As the world’s most popular language app, Duolingo is known for its gamified lessons, community features, and iconic mascot. With his passive-aggressive push notifications, Duo the Owl is internet famous for finding and reminding learners to do lessons, no matter where they are. And while Duo had successfully gotten millions to start learning languages, some learners were skipping lessons and spending too much time on Roblox instead.

So to build brand love for its 10th anniversary, Duolingo wanted to reach a new community and remind these learners there's nowhere to hide from Duo with a special gaming activation on Roblox.

Our idea was simple: turn Roblox players into Duolingo lesson reminders with the first brand experience built by fans. Duolingo invaded Roblox by unleashing dozens of user-generated games and accessories that allowed anyone to become Duo the owl.

We dropped a free asset pack and invited fans to create their own Duolingo games. Those who played the games were rewarded with coin multipliers, which they could use to buy accessories like a bodysuit, snapback, or mask—effectively turning them into Duo the owl.

By tapping into the audience insight that fans were already creating unofficial Duolingo avatars and experiences on the platform, we amplified an existing behavior and scaled to millions more fans. We made it easier than ever for everyone to transform into our mascot and these brand ambassadors started to show up all over Roblox and social media.

Duolingo fans love to create funny content featuring our iconic mascot, Duo the Owl, because he is willing to go to extreme lengths to remind learners to do their lessons. From viral memes to unofficial merchandise, fans have brought Duo to all corners of the internet with or without our permission.

As a gamified language learning company, we wanted to reach a new gaming audience in the metaverse and remind them to do their language lessons in an authentic way.

Since Roblox is a platform that allows players to make their own games and avatars, our approach was to invite fans to build and play their own official Duolingo experiences. We brought fans together in a Discord server where they could meet and develop new games.

Instead of promoting a finished activation, we released an asset pack and accessories, then let our community create an experience they would truly enjoy.

This branded Roblox experience sparked massive engagement around the world. So far, more than 13 million visitors have spent 60 million minutes playing language learning games in the Duolingo Game Hub. Duolingo branded in-game merch has been collected over 100,000 times and can still be worn in any of Roblox’s 40 million games. Duo’s birthday party inspired fans to create dozens of unofficial "official" Duolingo TikTok accounts, YouTube tutorials, and funny videos featuring Duo. All this user-generated content has earned more than 15 million organic video views across social and increased YouTube search traffic by 800%. We saw a direct spike in Super Duolingo subscriptions, our premium offering. The activation also paved the way for other brands to follow in our footsteps. Most importantly, there are now thousands of players dressed as our green owl who will serve as Duolingo lesson reminders throughout all Roblox games for years to come.