On Feb. 11, Duolingo took social media by storm by announcing that their beloved mascot, Duo the Duolingo Owl, had died. So began the most highly entertained social media marketing campaign that Duolingo had ever introduced.

Duolingo is a free language-learning app used to build vocabulary and grammar skills. The app often does promotions through weekly competition-style events but has also been known to guilt-trip Duolingo users into spending time on the app every day with various marketing tactics. 

Duolingo constantly sends out urgent messages to users who have not completed daily their language lessons. If a user ignores Duolingo’s alerts for very long, the app will ultimately turn off notifications on its own, with this passive-aggressive message: 

“These reminders don’t seem to be working. We’ll stop sending them for now.” 

Once, the Duolingo team changed the icon of their app to depict a sick Duolingo owl. This change tricked many users into opening the app, whether out of curiosity or fear that their bird was suffering from neglect.

The biggest stunt Duolingo would pull, however, was faking the death of their mascot Duo. The largest platform this scheme affected was TikTok, having taken over most users’ for-you pages and dominating online discourse. 

“It affected me quite a lot,” said Ciara O’Riordan, a junior nursing major. “It took over my for-you page. I lost sleep over that bird.”

While some students took the death of Duo very seriously, others immediately recognized it as the internet-oriented marketing scheme it was. Olivia Ullengren, a sophomore marketing major, spent zero time talking or worrying about the death of Duo until she was asked about it.

“It just doesn’t affect my everyday life,” Ullengren said. “I think it’s genius, but it’s also dumb that so many people made a big deal about it because it was clearly a marketing strategy to get people to post about it.” 

On the day of Duo’s ‘death,’ Duolingo posted two videos to their social media platforms: one a message informing the public of his death and speculating the cause, and the other a depiction of Duo’s funeral, accompanied by an audio that can only be described as highly inappropriate.

Part of what made the event of Duo’s death so compelling was its appeal to Generation Z humor sensibilities. Not only was the death of Duo a bizarre, seemingly random event, but the way the death was revealed was equally as strange. 

“It was kind of just random,” said Olivia Gentry, a junior mass communication major. “I have no idea why they decided to do that.”

The reason Duolingo themselves hinted as to why Duo might have died, was once again due to neglect. On their first official post revealing Duo’s death, Duolingo speculated the cause of his death was due to the mass amount of users putting off their language lessons, further clarifying this stunt as a marketing tactic.

Duolingo officially resurrected Duo from the dead on Feb. 24, when the company revealed Duo had faked his death to bring attention to the app and get people to do their language lessons.

“We’re talking about it, so it must have worked,” said Kaitlyn Taylor, a sophomore management information systems major. 

The true genius of Duolingo’s marketing tactic to kill and resurrect its mascot was its ability to hold the attention of social media for long enough that everyone knew about it. Some, however, had forgotten about the death of Duo long before he was revived. 

“Honestly I cared a lot about it in the beginning,” Gentry said. “I thought it was pretty funny. I didn’t keep up with it though. I had no idea the owl had been resurrected.” 

Whether or not the majority of those on social media realize that the Duo bird has been resurrected, or still believe he is dead due to the neglect of Duolingo’s users, Duolingo managed to capture everyone’s attention with their latest marketing stunt. The death and resurrection of the Duobird has become a masterclass in what kind of marketing works for a social media-oriented generation.