Chief Marketing Officer, DUOLINGO INC
Behind the Brand: Duolingo's CMO Manu Orssaud on AI & what to expect from Super Bowl ad
Duolingo's CMO Manu Orssaud promises the brand's inaugural Super Bowl spot will provide a “WTF moment” for viewers while ...
About Manu Orssaud
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.
Transcript (13 segments)
M
Manu Orssaud0:00
I'm Manu Orssaud, I'm the CMO of Duolingo.
I love a challenge. You have so little time to actually do something really exciting. We are planning to take the DNA of marketing at Duolingo, which is quite stunty, funny, impactful, something that feels authentic, and try to condense that and make it the five-second essence of what our brand marketing has been for the last two years. So what you can expect from us is a WTF moment on TV during the Super Bowl.
And yeah, of course, I'm not going to deny five seconds is cheaper than 30 seconds, but I think if five seconds is 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. I mean, we've seen brands do that really well. I think of Reddit a couple of years ago. We did a five-second ad. It's always the same: it's about driving buzz and talkability. We want people to notice our ad, talk about it, share it with their friends, and we really want that to be a super strong buzz moment on social for our brand.
Duolingo, the way we've used 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 happy moments, his frustration, his love stories with Duo Alia. And all of this in some ways has really helped us to turn our brand into something that feels very relatable, like a real person. I think that's what people love. They don't love the idea of interacting with a brand, but through a mascot you have something that becomes a bit more authentic, a bit more relatable, and it doesn't feel like you're talking to a brand; it feels like you're talking to a creator.
The problem is, because now mascots are a trending thing, a lot of brands may be tempted to try to replicate what other brands are doing. 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, unexpected, new, and fresh. So of course we have to reinvent ourselves every day. We don't want to get people tired of Duolingo and Duo. There are different things that we're playing with. We have an amazing array of characters within Duolingo that we can play with. We saw that Lily was actually getting a lot of traction organically on social because of her personality, so we decided to double down on Lily and start doing a lot more content. So we created our first sitcom, 'Living with Lily,' which is on YouTube Shorts, a new platform for us.
Our view is that we don't want to do the same across platforms. We really want to try to find a way for people to find value in following us on TikTok versus following us on YouTube Shorts. I think YouTube is really interesting from a storytelling perspective, playing with long-form content and short-form content and trying to find the best balance there. So you'll see us doing a lot more and experimenting again.
AI is for a long time part of our product. We actually have a personalization algorithm that we call Bird Brain, which really creates unique experiences for users and adapts the level of courses and difficulty based on how people are learning. What we did last year is actually launch 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 building a data screen scraper that looks at all the hashtags and conversations that the people who follow us on TikTok, for example, are using. Using that, we are able to identify new hobbies and fandoms to tap into as a way to build our brand. For example, K-pop, we realized through this approach, was a massive point of interest for our community.
The second thing I think is that 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 about 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. But creating a volume of assets takes a lot of time, and we believe AI can help us to do that in a way that is much faster and more practical by creating different cuts of different assets or helping to localize assets in multiple languages.
One use case that I found really interesting that we're looking into is how AI can help us to create more CGI-type content for social. We've seen some great brands having big success this year, like North Face taking over Big Ben in London, for example. We love to pull stunts with our mascot. I think with the use of AI and CGI capabilities, we can do stunts that are not as difficult to pull off.
Because what AI helps us to do is to provide some baseline content that is very imperfect, but it saves us time to actually create that. The human interaction comes from refining, optimizing, and enhancing that content, but it's definitely not something that comes from AI and is ready to be surfaced to our consumers at all. So that's definitely not changing. It's a shortcut to say that this would have a direct impact on human, but yes, of course, it's an amazing technology that we are using to do things faster.
When I look at my background with Spotify, PlayStation, and Duolingo, I think those three brands have something really unique in common, which is that they are brand-forward businesses in that they're here to nurture a community, build a fandom, and this in turn is a snowball effect that helps us to recruit more and more users. I think that same sort of approach has worked really well at Spotify and at PlayStation, where at heart it's a big community of fans that really believe in the brand, where the brand is part of their identity. And I think that's really something that we are trying to replicate at Duolingo. It's an amazing brand where language permeates across all aspects of life, from the shows that you watch on Netflix to the music you listen to on Spotify, so there's a really tight connection to culture and what people love.