Duolingo re-hinged

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Duolingo's CMO Manu Orssaud wants fewer "butt jokes".

Orssaud helped create the original strategy. He's been in marketing leadership at Duolingo since 2020, championing their unhinged content era, giving the strategy room to run, and turning a language learning app into one of the most referenced brand case studies in the world.

17 million TikTok followers. 472 million likes. 1.7 billion organic impressions from the Dead Duo campaign alone. Duolingo's own shareholder letter credited that campaign with driving "a meaningful lift in new and reactivated users", and Tracksuit data showed it drove full funnel growth among their Gen Z and Millennial target audiences.

And now they want fewer butt jokes.

I wrote about Duolingo's brand strategy last year. What made the chaos work, and why more brands should find their own version of it. This is the follow-up, to understand what had to be true for the strategy to work and why it stopped being true for the brand that was best at it.

The Duolingo social media strategy gets described as chaotic, unhinged, and random. The creative expression definitely was, but the strategy itself wasn't any of those things.

This is the entertainment-first model. You don't need to talk about your product if people are emotionally invested in the character. I've written before about how tl;dv runs a similar playbook, where comedians post to the brand account with full creative autonomy, rarely mentioning the product, and drive over 50% of leads through social. Neither brand is selling through content. Both are building the kind of cultural presence that makes the product feel inevitable.

This strategy doesn't work as a single campaign. It has to compound.

Each escalation builds on the one before. Duolingo started with snarky push notifications, then the TikTok characters, then bigger PR stunts building up to the fake death of their mascot. Every move worked because the previous one had established the equity to make it land. You can't skip that sequence. The audience had to be taken on the journey and live through each step.

Heinz have been compounding their marketing strategy for 150 years. Completely different scale and medium, but the exact same logic. Consistency is what turns the tactic into a brand asset. Their creative expression can get bolder because the foundational brand equity is consistent. Duolingo built similar compounding equity in five years instead of 150. That's genuinely insane. It's also why competitors who copied the unhinged content tactics never landed the same way. They hadn’t built the underlying brand equity to pull it off.

Orssaud made a fair point that there's a real risk in getting more and more unhinged to maintain the shock factor. How far could Duolingo have realistically kept pushing before the jokes stopped landing? At some point there has to be a ceiling, right?

I'd argue there's a big difference between the "we can't keep escalating in the same direction" problem and their "let's become more balanced" solution. The first is a creative problem, but the second is an identity crisis. The Heinz answer to the escalation ceiling isn't to change the underlying consistent brand asset. They've successfully spent 150 years finding new creative territory while standing on the same foundation. The question for Duolingo wasn't how much further they could take it, it was where to take it next.

The coverage of Duolingo's strategy, and there has been a lot of it, has focused on the outputs. The follower counts, the campaigns, the impressions. What didn't get examined was what the strategy was actually resting on. In hindsight, two things had to be true for this to continue working, and both collapsed within a few months of each other.

The first was Zaria Parvez. As a social media coordinator in 2020 she ran Duolingo's TikTok and created their famous approach to socials. After moving up into global senior management in 2023, she left Duolingo in August 2025 and joined DoorDash as Head of Social. Losing the architect matters.

The second was audience goodwill. The owl's guilt trips only worked because the audience liked the company enough to find them charming. That warmth was the fuel. The same content lands completely differently when the goodwill is gone.

I'm not drawing a straight line from that AI memo to this change in marketing strategy. But if goodwill was the fuel and the AI memo eroded it, it also compromised the broader strategy.

Duolingo's response is a "creator army". In other words, paying creators to make content promoting their product, distributed through those creator's own channels. It has a name. Influencer marketing. Every brand does some version of it, and there's nothing distinctive about it.

The thing is, nobody saw Duolingo's TikTok as marketing. People followed Duo because he was funny, weird, and unpredictable, not because they were being nudged toward a language learning app. The entertainment-first model only works because the audience never perceives it as a commercial interaction. Take that away and you're left with content that’s inherently transactional.

The “creator army” is advertising. Paid people, on brief, making content about the Duolingo brand. The audience isn't naive, they'll see it as exactly that. They were burned by the AI announcement I doubt this approach will do much to rebuild goodwill.

I can’t get over just how much of a complete 180 this is. The owned distribution, the compounding creative voice, the five years of brand equity built on a characters people chose to follow. The creator army replaces all of that with borrowed reach. Each creator's audience belongs to them. The brand equity doesn't transfer. The 17 million people who followed Duo followed a specific voice. Paying creators to make content about Duo is not the same thing, and the people who were there for the original will see exactly what it is.

Duolingo built an incredible amount of emotional equity in just five years. The changes they’re now talking about won’t just stop the compounding, it’ll spend what was already built.

Culture was the strategy. Consistency was the engine. Chaos was the expression. You can't replace one without affecting the others.

The question I asked in the previous Duolingo piece was whether you're brave enough to find your own version of unhinged. The harder question, it turns out, is whether you can protect the conditions that make it land in the first place. The internal champion who keeps it intentional. The company behaviour that fulfils the audience’s expectations. The courage to keep finding new and unique creative territory when more "balance" is always the easier path.

Finding a strategy is only half the work. Understanding why and how it works is the part most brands forget.

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