- Duolingo staged its owl mascot’s dying for a advertising and marketing stunt — besides in Japan.
- The marketing campaign displays Duolingo’s non-traditional and country-specific advertising and marketing.
- Advertising and marketing efforts helped enhance each day energetic customers by 51% and income by 41% within the fourth quarter.
In an elaborate advertising and marketing marketing campaign this month, Duolingo seemingly killed its viral inexperienced owl mascot in each nation however one.
“Duo, our owl, faked his dying in each single market that we had apart from Japan,” Luis von Ahn, the corporate’s CEO, mentioned on an earnings name on Thursday. “It seems that in Japan, joking about dying isn’t as kosher. So, in Japan, he was simply not lifeless.”
In an early February marketing campaign, the language studying app introduced the “dying” of its mascot with a sassy assertion. In a put up on X, the corporate wrote: “Authorities are at the moment investigating his explanation for dying and we’re cooperating absolutely. Tbh, he most likely died ready so that you can do your lesson, however what do we all know.”
Pop singer Dua Lipa replied to the X put up, and wrote: “Til’ dying duo half,” a reference to a long-standing joke about Duo being in love with the artist.
The corporate went all in: The app’s thumbnail depicted the mascot lifeless with crossed eyes and his tongue protruding, and Duolingo’s social handles mourned his dying in a sequence of posts.
On Thursday’s name, von Ahn mentioned Duo returned final week from faking his dying as a result of customers accomplished sufficient language classes to deliver him again.
The marketing campaign mirrored the corporate’s well-known nontraditional and country-specific advertising and marketing campaigns, which have made the owl mascot and the Duolingo app cultural icons.
Duolingo’s social media accounts for international locations like India, Germany, and France function hyper-local content material based mostly on information occasions, memes, and traits, amassing a whole lot of hundreds of followers in every of those international locations. Duolingo’s Japan Instagram web page has posts in Japanese and anime-style artwork, they usually function Duo taking part in native traits.
Final quarter, Duolingo turned the primary firm to make use of animation to ship ready remarks on an earnings name, emphasizing its synthetic intelligence push. An organization consultant informed Enterprise Insider that the video would have taken weeks to create with human animators, however generative AI did the job in lower than seven minutes.
The corporate spent $25.6 million on gross sales and advertising and marketing within the quarter that resulted in September, up from $22.3 million in the identical interval in 2023. Breakdowns for the latest quarter weren’t accessible at press time.
“We consider that our unhinged and viral advertising and marketing campaigns — like our 5-second Tremendous Bowl advert, Duolingo on Ice, and ‘Owl Recreation’ partnership with Netflix — contributed to our person development and the expansion of our iconic model,” the corporate wrote in a shareholder letter launched Thursday.
Day by day energetic customers — an essential measure for shopper apps — jumped by 51% within the fourth quarter to 40.5 million.
Fourth quarter income grew 41% to $209 million, beating analyst expectations of $205 million.
Duolingo’s inventory fell over 7% in after-hours buying and selling. The inventory is up 57% up to now 12 months.
