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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 Duolingos marketing team did the unthinkable: It killed him off.The decision turned out to be the companys most successful social media play everand 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 deadhit by a Cybertruck, fans later found out.This brand stunt was originally meant to roll out as an update to the apps icon (the cartoon owl appeared dead with his eyes crossed out), accompanied by a series of three videos for Duolingos 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 Fools 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 Duos 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, Duolingos social media team saw the opportunity to build Duos untimely passing into something much bigger. Within a matter of days, theyd met with marketing, product, and engineering teams to spin the concept into a campaign of global proportionscomplete 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 chillingjust another day at Duolingo, says Zaria Parvez, Duolingos 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 wed never seen before. Then we were like, Okay, like theres a huge wind here. We need to build this narrative out even more.'In the two weeks between Duos death and the reveal that hed actually faked his demise, the Dead Duo campaign raked in a record 1.7 billion impressions across Duolingos socials in just two weeks. According to Duolingos market research, there was twice as much social media conversation around Duos demise as any of 2025s 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, its right on brand.[Image: Duolingo]From Sick Duo to Dead DuoIn the past few months alone, Duo the owl has been roasted on a grill, shredded in a blender, and plagued by a terrible diseasebut this is the first time hes actually died. Duos recent ailments are part of the unhinged persona that has become his calling card online. In Duolingos 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 Duos 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 brands social media with his own cast of side characters. Duos defining characteristic is that he will do anything to get users to complete their lessonsincluding 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 brands TikTok account added more than 6 million followers over the past year, while total social media impressions grew 80% year over year. Duos internet stardom is so significant that, in an interview last year for the Acquired podcast, von Ahn assessed the owls value at hundreds of millions of dollars.Duolingo is now bringing more of Duos 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 apps default icon (a picture of Duos friendly visage) for something unexpected that reflects Duos desperation for learners to come back to the app. For a brief period in late 2023, Duos face appeared to be melted, startling users. An for two weeks in September 2024, the Duolingo icon showed a sickly looking Duowith snotty nose and red-rimmed eyesinciting both disgust and concern from fans. In an email to Forbes at the time, a Duolingo spokesperson explained the birds illness: Duo is quite literally sick of reminding everyone to do their lessons, they wrote. But dont worry. His symptoms arent 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. [Image: courtesy Duolingo]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, Duolingos head of art, had a radical idea: What if they just killed Duo?Hartmans 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, Duolingos 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 Parvezs blessing, Mansur brought the Dead Duo concept to Duolingos senior leadership teamincluding von Ahnand 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. Parvezs team had just six days to craft the content that would announce Duos 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 crimeThe news of Duos death came in the form of a somber black-and-white press release posted across socials, set to Sarah McLachlans Angel. It proclaimed: Duo, formally known as The Duolingo Owl, is dead. The following day, a post revealing Duos cause of death showed him getting hit by a speeding Cybertrucka timely jab at Elon Musks 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 CybertruckRIP https://t.co/578dWAWsWo Duolingo (@duolingo) February 14, 2025The choice of a Cybertruck as the instrument of Duos murder worked exactly as Duolingos marketing team intended. We wanted to find social-first ways to get the internet excited and drive conversation about these different parts of Duos death, Parvez says. Cybertrucks look funky. And it was like, This seems like something that would happen to Duojust getting hit by a truck.In a third video announcing Duos untimely passing, two of Duolingos other characters mournfully deposited Duos coffin onto the bed of a pickup truck. The videos 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 Duos death reverberated across TikTokthe Cybertruck video raked in 25.7 million views and the Good Lookin video garnered another 66.3 million, making it the companys second most-viewed TikTokmajor brands like KitKat, Subway, BuzzFeed, Hilton, and T-Mobile jumped into the comments to offer their condolences. The worlds most popular YouTuber, Mr. Beast, made his own TikTok about Duos death (it now has 96 million views.) Traditional media, including The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, weighed in as well. [Image: courtesy Duolingo]Duos death also led to one of the companys most sought-after achievements: an acknowledgment from the pop star Dua Lipa. For years, a cornerstone of Duos lore has been his one-sided love for the singer. But just before Valentines Day, Dua Lipa responded to Duos death with a tweet that read, Til death duo part. To commemoratethe occasion, James Kuczynski, senior creative director, says Duolingo sent Dua Lipa a gift basket which included a box of Duos ashes (a packet of matcha powder). [Screenshot: courtesy Duolingo]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, theres nothing left to accomplish.Duo dies 100 deathsAs 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. Duos death also went international. The company leveraged its 13 localized social media accounts to create region-specific narratives around the owls passing, engaging global audiences. In Germany, Duos 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 theres a higher cultural sensitivity around death, Duo never diedinstead, he became stronger than ever.[Image: Duolingo]Rebecca Paramo, Duolingos 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 Duos death, Paramo says.In Brazil, for example, Duolingo had previously lined up a major partnership with McDonalds that was set to drop around the same time that Duo died. There, Duos death was announced in a series of telenovela-inspired TikToks. When McDonalds saw the content, they were initially concerned for the future of the partnership. But Paramos team found a way to merge the two efforts: Duo appeared on a popular local TV gossip show to reveal both the McDonalds partnership and his resurrection. [Image: courtesy Duolingo]Duo rises from the deadDuo 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 apps language-learning missionand 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 its too late by completing enough lessons to rack up 50 billion XP. The site tallied the statistics by country, and ranked each oneenticing 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.[Screenshot: courtesy Duolingo]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.[Image: courtesy Duolingo]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 Cartis YEAT. In a subsequent TikTok, he addressed viewers himself: Ive 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? [Image: Duolingo]Extreme DGAF brandingThe 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, Duolingos largest campaigns generated around 100 million impressions. Not only did Dead Duo achieve nearly 2 billion impressions on the companys own social media accounts, the campaign inspired around 160,000 pieces of user-generated contentabout 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 Butters brain rot-inspired, head-spinning TikTok page. Already, other brands are trying to take a page out of the Dead Duo playbookSour 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, its 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 Duos resounding success. Mansur says its clear that the companys 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. Were 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 Duos successand taking a break from fielding countless questions from friends and family about Duos fate. From an outside perspective, its difficult to imagine where Duo could go from here. After all, there arent many moves more extreme than killing off a mascot worth millions of dollars. Parvez sees things differently. Obviously, as a marketer, theres always that fear of, like, Will we ever be able to one-up ourselves again? she says. But its also exciting. Its proof that, even five years into creating unhinged social content, weve been able to elevate it to literally a global scale where everyone was invested. I think the best is yet to come.
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The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is getting nationwide pickup. While cutting government has long been a goal on the right, DOGE has given that impulse a stickier, meme-inspired, brand name it hasn’t had in the past. Now, copycat efforts named after billionaire Elon Musk’s initiative to cut the federal government’s workforce and spending for President Donald Trump have appeared in more than a dozen states, according to a CNN tally. Republican governors in Iowa and Florida both created task forces named after DOGE in February to cut government, while other elected officials adopted the term to describe their agenda, like Georgia’s Republican lieutenant governor who described the state’s “Red Tape Rollback Act of 2025” as “Georgia does DOGE.” The Wisconsin Assembly’s Committee on Government Operations, Accountability and Transparency (GOAT) held its first meeting in March. While it’s not “DOGE,” its goal is similar and its name is also inspired by a meme. BRAND BUILDING VOLATILITY Drawing comparisons between state efforts to shrink government and DOGE might help Republicans at a local level nationalize state issues, but it also ties their efforts to a volatile national political brand. A March NBC News poll found registered voters like DOGE more in theory than in practice. A 46% plurality think DOGE is “a good idea,” compared to 40% who think it’s a bad idea and 14% who aren’t sure, and there’s not a clear consensus among respondents about whether it’s doing a good job. The poll found 33% of registered voters believe Musk and DOGE have been “reckless and should stop now before more damage is done” and 28% believe they should “slow down to assess the impact,” compared to just a third who think DOGE should continue as is. A March Quinnipiac poll found 60% disapproved of how Musk and DOGE dealt with federal workers. Politicians in majority-Republican states that franchise the DOGE brand for themselves could find the affinity politically useful. For those in competitive states or that represent communities especially affected by DOGE cuts, though, hitching their wagon to Musk’s efforts could be a decision they come to regret. If attitudes toward DOGE deteriorate, the political capital associated with the phrase could fall faster than the aftermarket value of a Cybertruck or the stock market after Trump’s tariffs.
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Camb.ai is on a mission to disrupt the dominance of English in global media. Founded in 2022, the AI-powered platform specializes in real-time translation that retains a speakers emotional resonanceprocessing content up to 20 times faster than traditional dubbing services. Major League Soccer now uses Camb.ais technology for live broadcasts. But the company has also found unexpected demand in markets like video advertising and the localization of interactive smart toys. To power its growth, Camb.ai has raised $15.5 million to date. The platform now supports translations in more than 150 languagesincluding Maleku, spoken by just 500 people. CEO Avneesh Prakash, who previously helped build Indias Aadhaar biometric ID system used by more than a billion people, cofounded the company with his son, Akshat Prakash. The younger Prakash, Camb.ais CTO, is a computer scientist and former AI/ML engineer on Apples Siri team. Avneesh Prakash envisions a future where English is no longer the default language for media productionand where global audiences can access any content, in any language, on demand. Fast Company spoke with Prakash about AIs potential to reshape global media, the complexities of preserving emotional nuance across languages, and why rare languages remain central to Camb.ais mission. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. What misconceptions do people have about AI voice technology, and how do you address those concerns? People are concerned about inaccuracies when using AI, but they often overlook that even human translators have flaws. When evaluating AI, people try to find that moment of Oh, it went wrong there. Often these are subjective opinions, and such analyses do not use a comparative benchmark of how human translators would do on the same piece. The best approach is to enable human translators with AI like ours so they can be 50 times more productive and help cover a large body of work that today remains locked up in one to two languages, like English. What metrics do you use to measure success beyond traditional business growth indicators? One way we measure success is the number of languages we can translate into. Our mission is to redesign the internet for speakers of every language. Thats why weve also put a lot of effort into our capability to translate rare or endangered languages like Icelandic or Indigenous languages like Maleku. We already support more than 150 languages for speech-to-speech translation and our goal is to grow this number three to four times over the next two years. What advantages do you have in competing against large tech players and giant AI companies, and what are the biggest hurdles for you to overcome? Compared to the household names in AI, we can make models that are hyperfocused on being the best at translation and dubbing. We are also focused on the open-source community and can use its feedback to iterate and develop faster. The biggest challenge we face is one plaguing the entire AI industry: access to the computing power necessary to continue innovating. To remain competitive, we have prioritized building smaller models capable of being run on a users device, rather than the race to the biggest model in Big Tech. Your recent partnership with Legible focuses on books. What other content types present the most compelling opportunities? One unexpected opportunity were capitalizing on is translating advertisements (both picture and video). With traditional translation tools, its very difficult to translate ads in a way that makes sense culturally. A lot of advertising relies on metaphors, analogies, and cultural references. In the past, if you were to translate ads directly, a lot of the context would get lost in translation. Our models can overcome that hurdle. What do you envision happening to translators as AI dubbing technology advances? I envision a future where content creators and translators work alongside AI rather than work against it. AI will be able to provide a first draft translation, but there will always be scenarios (especially in literature and poetry) where a human touch is needed. What’s a common assumption about the future of global content that might be flawed? Most people assume content will continue to be English-first. While a majority of the global content is currently produced in the U.S., in English, with demographic and technology shifts, I see a future where a majority of the worlds media is originally produced in languages other than English. Which unexpected industries or sectors have shown the most interest in your technology? One interesting use case has been in the smart toy industry, where more and more toys are becoming interactive and AI-enabled. Localization in this context has the incredible potential of teaching children their own culture and language; this gets increasingly lost in the modern world. Looking ahead five years, what do you expect to be the most significant change in how we consume cross-language content? We will see all content available in all languages. If you go on Netflix or YouTube right now, youll see some content being translated or captioned into a limited number of languages. In less than five years, I expect we will be able to view that same content in tens or hundreds of languages on demand. How does AI-powered dubbing/live translation fundamentally change the economics of global content distribution compared to traditional methods? With AI translation, markets and audiences that were previously considered financially unviable now become accessible. AI translation rapidly increases the speed at which content can be spread around the world. Weve seen our technology dub content up to 20 times faster than traditional dubbing agencies, so content can be released worldwide simultaneously. Beyond cost savings, what unexpected benefits do you see for AI live translations? Certain cultures have populations greater than that of the U.S. For example, the number of Bengali speakers is larger than the populations of many countries combined. In many such cultures, sports/content/media has the opportunity to reach everybody and unlock a new generation of accessibility and viewership for businesses. Critics argue AI-dubbed content lacks the soul of human performance. How do you address this perception, technically and philosophically? With our models, preserving emotion and soul has been the number-one priority. By training our models on both text and raw audio, the model learns how different words, punctuation, and context relate to various emotions and expressions. For us, translation is a way to share human expression across cultural boundaries, and ensuring that we maintain the emotional meaning of speech is the essence of what we do. Camb.ais mission is to let “every story be told in every language.” How might this reshape cultural power dynamics? Could a Gambian filmmaker compete more effectively against someone benefiting from Hollywoods global influence? Exactly. Thats our vision. As technology like ours becomes more pervasive, I expect to see content that breaks the internet coming from all corners of the globe. Major League Soccer used Camb.ai to live-dub commentary into four languages simultaneously. Is sports broadcasting reaching a linguisic tipping point? Prior to MLS using our technology, there was very little appetite for using AI in a livestream context. This milestone has led to AI being considered a viable alternative for commentary and dubbing, and were now seeing more and more global sports organizations adopt the technology. Whats your mission in competing in this ultra-competitive AI arena? The internet was made for English speakers, and we decided to redesign it for the world. While language is a tool of diversity and hence evolution, it is also a tool of exclusion. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have the good fortune of going through an English-language education. I’m grateful for that, but I also see the unfairness of that. We created a company to disrupt that disparity. As noted in the film Ratatouille, Not everyone can be a great artist. But a great artist can come from anywhere. We are trying to create a world where a great artist born anywhere, creating anywhere, is able to take their content to any other part of the world.
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