”

Then, Sims says, inspiration struck: What if in-app Duo becomes unhinged because he’s so desperate for you to keep learning that he’ll “do anything to get your attention”? 

The idea immediately clicked with the team. In early 2023, they began plotting out how Duo’s Jekyll and Hyde personalities would finally come face-to-face within the app. The first trial run was a downloadable widget for iOS users, which they released in November 2023. Each day, the widget, which lives on users’ homescreens, is on a 12-hour clock, and it cycles through various images and messages from Duo depending on users’ engagement with the app. 

“The widget is really a window into how Duo feels about your progress that day—or lack thereof,” Sims says. “He starts the day pretty chill, but the closer you get to midnight, he just starts tweaking and losing his mind and getting more and more concerned.”

According to Chan, who helped promote the widget on socials, the feature performed “really well,” inspiring screenshots from users and driving growth for the app. Duolingo’s artists were essentially given free reign to come up with whatever designs they could imagine, a rather laissez-faire strategy which produced some eyebrow-raising results. One of the widget images, internally known as “butt-ception,” featured Duo’s glistening backside—and ultimately served as the basis of Duolingo’s eye-catching five-second Super Bowl spot in February. The ad featured the slogan ‘Do your lesson, no buts” emerging from the owl’s, er, cheeks.

“I remember [the artist] showed it to us, and we were like, ‘What in God’s name even is this?’ It was super weird,” Sims says. “Then we were just like, ‘I don’t know, let’s try it.’”

That guiding creative attitude—”This is weird, let’s try it”—seems to generate some of Duolingo’s most engaging content. The Super Bowl clip is now one of Duolingo’s most-watched YouTube videos, with five million views. 

Step 3: Establish the mascot’s motive and lore

Duo’s Super Bowl ad involved the owl literally baring his butt on national television. Even so, it wasn’t his most controversial move this year.

This September, the Duolingo app icon suddenly shifted from Duo’s normally chipper cartoon face to a clearly ill version of the bird: The haggard Duo was sweating and bleary-eyed, with a juicy booger hanging precariously from his beak. Almost immediately, users began sounding off on the new icon, which appeared automatically on their screens and remained there for around two weeks. They found the new look “disgusting,” “gross,” and even off-putting enough to delete the app entirely. 

“I can’t defend you on this one Duo,” Instagram user @duosattorney wrote under a sick Duo post. “Not funny Duo,” another comment with 5,000 likes reads. One Redittor summed it up concisely: “TRAUMATIZING!!”

Duolingo stood its ground in an email to Forbes: “Duo is quite literally sick of reminding everyone to do their lessons,” a spokesperson wrote. “But don’t worry. His symptoms aren’t contagious, as long as learners keep their streaks going.”

Like the widget, Sims says the “sick Duo” icon originated from artist experimentation and was aimed at bringing Duolingo’s socials and product more closely together. Despite the naysayers, sick Duo content on TikTok and Instagram drove 30 million total impressions. Sims also notes that fans seem to have internalized Duo’s mission so thoroughly that many were concerned his sickness was related to their own neglect of the app—a marker of success in the team’s books.

“It worked out really well,” Chan says. “This is the first time we tried [Duo being sick], and I think we were really happy with the results. We’re definitely trying to bring product and content closer together overall.”

As Duo’s Jekyll and Hyde personalities begin to merge on the app, his motivations and backstory are becoming more defined, like the idea that he cares so much about users’ streaks that he might get physically ill, or, as one YouTube video suggests, burst into tears when a learner returns to the app. These details elevate Duo from a two-dimensional symbol to a kind of brand celebrity—one that fans want to learn more about. 

“I don’t think you can care about a character if they don’t have a motive,” says Greg Hartman, Duolingo’s head of art. “That’s what you see from a lot of mascots—it’s like a figurehead. When I think of mascots, I think of college football, right? It’s just a representation of something running across the field to get people amped. That was the [original plan for Duo]. It was just like, ‘We need a logo.’ But it turns out, it’s his motive that people really like.”

Step 4: Prioritize in-person experiences and brand partnerships 

Duolingo’s marketing team is now focused on expanding Duo beyond his digital presence—and into markets outside of the U.S. 

In February, Duo appeared in-person at a lucha libre wrestling match in Mexico for La Botargada del Añoh, an event where brand mascots literally fight for their fans’ favor. Last month, he started a rave on a river in Germany. That same month, fans spotted a crew of people in Duo masks in the crowd of Charli XCX and Troye Sivan’s Sweat Tour in Detroit (the aptly brat-green birds even got a shout-out from Charli herself). According to Chan, the Duos in the audience were all Duolingo employees.

@aaronjandette #duolingo llegando a #labotargadadelaño @DuolingoEspanol #botarga #humor ♬ The Time Is Now (John Cena) – WWE & John Cena & Tha Trademarc

“We are a very female-dominated group in marketing, so everyone’s obviously a huge Charli fan,” Chan says. “I had wanted to do something all summer, and this opportunity came up, and we decided to go for it. Oftentimes, guerrilla-style marketing can be a lot more effective than going through formal channels, because it just takes a lot longer. For us, speed and cultural relevance are super important.”

The concert activation garnered more than 32 million impressions from owned and user-generated content. Going forward, Chan says, live fan experiences will be “a big area for the team to further develop.” 

Duo is also becoming an increasingly integral part of how the company approaches its brand partnerships. According to George Audi, Duolingo’s VP of brand partnerships, Duo’s presence is frequently “something that we negotiate as part of our partnership agreements.” Now that Duo’s personalities are more closely entwined in the app, Audi says that there’s some more room to play with his appearance in partnerships, too. 

In a collaboration with Chess.com last November, players were given the option of facing off against a Duo chess bot in a digital match. Initially, he was an average player—but if his opponent used a language-based move, like a Spanish opening or Portuguese closing, then he was  triggered and became “unbeatable.”

And then there’s the Webtoon partnership. In the Duo Unleashed! web comic, which dives deeper into the mascot’s backstory, Duo is overwhelmed by his workload of constantly convincing users to learn, and decides he needs an assistant to help him. Antics involving a cloning machine, hundreds of evil Duos, and a PR crisis of epic proportions ensue. 

Brand partnerships like the Webtoon series give Duolingo the opportunity to flesh out Duo as a character and build the audience’s connection to the owl. David Lee, head of U.S. Webtoon, says he believes readers tend to have “an inherent curiosity” in uncovering the secrets behind recognizable mascots. Even so, the appetite for Duo was particularly strong: Duo Unleashed! hit the top trending spot on the site after its release and pulled in almost 5 million weeks in just over a week.

Step 5: Secure celebrity status

At Duo’s Comic Con meet-and-greet, hundreds of fans of all ages—from parents with small kids to adults in high-fashion cosplay—waited in a snaking line for the chance to shake Duo’s wing. Between interacting with Duo every day in the app, watching his content across social media, and seeing him pop up in real life, he’s become almost like a real friend to many followers.

“I love the owl because he’s his own person, promoting learning,” explained Mitchell, 24, who traveled from New Jersey for the event. “I go on LinkedIn a lot, and sometimes I’ll see him post there. People will sometimes say, ‘I lost my streak.’ And he’ll pop in saying, ‘You better not do that again!’” 

“I just love the social media presence that the owl has on TikTok,” said Juliana, a 35-year-old New Yorker. “After watching it online and using the app, it’s pretty cool to be able to say, ‘Hey, here’s a picture of me with the owl that I see every day.’”

“I can’t wait to take my picture with him,” said Kelsey, a 20-year-old from Long Island. “I feel like I’m meeting a celebrity.”