While hugely popular with Gen Z on social media, Duolingo was looking to reach a wider audience and encourage them to complete their language lessons. The brief was clear—use the Super Bowl's massive fanbase to promote doing your daily language lesson in a direct, memorable way. The objective was to drive immediate action from current users while capturing the interest of potential new learners. To achieve this on a limited budget, we would need to use creativity to cut through in a saturated media landscape.

Duolingo’s iconic mascot Duo the Owl is famous for his passive-aggressive push notifications and finding ridiculous ways to remind learners to do their language lessons. There’s no place Duo won’t go, including the Super Bowl. To reach people on their mobile devices during this moment, we needed to generate a WTF moment that would get people talking.

For the Super Bowl, Duolingo created a 5-second commercial that featured its green owl mascot farting out its own face with a reminder to “do your Duolingo.” At the same exact time that the commercial aired, we also sent a push notification to millions of learners with the same reminder to do their lessons.

In 2023, Duolingo sent a push notification during the Super Bowl that achieved our highest activation rate of any general marketing send. We believe this was due to the shared cultural attention and the fact that people normally watch the event together in the same room, which leads to word of mouth. Based on this hypothesis, we wanted to launch a campaign for Super Bowl 2024 and reach an even wider audience.

Our strategy was to double down on this success and pair it with the viral success of an iconic image of our mascot Duo emerging from his own butt on social media. We created a short, memorable Super Bowl commercial that directly urged viewers to do their Duolingo lessons, and re-engineered our backend system so that within seconds of our commercial airing on live TV we could send push notification reminders to millions of learners.

To tease out the campaign, Duolingo partnered with influencer plastic surgeon Dr. Miami to give Duo the Owl a “BBL” (Brazilian butt lift). This controversial collab sparked endless conversation online and made Duo top of mind heading into the Super Bowl.

Then during the big game, we ran a 5-second ad in 7 cities (NY, PGH, CHI, LA, SF, DE, MI). We focused on markets with the highest user engagement, which ensured the ad reached the most relevant audience. At the same exact time as the commercial, we sent a real-time push notification to 4 million learners within 5-seconds of them seeing the commercial.

Throughout the rest of the game, we shared the Super Bowl commercial on social, jumped in on trending moments, and posted other content with Duo the Owl’s green butt to get learners to do their lessons.

With a 5-second regional commercial and a real-time push notification, Duolingo subverted the Super Bowl and generated over a total of 800 million impressions. This timely push notification marked Duolingo's most reengaged notification ever.

X (aka Twitter) named Duolingo the most liked brand of the Super Bowl and media outlets placed it in the top 3 social moments of the game with 100 million social impressions. The campaign’s unhinged social content even spurred tabloid coverage for Duo the Owl in the UK and other markets.

Most importantly this all led to a 25% increase in reactivated learners, which shows how a cheeky use of digital platforms can directly impact metrics. The unforgettable real-time reminder not only drove fans to do their lessons, but also demonstrated Duolingo's innovative approach to making learning fun and relevant.