If they find out Duolingo can shapeshift they are going to tell the board
Or, a deep-dive into Duo as a cultural icon and the illusion of spontaneity in social-media marketing
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INCLUDED IN THIS PACKAGE:
If they find out Duolingo can shapeshift they are going to tell the board (an essay)
Media Review
Anisa’s Writing Corner
Conclusion
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If they find out Duolingo can shapeshift they are going to tell the board
This essay is dedicated to Eve, who gave it a reason to be.
What makes an icon? When we consider the word as synonymous with celebrity, we begin pulling prénom-only names out of hats. Madonna. Cher. Prince. Duo…
Yes. The Green Owl.
This newsletter began in a way that a lot of my others newsletters just didn’t. Duo, or more technically, several Duos, went to the Sweat tour. I sent video evidence to my friend Eve. She asked why the owl is such a cultural icon and I promised her I would write about it. So, in the throes of election season, suspended in the air while results came in, I found myself thinking: what is it that makes a Brat-green owl in a tank top So Julia? And then the last two months of the fall semester drove all other worries away. Then Christmas, then New Year’s, then January.
Admittedly, I’m several months late, but back nonetheless, and still wondering.
I have a long history with Duolingo. I first downloaded it in 2015, when I was still in primary school, when 5SOS and 1D were most reblogged on Tumblr. It was then still rather new and exciting, and my French teacher got the whole class to get it. All the kids in our year friended each other. I got certified as a French teacher on a whim at age nine and added my brother to my class. Apart from High Valyrian, I tried all they had to offer. I first stuck with Irish, then German, then Russian. Spanish, for almost a year. I learned Cyrillic with their TinyCards and French both on and offline. I recall bits and bobs of it now: sí and is cailín mé.
Five schools, two fallings-out and one move bring us to our current age. My ex-classmates’ accounts lie dormant, forgotten. I haven’t spoken to most of them in years. I don’t bump into them at Paddington Station; I don’t learn Irish anymore. But somehow Duolingo is the only thing from that life that I’ve managed to keep. The trees are no longer as tree-shaped, sure. Duolingo for Schools is much different. Red lingots have become blue gems. Idioms and Proverbs have vanished. So much has changed about this app that I love, but I have retained an atavistic interest.
All the same, no matter how true it is, “atavistic” is a strange thing to call a sensation. Because that’s what Duolingo has become—a sensation, viral so many times over. (I’ve lost count.) But first, some stats about the history of the company, paraphrased from Zippia’s “Duolingo company history timeline” (which in turn is paraphrased from Wikipedia.)
2011, Unspecified - Luis Von Ahn and Severin Hacker dream up a language learning model. They call it “Duolingo,” envisioning a model free for users who in turn would contribute to translations.
2011, November 30 - Duolingo launches its private beta with Series A financial backing from:
a) Co-Founder Luis Von Ahn’s MacArthur fellowship
b) a grant from the National Science Foundation
c) $3.3 million in first-round funding from Union Square Ventures/Tim Ferris/Ashton Kutcher’s “A-Grade Investments.”
It amasses a waiting list of 300,000+ people.2012, June 19 - Duolingo launches! Waitlist has increased from 300,000+ to around 500,000 people.
2013, July - 5 million users. Duolingo is the Google Play Store’s #1 free educational app.
2014, February 18 - Duolingo now reportedly has 34 employees and 25 million users, 12.4 million of which are active.1 Duolingo receives $20 million in Series C funding.
2014, Later - Duolingo nixes translation idea, and the company earns nothing for three years. There is still $38 million in venture capital to work with. and the company onboards “linguists and second-language-acquisition researchers who [add] instruction extras like grammar tips and conjugation tables.”
2015, January - Bill Gates mentions Duolingo during a Reddit AMA.
2015, June 10 - Series D funding led by Google capital brings home $45 million. Duolingo is valued at $470 million dollars
2017 - 200 million registered users, 25 million of which reported active. 95 employees, $108.3 million in funding. Google and Facebook ads are launched, as are subscriptions that take away ads. The year ends with $13 million in revenue.
2018, August - 300+ million registered users.
2019 - Duolingo makes the Forbes’ list of Next Billion-Dollar Startups.
2023-2024 - $531 million in revenue in 2023, with $731 million forecasted for 2024. According to BBC, “Roughly 8% of Duolingo users pay for a subscription, contributing to 80% of the company’s revenue. Meanwhile, the vast majority, 90%, use the free version and see ads, which account for only 8% of the earnings.”
TL;DR: there’s a lot of money to work with. If you’re like me, however, the financial stuff isn’t what you really want to know. Yes, Duolingo made significant splashes in a relatively short period of time. Yes, they did get into adverts around 2017. Yes, Ashton Kutcher. But what about the Spanish or Vanish persona? What about Duo the meme? For that, allow me to take you back a little…to Duolingo “Push.”
It’s April Fools’ Day, 2019, and Duolingo has just decided to commit to its menacing owl persona. Their contribution to the April Fools’ Fun? A faux-ad campaign for Duolingo push—a service that would allow Duo to show up wherever you are, to “gently” remind you to do your lessons. To date, it has received 9,244,883 views. Given the numbers, there’s a very good chance that you’ve already seen it, but in case you haven’t, here it is:
This video is what I like to look at as the origin of Duo the owl as we know him. The millennial version, if you will. From here, we see a number of things established as par for the course with Duolingo online. The owl-suit, for instance. (We’ll come back to this. You’ll notice it changes a lot)
Duolingo has never skipped an April Fools’ opportunity since Duolingo Push. Here began started off a brilliant marketing tradition—every year comes something wackier. The point of it? To keep us talking, and to give us something to look forward to.
“It helps that we’ve committed to this bit every single year since 2019. It’s a tentpole campaign for us, but just because our learners are waiting for it doesn’t mean they know what’s coming. Having these key moments throughout the year that your audience can anticipate is a great way to create buzz…as long as you deliver something better, and in our case, funnier, each year.'“ - Emmanuel Orssaud, Chief Marketing Officer, Duolingo
Duolingo Push was also the first time Duolingo decided to lean into the idea of Duo as a vaguely threatening owl. A few days after the video was launched, Twitter user @/duolingous coined the phrase we all know, and the rest was history.
The genius of it was Duolingo’s early adoption of the phrase. It reappears several times in Duolingo lore, but for symmetrical reasons, I’ve linked Duolingo’s April Fools’ Day video from 2022. Here, it’s listed as one of several language-based threats (my favorites? “Italian or the battalion” and “Latin or be flattened”). At this point in time, Duolingo’s brand identity has tied in very firmly with the jokes—Duo of 2022 is fully threatening.
The [Duolingo] brand has taken advantage of Duo's popularity as evidenced by its TikTok videos, where it does "very strange stuff", as Von Ahn described. "At first it was just this owl, then I think it started getting a life of its own when the notifications from the phone started coming from the owl. People started ascribing it a personality, and then I think people started memes for the owl, because the owl is very insistent" - Natalia Guerrero, “Good, free, fun: The simple formula that has made Duolingo a daily habit for millions,” BBC
Duolingo first went mega-viral in 2019, with Duolingo Push. But the problem with memes is that times change, update. Gen-Zers started making TikToks, and Duolingo decided to go where the kids were. Enter Zaria Parvez in September 2021, also known as The Owl. Duolingo had already partnered with an agency in early 2021, to make videos that capitalized on their established identity However, there was still untapped potential, and Duolingo and that agency split ways six months after the venture first began. That’s when TikTok hit 1 billion users and Zaria Parvez saw potential (Baxter 2022).
You may be thinking: well, given the cultural and financial success of Duolingo, Parvez would surely have an incredible amount of money and resources to work with. If so, you’d be wrong. Duolingo had long since deprioritized TikTok, and they told Parvez as much (Baxter 2022). In Parvez’s words, she had “a zero-dollar budget, a crusty owl suit, and an iPhone.” With these three tools, she made magic, and to be more precise, the sassy comments Duo leaves on other people’s most viral moments/videos like the ones in which Duo births owl-shaped Scrub Daddys (Duolingo 2022). She no longer wears the suit, but she still wears the hat of the young Duolingo media wizard.
"A lot of our storylines on TikTok started with funny videos and memes we've seen on the internet, such as Duo being a big fan of Dua Lipa – that came to be because people would mix up our names, such as Do-a-libra…Once trends would pop up, we'd match the trends to the ideas we already had, and that really allowed space for quick approvals for new videos.” - Zaria Parvez, “Talking TikTok,” Duocon 2022
One notices, on DuoTok, a complete and noticeable difference in the style and content we recognized from YouTube’s Duolingo Push. Duo is younger, perhaps, more chronically online. No less likely to threaten you, but more likely to meme or reply instead of just like your comment. He’s also 110% more likely to know exactly what the kids are talking about. Let’s take a look at that ear-to-the ground interactivity…
…and widen back out to what it says for Gen-Z led social media marketing.
For this segment, I asked Dane (@trustmeitsparadise on TikTok), who works in social media marketing, to talk to me a bit about the future of marketing in the hands of Gen-Z. She said “good marketing to me means being good at recognizing the needs of your audience, and understanding the language they speak (emotionally) and solving their problem(s). A good marketer knows that without having an emotional connection to the product, the customer will never buy - and never stay loyal.”
This is something that I think Duolingo has mastered. The tongue in cheek nature of their activity on TikTok is all part of knowing the language (no pun intended) their audience speaks. In fact, you’ll hear Parvez speak about how learning a language is a lot like learning how to TikTok. But all the same, there is a prevailing sense that Duolingo’s—and by extension, Nutter Butter’s, RyanAir’s, KFC’s, etc.—online presence is not appropriate for front-facing company. Part of it is of course, is the same generational disconnect that makes Gen X’ers mad at Jack Schlossberg. I asked Dane if she thought there was a generational divide in relation to social media marketing. Her answer? “Absolutely.”
“Generations have different emotions, different problems to solve, different ways of expressing themselves. I do not buy the same brands at 40, that I frequented at 20. Zeroing in on your true target audience and marketing to them first is what brings success to brands, while of course considering inclusivity at the same time.”
Parvez speaks often of intersectionality, and how her intersectional identities helped her nail Duo’s brand. And the proof’s in the pudding—however saucy, Duolingo’s marketing campaign clearly seems to resonate with its audience. But what about the Board?
“One of the million dollar questions I get asked by literally everyone is, "How are you not fired yet?" And the short answer is, No, I'm not fired…And no, I've never been threatened to be fired. But it is a legitimate question knowing the kind of content we can put out there. And while I'd love to be able to throw spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks, that's not really how it flies out here at Duolingo. The reality is, is that there's actually a lot of thought and process that goes beyond our strategy.” - Zaria Parvez, “Talking TikTok,” Duocon 2022
We’ve been here for a while. Perhaps the idea still exists: a staid CEO told your Gen-Z admin friend to tone it down on the twerking. Nevertheless, she persisted. The company doesn’t know and would be scandalized if they found out…but that’s in no way how it works.
These accounts have created an illusion of spontaneity in order to win a culture war, and it’s working. It’s why Ryanair is…Ryanair, and why Duolingo was in the audience for Brat. All of it exists to make you remember a green owl, in an out of a Sweat tour tank top, in and out of Squid Game Gear. A marketer, at the end of the day, is still an employee with organizational leeway. They still sit down for meetings and plan all the memes that you see. Whether it’s Duolingo or RyanAir or Nutter Butter’s Aidan/Nadiaverse, all social media marketing is the result of companies that trust their teams. And admittedly, a lot of these teams are increasingly made up of people as young as you or your cousin or your little sibling.
I asked Dane to tell me how she as a millennial marketer thought Gen-Zers were changing the field, but I think her answer also serves to answer Eve’s question. She said:
“I think Gen-Z marketers are better at thinking outside of the box, same way we millennials are better at that than boomers. If Gen-Z marketers can use their wit, bravery and creativity and sprinkle a little discipline on top, they will be unstoppable.”
I think she’s right. Don’t you?
Media Review/recs + Anisa’s Writing Corner
BOOKS/SHORT STORIES:
Here’s (almost) everything I read in 2024:
My Top 10: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Hypnotic!), TPW Trilogy by R.F. Kuang (harrowing!), Real Americans by Rachel Khong (eternal!), The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab (unforgettable!), Babel by R.F. Kuang (incendiary!), The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell (captivating!), The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo (entrancing!), The Final Revival of Opal and Nev by Dawnie Walton (rip-roaring!), The Six Deaths of The Saint by Alix E. Harrow (undying!), and Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (Avante-garde!).
Runners Up: Bunny by Bora Chung (Outré!), Piglet by Lottie Hazell (Decadent!), Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko (Bizarre!), If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga (Tender!), and Love In A Fallen City (and other stories) by Eileen Chang (Emotive!)
I also beta-read TWAR (unputdownable!) by Eve (@sunsoffline on IG) and Starbound (scintillating!) by
(@mayawritesstories on IG) Anisa’s Writing Corner:
Perhaps the biggest thing I managed to get done in 2024 was Project V’s first draft. Since then, four people have read it, and while the work of course continues, there’s something immeasurably gratifying about having my book finally look and feel like one. More news soon?
Conclusion:
I’ve spent an awful amount of time with you; you must be sick of me. All the same, if you’ve made it to the end of this monster (and by extension, through my unplanned hiatus), thank you for being. If you’re new, stick around, would you? I’ll see you next month if we’re lucky ;)
All my love,
Anisa
According to Zippia, Duolingo later amended that figure, reporting it as being closer to 60 million
WORKS CITED:
Adam. 2025. “Spanish or Vanish.” Know Your Meme. January 30, 2025. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/spanish-or-vanish.
AltPress. 2023. “The 20 Most Reblogged Bands on Tumblr in 2015.” Alternative Press Magazine. June 1, 2023. https://www.altpress.com/the_20_most_reblogged_bands_on_tumblr_in_2015/.
Baxter, Daryl. 2022. “How Duolingo Went Viral on TikTok to Millions of Users.” TechRadar. June 22, 2022. https://www.techradar.com/features/how-duolingo-went-viral-on-tiktok-to-millions-of-users.
Babenok, Karina. 2024. “‘Marketing Team Deserves a Raise’: Duolingo Attends Charli XCX and Troye Sivan’s Sweat Tour.” Bored Panda, September 17, 2024. https://www.boredpanda.com/duolingo-owl-mascot-spotted-charli-xcx-troye-sivan-sweat-tour/.
“Duolingo History: Founding, Timeline, and Milestones - Zippia.” July 21, 2023. https://www.zippia.com/duolingo-careers-1401541/history/.
Guerrero, Natalia. 2024. “Good, Free, Fun: The Simple Formula That Has Made Duolingo a Daily Habit for Millions.” October 5, 2024. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20241004-the-simple-formula-that-made-duolingo-a-daily-habit-for-millions.
“Duolingo on TikTok.” n.d. TikTok. https://www.tiktok.com/@duolingo/photo/7467351261386525994?lang=en.
“Duolingo Push.” n.d. https://push.duolingo.com/.
Duolingo. 2022. “Talking TikTok • Zaria Parvez • Duocon 2022.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxSS__nSqU8.
Orssaud, Emmanuel. 2024. “Committing to the bit: How (and why) Duolingo goes big for April Fool’s” April 22, 2024. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/committing-bit-how-why-duolingo-goes-big-april-fools-emmanuel-orssaud-ksvke/.
Thisisbillgates. 2015. “Hi Reddit, I’m Bill Gates and I’m Back for My Third AMA. Ask Me Anything. : R/IAmA.” https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2tzjp7/hi_reddit_im_bill_gates_and_im_back_for_my_third/.
Wikipedia contributors. 2025. “Duolingo.” Wikipedia. February 5, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duolingo.
Such a funny essay! Made me smile all day!
read this gem after getting out of a math test, thanks for making me laugh haha