Chief Marketing Officer, Duolingo
Search every verified Manu Orssaud interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Manu Orssaud, chief marketing officer at Duolingo, discussed the company’s marketing strategy in two recent appearances. At an Axios Live event on July 17, 2025, he described how the Duolingo owl mascot gained fame through push notifications and user-generated content, leading to guerrilla marketing stunts such as appearing at a Charli XCX concert. Orssaud said the company spends about 6% of revenue on marketing and aims to “surprise and be in places that you don't expect us to be.” He also noted that the brand changes its app icon several times a year to re-engage lapsed users, citing a “dead face Duo” campaign that generated 1.7 billion views. In a September 17, 2024 interview, Orssaud said Duolingo’s first Super Bowl ad would be a five-second spot intended to create a “WTF moment.” He discussed the company’s use of AI, including a new tier called Duolingo Max that uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 to mimic a real-life tutor, and a data scraper that identifies trends from TikTok hashtags. Orssaud stated that AI is used to augment human work rather than replace it, and that the brand treats its mascot as a “Creator” with its own personality across social platforms. He cited his previous roles at Spotify and PlayStation as examples of building community-driven brands.
“Learning a language is actually very hard. So we try to get people hooked on the product by coming back every day in order to be able to learn. And the owl became famous because all those push notifications are sent by the owl, right? That's the idea.”
“When we started with TikTok, the first few content pieces that we produced were exactly what you would expect from a language learning app. It was working with influencers to translate some funny words and sentences. And it just didn't drive the variety or the interest at all. It's only when we started to not try to se...”
“We change our app icon about three or four times a year because people who haven't been on Duolingo for a while, if they see that the app icon has changed and it's weird, they will click on it and then get back into their lesson. This time we had the idea of doing a dead face Duo, creating a story about Duo dying, bein...”
“We only spend about 6% of revenue on marketing, but we do some big activations like a Super Bowl ad. We are known for being quite scrappy and authentic in the way we produce content, moving fast, but also showing breadth with more polished campaigns like the Squid Game one last year.”
“We really try to take risks because we want to stand out. We believe that's the right approach. How we build trust is by starting small, removing the fear of failure because you're not spending much money, and then iterating your way to find value. When you have that value, that actually builds trust for the team to co...”
“The brand that you see out there is exactly the same as the people inside. The jokes you see are the jokes that make us laugh. The passion, authenticity, agility, and scrappiness is the way we actually work. With AI, the role of the talent brand team is to demystify and show through the lens of our employees how AI is...”
“We clarified that the role of AI internally at Duolingo is not in replacement of people but more as a way to augment what people do and give them more opportunity for impact. It's important for us to continue explaining that AI is an amazing tool that we really believe in and to remove the fear generally present in the...”
“Our goal is always to surprise and be in places that you don't expect us to be. We're always trying to think what have we done that will get people excited and surprised where people go like 'Oh my god, I can't believe Duolingo is there.'”
“What you can expect from us is a WTF moment on TV during the Super Bowl. And yeah of course I mean I'm not going to deny 5 seconds is cheaper than 30 seconds but you know I think if 5 seconds done well with the right creative idea and the right concept you can still get a lot of coverage and interest from what you do.”
“The way we've edited our mascot is actually to turn a mascot into a Creator. If you look at our social what you'll see is that Duo has got his own personality, his own tantrums, his own happy moments, his own frustration, he's on love stories with Duolingo. All of this in some ways has really helped us to turn our bran...”
“My best advice is to try to really think about it from a very unique and authentic standpoint. We want to make sure that whatever people see from us every day on our social is entertaining, it's unexpected, it's new, it's fresh. So of course we have to reinvent ourselves every day; we don't want to get people tired of...”
“Last year we actually launched a new tier called Duolingo Max and this is using OpenAI GPT-4 technology with new features that are here to almost mimic the experience of a real life tutor.”
“AI plays a big role in the way we are able to identify trends in terms of what our community is talking about and the different passion points and topics they are really interested in. One thing we've been doing is actually build a data screen scraper that looks at all the hashtags and conversations that the people tha...”
“AI is really good at taking care of tasks that are very time consuming. For example with performance marketing these days the game is very much around creating as many assets as you can in order to feed the machine that will then figure out how best to optimize on those assets to recruit new audiences for Duolingo.”
“We believe AI can help us to create different cuts of different assets or help to localize assets in multiple languages much faster and more practically.”
Axios communications writer Eleanor Hawkins speaks to Duolingo chief marketing officer Manu Orssaud at an Axios Live event at ...
Duolingo's CMO Manu Orssaud promises the brand's inaugural Super Bowl spot will provide a “WTF moment” for viewers while ...
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