Fresh from rocking the internet with the culling of its owl, social lead Zaria Parvez shares the secrets of the unconventional approach that has shot the brand from 50,000 followers to more than 16 million while putting it on the lips of the world’s media.
Zaria Parvez: the real face behind Duo the Owl
If there’s one brand right now that has the knack for going viral, it’s Duolingo. The language-learning app has gone all-in on social-first storytelling, turning its beloved but notoriously pushy green owl, Duo, into a pop culture phenomenon in the process. At least it did until, in a masterstroke of shock marketing, Duolingo “killed” its own mascot earlier this month.
The campaign, which began with a simple app icon change and rapidly escalated into death by Cybertruck, sparked a social media frenzy. “It actually just started from an app icon that had X’s over Duo’s eyes,” says Zaria Parvez, Duolingo’s senior global social media manager, in an interview with The Drum at Web Summit Qatar. “Every six months, we change our app icons, and we’ve seen when we do that, we get an uptick in new users.” But this time, rather than a routine cosmetic refresh, the team decided to craft an increasingly elaborate narrative around it – and before long, Duo’s demise became the internet’s latest obsession and even the subject of postmortems from the grown-ups at CNN and The New Yorker.
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Killing Duo was characteristic of what Parvez describes as an “unhinged” approach to social media and a tone that has helped Duolingo leap from 50,000 TikTok followers to 16 million in a little over four years. “A lot of our social is just what our community wants us to do,” says Parvez. “We’re very fast with reaction. It’s a priority.”
Parvez joined Duolingo as its sole social media coordinator in 2020. Back then, the company’s leadership was skeptical about TikTok’s potential. “Our CEO was like, ‘I don’t know if there will actually be an impact with it’,” she recalls. But Parvez was given the go-ahead to experiment, the early videos took off, and the brand’s social presence snowballed from there. Today social media takes pride of place within the brand marketing team and has expanded to include two additional social content creators, augmented by contractors and working in alignment with art and copy specialists in the wider brand department.
Within this structure, Parvez and her fellow social specialists operate with significant autonomy. “There’s a lot of trust in our social team,” Parvez says. While other brands face layers of approvals, Duolingo’s legal and executive teams are supportive of the brand’s playful, sometimes chaotic, voice. “It’s not as much of an approval process as other brands have, which is pretty cool.”
That trust was built over time, in part due to a unique safety measure: a third-party mediator who helps ensure the brand stays within the right boundaries. “The guy we hired actually used to work for Sesame Street. And he would be like, This is what Elmo was allowed or not allowed to do.” Acting effectively as a “mascot specialist,” their role is to provide dispassionate counsel as to whether content crosses the line – ensuring that Duolingo’s irreverence never tips into scandal.
For a brand that has amassed such a huge following on TikTok, the prospect of the Chinese social platform being banned in the US was a concern. Again though, even as what turned out to be a short-lived TikTok switchoff loomed in January, the social team couldn’t help but be reactive. “We saw an uptick in Mandarin learners on Duolingo because people were preparing for a shift to [Chinese app] Rednote,” Parvez says. The team quickly created a video teaching TikTok phrases in Mandarin, which blew up online. “The ban ended up helping us in a weird way.”
In anticipation of TikTok’s turmoil, Duolingo started more seriously experimenting with YouTube Shorts late last year. What started as a “precautionary” measure has yielded encouraging results. “I actually am a very big YouTube Shorts fan. It’s awesome because there’s a lot more space for original ideas to go viral there, versus TikToks, which are very trend-dependent, and people run into audio usage [issues], or it’s too risky. We’re converting a lot from Shorts. I don’t think we’ve cracked it yet, or any brand’s really cracked it. So I feel like Shorts is just a place where it would be awesome to see more people trying and experimenting.”
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For Duolingo, social is a clear brand play – meeting users where they are, especially if they happen to be procrastinating on TikTok when they should be brushing up on their French. While many companies struggle to quantify social’s business impact, Duolingo found a direct link: a “How did you hear about us?” survey in the app onboarding process. “Whenever we have a viral video, we see an uptick in new users,” Parvez says.
The company has now refined its strategy to focus on conversion, not just impressions. “Before, it was about impressions and press hits. Now, it’s about what are the actual new user numbers that are coming,” she explains. This shift has shaped everything from content strategy to executive buy-in. Even Duolingo’s CEO, once a TikTok skeptic, now urges the team to make content even “more unhinged.”
Having conquered short-form, there may be another surprising pivot in Duolingo’s sights as social tastes shift once more. “I think actually, we’re going more into like long-form video, which is really fun,” says Parvez, imagining a future where SNL-style sketch writers “create content based off Duo.” Before that though, there will be the denouement of the dead Duo campaign and maybe - just maybe - a resurrection for the stricken mascot.
Planning too far ahead though just wouldn’t be becoming of a brand that has learned that it pays to be reactive. “I wish I had a ‘go viral’ button,” Parvez jokes. “But the internet still surprises me every day.”