‘Dead the sh*t out of it’: How Duolingo scored its most viral hit ever by murdering its mascot

It took Duolingo more than a decade to grow its owl mascot, Duo, from a cute cartoon character into a social media star with tens of millions of followers. Then Duolingo’s marketing team did the unthinkable: It killed him off.

The decision turned out to be the company’s most successful social media play ever—and likely one of the widest-reaching social campaigns of all time, by any brand. 

Duo was originally created as logo in 2011, the year that Duolingo was founded. In the years since, the friendly (if occasionally menacing) green owl has grown into a layered character with friends, enemies, motivations, even a potential lover, and legions of fans. But on February 11, Duolingo announced that Duo was dead—hit by a Cybertruck, fans later found out.

This brand stunt was originally meant to roll out as an update to the app’s icon (the cartoon owl appeared dead with his eyes crossed out), accompanied by a series of three videos for Duolingo’s social channels. Duolingo, after all, has a track record of building daring social media campaigns around its owl. Last year, the company rolled out a production-heavy April Fool’s prank promoting Duolingo on Ice, a fake musical for which the company made several very real music videos. This December, Duo starred in a collab with the the Netflix show Squid Game that saw him transform into a K-pop idol.

But Duo’s death struck a deeper chord with users than these previous stunts. As the death notice began taking off on TikTok, it garnered thousands of comments from concerned fans, video responses from other brands, and even callouts on national news stations. As the reaction grew, Duolingo’s social media team saw the opportunity to build Duo’s untimely passing into something much bigger. Within a matter of days, they’d met with marketing, product, and engineering teams to spin the concept into a campaign of global proportions—complete with localized ads, in-app integrations, merch, and brand partnership tie-ins. 

“Candidly, we had three posts, and we were gonna post them and be chilling—just another day at Duolingo,” says Zaria Parvez, Duolingo’s senior social media manager and the mastermind behind its TikTok strategy. “The first post we did was a fake press release about Duo being dead. When we posted that, we saw that the user engagement was popping off. It was a number of impressions that we’d never seen before. Then we were like, ‘Okay, like there’s a huge wind here. We need to build this narrative out even more.'”

In the two weeks between Duo’s death and the reveal that he’d actually faked his demise, the Dead Duo campaign raked in a record 1.7 billion impressions across Duolingo’s socials in just two weeks. According to Duolingo’s market research, there was twice as much social media conversation around Duo’s demise as any of 2025’s top 10 Super Bowl ads, which had aired just days before on February 9. 

Though the campaign was unprecedented in many ways, it followed a social media marketing recipe that Duolingo has perfected over the years: Combine a healthy dose of risk-taking with speed, agility, and, most importantly, a deeper brand story. For many companies, a mascot faking his own death would feel out of character or desperate. But for Duo, it’s right on brand.

From Sick Duo to Dead Duo

In the past few months alone, Duo the owl has been roasted on a grill, shredded in a blender, and plagued by a terrible disease—but this is the first time he’s actually died. 

Duo’s recent ailments are part of the “unhinged” persona that has become his calling card online. In Duolingo’s early days, the company started using the owl to send push notifications to users, begging them to continue doing their lessons, often in a guilt-tripping tone. The internet spun Duo’s passive-aggressive personality into a meme (including one much-circulated image of him holding a gun).

The company quickly embraced fans’ interpretation of Duo, building him into a much larger figure on the brand’s social media with his own cast of side characters. Duo’s defining characteristic is that he will do anything to get users to complete their lessons—including kidnapping their families and holding the Duolingo office dogs hostage. Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn told Fast Company in November that he reviews anything where the owl is going to be in the product, and his feedback usually is, “Can we make it weirder?”

This strategy has unlocked a new level of visibility for Duolingo on socials: The brand’s TikTok account added more than 6 million followers over the past year, while total social media impressions grew 80% year over year. Duo’s internet stardom is so significant that, in an interview last year for the Acquired podcast, von Ahn assessed the owl’s value at hundreds of millions of dollars.

Duolingo is now bringing more of Duo’s social media personality into brand partnerships and onto the app itself, building out his lore along the way. Part of this strategy has involved occasionally swapping out the app’s default icon (a picture of Duo’s friendly visage) for something unexpected that reflects Duo’s desperation for learners to come back to the app. 

For a brief period in late 2023, Duo’s face appeared to be melted, startling users. And for two weeks in September 2024, the Duolingo icon showed a sickly looking Duo—with snotty nose and red-rimmed eyes—inciting both disgust and concern from fans. In an email to Forbes at the time, a Duolingo spokesperson explained the bird’s illness: “Duo is quite literally sick of reminding everyone to do their lessons,” they wrote. “But don’t worry. His symptoms aren’t contagious, as long as learners keep their streaks going.” Sick Duo content ended up generating 30 million impressions across Instagram and TikTok. 

The success inspired the product team to push the envelope even further with their next icon update. 

Move fast and break Duo 

In early January, the Duolingo product team began exploring ideas for an app icon change, looking for something next-level that would grab users’ attention. After a few weeks of brainstorming options, Gregory Hartman, Duolingo’s head of art, had a radical idea: What if they just killed Duo?

Hartman’s mock-up of a Duo with Xs over his eyes went into audience A/B testing alongside several other icon options, including an anxious, sweaty Duo and a chubby Duo. According to Osman Mansur, Duolingo’s senior product manager specializing in reengagement, the results of the test were relatively inconclusive: The icons performed similarly in getting inactive users to return to the app. So Mansur took the results to Parvez for her input.

“We really liked Dead Duo because there was more lore, more narrative, more story we could tell about that,” Parvez says. “We particularly notice that when an app icon change has a strong emotion or a characteristic that people can relate to, it creates more buzz.”

With Parvez’s blessing, Mansur brought the Dead Duo concept to Duolingo’s senior leadership team—including von Ahn—and explained that both the product and marketing teams had a “strong intuition” about the potential icon swap. Von Ahn approved the selection, instructing the team to “Dead the shit out of it.” 

Parvez’s team had just six days to craft the content that would announce Duo’s death. “We value speed at Duolingo,” Parvez says, “so our biggest goal as a marketing team is how do we get things the quickest from ideation to post?”

A Cybertruck crime

The news of Duo’s death came in the form of a somber black-and-white press release posted across socials, set to Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel.” It proclaimed: “Duo, formally known as The Duolingo Owl, is dead.” 

The following day, a post revealing Duo’s cause of death showed him getting hit by a speeding Cybertruck—a timely jab at Elon Musk’s Tesla, which has been on a downward financial spiral as Musk has become increasingly involved in the U.S. government. Three days after Duo “died,” the official X account tweeted, “All birds go to heaven,” with images of the former Twitter logo and Dead Duo. Duolingo responded, “both killed by a Cybertruck. RIP.” 

both killed by a Cybertruck

RIP https://t.co/578dWAWsWo

— Duolingo (@duolingo) February 14, 2025

The choice of a Cybertruck as the instrument of Duo’s murder worked exactly as Duolingo’s marketing team intended. “We wanted to find social-first ways to get the internet excited and drive conversation about these different parts of Duo’s death,” Parvez says. “Cybertrucks look funky. And it was like, ‘This seems like something that would happen to Duo—just getting hit by a truck.’”

In a third video announcing Duo’s untimely passing, two of Duolingo’s other characters mournfully deposited Duo’s coffin onto the bed of a pickup truck. The video’s caption read, “Btw im deaf so i hope this is a sad song,” while the sexually explicit lyrics of the song “Good Lookin’” by Dixon Dallas played in the background.  

Those three posts were supposed to be the extent of the Dead Duo campaign. But the internet had different ideas. As news of Duo’s death reverberated across TikTok—the Cybertruck video raked in 25.7 million views and the “Good Lookin’” video garnered another 66.3 million, making it the company’s second most-viewed TikTok—major brands like KitKat, Subway, BuzzFeed, Hilton, and T-Mobile jumped into the comments to offer their condolences. The world’s most popular YouTuber, Mr. Beast, made his own TikTok about Duo’s death (it now has 96 million views.) Traditional media, including The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, weighed in as well. 

Duo’s death also led to one of the company’s most sought-after achievements: an acknowledgment from the pop star Dua Lipa. For years, a cornerstone of Duo’s lore has been his one-sided love for the singer. But just before Valentine’s Day, Dua Lipa responded to Duo’s death with a tweet that read, “Til’ death duo part.” To commemorate the occasion, James Kuczynski, senior creative director, says Duolingo sent Dua Lipa a gift basket which included a box of “Duo’s ashes” (a packet of matcha powder). 

Inside Duolingo, the team was ecstatic. Parvez received a Slack message from von Ahn: “Dua fucking Lipa tweeting about us.” That same morning, von Ahn also sent a company-wide Slack that read, “It is with a heavy heart that I announce the retirement of the entire marketing team. As they said, ‘there’s nothing left to accomplish.’”

Duo dies 100 deaths

As it turns out, the marketing team was just getting started. 

With the original Dead Duo videos taking off online, the Duolingo team decided to capitalize on the moment by building out a much wider campaign. The company began systematically killing off its other characters on TikTok. Within a couple of days, it had worked with its merch partners to launch limited-edition plushie versions of the dead characters, which came in coffin-shaped packages. 

Duo’s death also went international. The company leveraged its 13 localized social media accounts to create region-specific narratives around the owl’s passing, engaging global audiences. In Germany, Duo’s death had a creepy, cult-inspired twist: After his death, a group of smaller Duos resurrected him through occult practices and initiated him as their leader. And in Japan, where there’s a higher cultural sensitivity around death, Duo never died—instead, he became stronger than ever.

Rebecca Paramo, Duolingo’s regional marketing director for Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, says her team had all of two days to plan out their localized content and hop on the bandwagon. “We pivoted most of the campaigns that we were already working on and partnerships with other brands, and were basically able to create an entire global and international narrative around Duo’s death,” Paramo says.

In Brazil, for example, Duolingo had previously lined up a major partnership with McDonald’s that was set to drop around the same time that Duo died. There, Duo’s death was announced in a series of telenovela-inspired TikToks. When McDonald’s saw the content, they were initially concerned for the future of the partnership. But Paramo’s team found a way to merge the two efforts: Duo appeared on a popular local TV gossip show to reveal both the McDonald’s partnership and his resurrection. 

Duo rises from the dead

Duo was never actually going to stay dead, of course. But as the buzz around his death grew, it became clear that the story of his resurrection would have to justify the hype. The team decided that the campaign needed to connect more directly to the app’s language-learning mission—and get fans involved.

The weekend after the first Dead Duo post, several engineers worked to create a web page that would track the XP (experience points) that users receive when they complete their lessons, each of which are worth 20 to 35 XP. The page promised that users around the world could “bring back Duo before it’s too late” by completing enough lessons to rack up 50 billion XP. The site tallied the statistics by country, and ranked each one—enticing users to boost their countries’ standings. “The engineers worked on it for hours over the weekend just to get us to the finish line,” Parvez says. “That speaks to Duolingo culture: When people started getting excited about it, everyone was like, ‘How can we help?’ It became a company-wide effort.”

While Duolingo is unable to share exact statistics on how much Dead Duo boosted in-app engagement before its first quarter earnings report on May 1, a spokesperson confirmed that the campaign “drove a meaningful lift in new and resurrected users.”

Exactly two weeks after Duo first perished, fans’ revival efforts proved successful. Duo rose from the dead with a new app icon showing his eyes blazing with light, alongside a hype TikTok set to VVV and Playboi Carti’s “YEAT.” 

In a subsequent TikTok, he addressed viewers himself: “I’ve always had two main goals: Get people to do their lesson and get Dua Lipa to notice me,” Duo said. “Neither was working. I had to do something drastic. So I thought, why not kill one green bird with two stones?” 

Extreme DGAF branding

The impact of Dead Duo surprised even Duolingo. The company had set a goal of 70 million impressions for the campaign, according to a spokesperson. In the past, Duolingo’s largest campaigns generated around 100 million impressions. Not only did Dead Duo achieve nearly 2 billion impressions on the company’s own social media accounts, the campaign inspired around 160,000 pieces of user-generated content—about 25 times the size of fan reactions to past icon changes.  

Dead Duo is a prime example of something that Fast Company has termed “DGAF branding”: A form of branding that eschews expectation and tradition in favor of all things wild. Examples include Pop Tarts sacrificing one of its pastries at the Super Bowl and Nutter Butter’s brain rot-inspired, head-spinning TikTok page. Already, other brands are trying to take a page out of the Dead Duo playbook—Sour Patch Kids recently announced that it would no longer be sour and would instead adopt the moniker, “Patch Kids,” before ultimately restoring its sourness days later. 

Still, Duolingo stands out in that, through its push notifications, brand partnerships, and social media content, it’s built Duo to feel almost like a real person (or owl) to fans. That level of connection is difficult for other companies to replicate.

Duolingo, meanwhile, is taking its own lessons from Dead Duo’s resounding success. Mansur says it’s clear that the company’s focus on creative speed is working, but the campaign demonstrated that marketing, product, and creative teams could benefit from collaborating more extensively.

“We have a very strong marketing team at Duolingo, and we have a very strong product team. But for a while, a lot of our work streams were kind of parallel to each other,” Mansur says. “This a really unique case where something that was within the product also had a larger marketing component to it, and required close collaboration. We’re testing new things to strengthen this muscle of collaborating across different teams at Duolingo.”

For now, the team is still basking in the afterglow of Dead Duo’s success—and taking a break from fielding countless questions from friends and family about Duo’s fate. From an outside perspective, it’s difficult to imagine where Duo could go from here. After all, there aren’t many moves more extreme than killing off a mascot worth millions of dollars.

Parvez sees things differently. “Obviously, as a marketer, there’s always that fear of, like, ‘Will we ever be able to one-up ourselves again?’” she says. “But it’s also exciting. It’s proof that, even five years into creating unhinged social content, we’ve been able to elevate it to literally a global scale where everyone was invested. I think the best is yet to come.”

View the full article