Duolingo's "unhinged" marketing strategy is getting a reset.
Duolingo CMO Manu Orssaud helped build the learning app's brand with absurdist marketing that leaned into TikTok trends and wasn't afraid to get sassy in the comment section.
Now, Duolingo and its rotund Duo bird mascot, who famously ripped out a fart in a five-second Super Bowl ad, are growing up.
What does that mean? For one, fewer "butt jokes," Orssaud told me in an interview.
While crass humor gets eyeballs, there's a risk in getting more and more risqué to maintain the shock factor. Orssaud wants to recalibrate Duolingo's marketing output from "80% unhinged, 20% wholesome" toward a more balanced approach.
Plus, while going viral on TikTok helped make Duolingo famous, it's now harder for organic content to land there, despite the brand's 17 million followers to its main English-language account, Orssaud said.
"There isn't that much room to grow in terms of audience and impressions we can drive from our own account," Orssaud said.
It gave me flashbacks to — checks watch — 2012 when marketers grumbled about declines in organic reach on Facebook after investing heavily in building their pages and followings.
Orssaud said TikTok wants brands to pay for reach through ads, but he'd rather invest those dollars in creators.
Duolingo is about to experiment with what it's calling a "creator army." It's begun outreach to creators, big and small, to encourage them to become paid ambassadors and make new TikTok burner accounts for fun content about the Duolingo brand.
User-generated content is where the reach happens, Orssaud said.
That's why you're seeing the Duo mascot out and about in the real world more often: from being styled as Bad Bunny for an NYC subway train takeover to rocking up at a Charli XCX concert. It's the kind of surprise that encourages people to whip out their phones and share the moment online.
Shifting focus to Reddit, WhatsApp, and good-old-fashioned blogging
2026 is all about user acquisition for Duolingo.
The app reached 50 million daily active users in 2025, though its growth has been decelerating. It's looked to boost growth by improving its product and introducing new courses, such as advanced "B2" language learning, music, and chess. The company also spent around $126 million on sales and marketing expenses in 2025, up 39% from the prior year.
As AI becomes central to marketers' brand awareness strategies, Duolingo recently staffed its first team dedicated to Reddit, which is frequently ranked one of the top-cited sources for AI answers. It's fast becoming Duolingo's go-to platform for sharing new product updates and gathering feedback, Orssaud said.
It's also doubling down on PR and producing content for the Duolingo blog.
Beyond these generative engine optimization tactics, Duolingo has also found WhatsApp to be a useful new broadcast channel. The company began testing a WhatsApp channel in Brazil, which it has grown to a community of 1.7 million Portuguese speakers. More recently, Duolingo launched an English-speaking channel, which it uses as an extension of its blog. It has grown to 236,000 followers in about a month.
