Why Duolingo Has Replaced Many TV Ads With Free TikTok Posts

Brands over the years have navigated the balance between leaning more on brand marketing, which is seeking to help a consumer understand a brand and what it stands for, versus performance marketing, which refers to advertising that directly generates consumer actions like clicks or downloads.

When Orssaud joined Duolingo in 2020, the company was focused on traditional marketing to build awareness for the brand, which teaches 43 languages. Since then, the company, which went public in 2021, determined that with 80% of its growth coming from word-of-mouth and the majority of users subscribing to its free, ad-supported version, the return-on-investment of bigger-budget campaigns wasn’t adding up. 

That kicked off the new emphasis on social-media channels such as TikTok, which Duolingo started using more frequently during the pandemic. The attention started rolling in on posts about the Duolingo owl’s romantic relationships with other brand mascots and jokes about the company’s legal team trying to capture the mascot to keep it from posting online. 

Part of the social campaign’s appeal may come from a relative lack of oversight, allowing memes and jokes to go live before they grow stale. 

“I would say for 80% of the content, we trust the team” to perform any necessary oversight themselves, Orssaud says—an effort to make sure the content can react to trending jokes and audio. For the other 20%, content that is more planned and part of larger campaigns, “we would improve on an idea or just give some guidance or tweak things a little bit,” he adds. “But the majority is all about speed. The more layers you add, the harder it is.” 

Efficient marketing

Duolingo has 6.7 million followers on TikTok, making it one of the more highly followed accounts on the app, trailing accounts such as ESPN, Nickelodeon, Netflix and the NBA. It also has seen success on platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. 

Company leadership has recently lauded the change in strategy over the past year-and-a-half. During its first-quarter earnings call in May, Luis von Ahn, co-founder and chief executive, attributed recent user growth in part to more efficient marketing. 

“Our marketing team has really found its stride in terms of…the levers that work and don’t,” he said on the earnings call. “We’ve just found that we have a brand that is very good for social media. And it’s organic, it’s not paid stuff.” 

Von Ahn also cited improvement in the product as driving an increase in daily active users—up 62% to 20.3 million year-over year during the quarter ended March 31.

Within its product organization, Duolingo has teams such as the “Virality Team,” which works very closely with marketing to build out the product in a way that lends itself to sharing on social media, Orssaud says. For instance, the app encourages users to translate sentences such as “Without a doubt, I want to eat ham” or “Whose robot ate my cake?” or “I do not hear you since I have cinnamon rolls in my ears.” Those sentences are meant to be memorable to those learning a language, and lend themselves to users sharing them on social media for comedic value.

The app contains functions like “streaks,” which try to motivate users to return on consecutive days.

“The role of marketing, the way I see it, is for us to try to be top of mind with users and nonusers,” Orssaud says. “So that every day, if a user or nonuser can come across our brand, whether it’s through social media, or whether it’s through some activations that we’ve done, for example, like our space in

Duolingo continues to spend just under half of its marketing budget on so-called performance marketing, or ads that try to get consumers to click on or download something, including mobile ad campaigns that seek to drive app downloads through Google. The rest of the budget largely goes to producing content, paying to promote its social-media presence and influencer marketing. The company says it has significantly scaled back its TV investment, only running TV ads in markets where it sees direct impact on new user growth at an efficient cost per new user, such as in Brazil and Japan.

The company’s marketing also benefits from having become an internet joke. Duolingo is the beneficiary “of essentially having a mascot that has become a meme,” says Chris Ross, a vice president analyst at research firm .

That fate for a mascot, he says, can be a powerful way for brands to build an audience, and can lead to success with organic marketing. 

“A big part of organic success is having an audience that you developed. And to develop an audience takes time and consistency and investment,” Ross says. “Then, even once you build an audience, it requires a commitment to maintain that audience. You can’t build a huge audience and then just go dark.” 

But for a product like a language-learning app, which serves a specific function, brand advertising is less necessary, says Christie Nordhielm, who teaches marketing at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. 

“Ben and Jerry’s can create a 30-minute video on how fantastic their ice cream is, but all they really need to do is take a spoonful and jam it in the consumer’s mouth,” she says. “Duolingo and any language learning is way more into that category of ‘Try it, you’ll like it’ kind of thing, and then reinforcing what it is that they’re experiencing. You don’t need a big marketing spend, certainly you don’t need television advertising. That’s goofy for a product like this.”

For a functional product, what is more important is a product that gets customers using it on a repeat basis because of how helpful or effective it is. 

“It’s boring, but it’s profitable if you have a product that kills it in terms of its functionality,” Nordhielm says. “Awareness isn’t the issue, it’s trial…People often mistakenly think of marketing as just advertising but really, this is about the product.”

Megan Graham is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in New York. She can be reached at [email protected].

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