Duolingo is the world's largest free language learning app, with over 500 million users worldwide and 30 million in Brazil alone. As the second largest market for the application's users, the Brazilian market still has a huge potential for growth, both in new users and in users who have stopped using the platform for a while. Thus, the main goal of the campaign was to identify those students who for some reason stopped using the platform - and were ignoring the app's mobile notifications - and bring them back; attract new users in this potential market; celebrate their love and regard for the brand; and preferably generate buzz. All audiences are potential users of Duolingo. By having more than 40 language options to learn (including some unusual ones such as Klingon from StarTrek and HighValyrian from Game of Thrones) the App appeals to all social classes, ages and cultural styles.

Based on precious insights and a robust data analysis, we came up with the idea to remind and motivate students to take their classes: we've created for Duolingo the world's largest push notification - impossible to ignore, targeted at the people who would ignore our notifications the most. We mapped out who the runaway students were and had a history of learning with Duolingo, yet hadn't yet surrendered to Duo's onslaughts and callback notifications. And in order to help with this task, we've recruited friends and/or family members from those who missed their "onslaughts" to identify who those students were and those who were ignoring the notifications. With the creation of our innovative DOOH (digital-drone-out-of-home) we actually created a new media channel, an "moving billboard", and have brought a fun and convincing push notification to the window of our dear students.

So we started designing and elaborate strategy, which involved recruitment through social media teasers to seek out stories from former students, geolocation mapping to identify regions where they were located, our own learner data and the most important thing, an unprecedented way to deliver the world's largest push notification directly to the homes of those runaways students who were socially isolated because of the pandemic. This was only possible because of a robust data analysis to pinpoint how long those students had been away from the platform, their previous performance, the languages they were studying, their geographic (macro) and micrographic (nearby neighborhoods, homes with nearby buildings, visibility from their windows) locations to enable the logistics, coupled with limitations on drone flight hours, weather, and synchronicity with the plots. There were more than 500 interested parties (referrals from friends and family) and 8 pranked students.

The construction of the Drone with a high resolution projection with custom messages directed at specific learners allowed it to bring the Duo Owl to the real world, taking its famous features on the internet and social networks to real life for the users: embracing the meme. This ensured the potential of the action, with the video going viral and the expected buzz. Duolingo is a mobile App, and our pre-action (recruitment), during (influencers and spontaneous posts) and post-action (video hero release) communication strategy was totally mobile-first using platforms like Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. Even our DOOH was flown by mobile-only control. On social networks "The impossible to ignore notification" went viral, where users spontaneously created memes referencing pop culture icons (Spiderman for example), a notification skin on the renowned mobile game Minecraft, and a series of spontaneous videos on the mobile platform of the moment: TikTok.

The campaign generated a tremendous buzz in Brazil and spreaded to the world. Bringing the Duo Owl to the real life of the users generated a lot of word of mouth, positive reviews and consideration to the brand. And with that, we had 554K more active learners during the campaign period, only in the Brazillian market. Not only did the idea work in our target market, but it scaled penetrating the US and other key markets with millions of organic views.

Time: 06/07/21 until 06/30/21 (23 days after the hero video launch)

75MM earned impressions worldwide

24.5MM video impressions

19.4MM people reached on social media

10MM video views

10.7MM engagements (+432% over the previous month)

99.1% positive mentions

+35% brand search lift on Google

+5% new users

642 PR points - 51 articles national and international

(*) Data Monitoring and Analytics with SocialBakers, PlusoftSocial, Stilingue, AnswerThePublic, AirFluencers and Duolingo's Algorithm.