Situation:

Duolingo needed to maintain momentum in user growth amongst younger audiences, and has discovered a very efficient marketing model by pursuing "viral" content online.

Brief:

Capture the latent love of a cult favorite character in the Duolingo brand world, and bring her to life with innovative and viral content online.

Objectives:

Engagement - views, likes, and follows.

Lily is at her best when she is playing off of another character. Judging, ignoring, going out of her way to be unimpressed… Lily thrives when she can (lovingly) crush another character’s spirit. We thought this made her the perfect lead for a sitcom, and explored the format as a medium to tell her story.

We developed the 10-part comedy series “Living With Lily” to follow the unenthusiastic, purple-haired teen, and her upbeat family as they go about their lives, pining for Lily’s love and respect. The show, set in a nostalgic 90’s era ‘live audience’ style home, reveals her surprisingly normal suburban backstory with some sarcastic and unhinged plot twists. It’s a hilarious spin on a classic sitcom format, and is set to a soundtrack written and performed by The Gregory Brothers, famous for viral hits like the “Bed Intruder” and “It’s Corn” songs.

We had a paid media budget of $0, so we knew our only chance at getting engagement was to take a big, surprising creative risk. The social web rewards these kinds of "big swings" and our target audience of younger users seeks them out. It was our only chance at virality.

We also knew that the characters in Duolingo had endeared themselves to users. We believed that creating a backstory, and then delving into it via a longer-form series would give us and the auidence space to tell an entertaining story.

Lily is at her best when she is playing off of another character. Judging, ignoring, going out of her way to be unimpressed… Lily thrives when she can (lovingly) crush another character’s spirit. We thought this made her the perfect lead for a sitcom, and explored the format as a medium to tell her story.

We developed the 10-part comedy series “Living With Lily” to follow the unenthusiastic, purple-haired teen, and her upbeat family as they go about their lives, pining for Lily’s love and respect. The show, set in a nostalgic 90’s era ‘live audience’ style home, reveals her surprisingly normal suburban backstory with some sarcastic and unhinged plot twists. It’s a hilarious spin on a classic sitcom format, and is set to a soundtrack written and performed by The Gregory Brothers, famous for viral hits like the “Bed Intruder” and “It’s Corn” songs.

The result was a success bringing in over 60 million organic views, 4 million likes, 700,000 new followers, and growing the @ (pronounce “at”) Lily TiTok from literally zero to over 340,000 followers.