More Powerful Than A TikTok Ban: Behind Duolingo’s Unhinged Rise And Rise To Social’s Favorite Brand Mascot

The language learning app’s thirsty, out-of-pocket, sometimes questionable posts have given way to an unignorable brand voice that’s taken on a life well beyond ByteDance.

By Oliver McAteer

A sketchy white van rolls up to Madison Square Gardens in New York City.?

Any cause for alarm is immediately and hilariously shut down when the backdoors swing open and a giant green owl spills into the street in front of hoards of people.

They’re lining up to see Dua Lipa perform in concert. But there’s a greater show about to unfold before them.?

The owl bops around enthusiastically while a guy crouched beside it runs through a stack of cardboard signs a la Love Actually.?

“Hey Dua! It me, your boi, Duo!” one reads. Followed by: “I flew to NYC to shoot my shot. Just to say… you want me I want you baby.”

It goes on to note the green jumpsuit the singer was wearing on tour—“I’m 100% taking it as a sign”—and a joke about how they should be making babies together.

Suddenly, a giant inflatable diamond ring emerges: “DUA WILL YOU MARRY ME????”

The great Duolingo Owl-Dua Lipa proposal of 2022 goes down as more than just a viral sensation. It’s the first time a brand took its lore out of the comments and into a real life experience—with dramatic success. The infinite fountain of press coverage and user-generated content it sparked confirmed how pervasive the language learning app’s social storyline really is.?

That story’s author is Zaria Parvez . And this is just one of her countless internet brainchildren that push the boundaries of how a brand shows up online.?

When she arrived at Duolingo in 2020—fresh out of college—its TikTok account had around 50,000 followers and bog-standard content. Only a year after she turned her attention to the account, that number became more than five million. At the start of 2025, it was nudging 15 million. Today, Duolingo’s social presence is seen as the bellwether for brands with bite.??

Parvez is the poster girl for brand social media managers and in-house marketing teams everywhere. Like, globally everywhere. Most companies would give their left arm for an artful dodger of www like Parvez. Her ascent, much like her content strategy, was lightning fast and unapologetic. She’d always loved the internet, ever since she was a kid. But this was not at all the career path she’d planned.?

Unlike most Millennials, who didn’t grow up with fast internet, smartphones and social media, but witnessed their rollouts, this U.S. Pennsylvania Pittsburgher never knew a life without them. There’s a huge technological delta for those born in the early nineties versus those born in the late nineties. Parvez was six-years-old when Facebook debuted in 2004, and 12 when Instagram launched.?

“Some of my best friends in life are internet friends,” she said. “It’s always been a big part of my core.”

In middle school, she hounded her mother for a Facebook account and lied about her age to open one. If there was a social platform, chances are she had a profile. Parvez even had a photography business on Instagram at one point in her teenage years. She was overly invested in how people were using the internet. But despite her curiosity for the online world, she shrugged off any thought of turning it into a career. It was, after all, a very different time.

While some brands adopted social media in the early 2000s, specific roles around social media management wouldn’t be popularized until 2010 and onward, and corporate America would take even longer to fully embrace it without eye-rolling. (Some still don’t, and they’re losing.)

She said: “I always saw that as a passion and something I cared about, but that’s it—my real job has to be something much more buttoned up and official because there’s no way you can make a career out of that.”

Parvez studied marketing at the University of Oregon with the view to become a brand strategist. But when she graduated, she found herself plonked in front of a sucky economy in the middle of a global pandemic. The circumstances were less than ideal, on the face of it. Now, however, with hindsight, one could say they were the most perfect set of circumstances.?

The graduate couldn’t find any jobs in brand strategy. And she had no desire to move to New York City, a natural magnetic draw for most people her age in a neighboring state. She took one of the only jobs she could find: Social media coordinator at Duolingo, right there in Pittsburgh. The role reported into a PR manager and wasn’t technically part of the marketing team.?

It was meant to be a stepping stone to a brand strategy job. And after a year there, she wished more than ever that it was. Parvez was bored. Happy. But bored. She’s a creative person by nature, and posting cutesy graphics of a cheery green owl made by the design team wasn’t quenching any artistic thirst.?

By 2021, it was clear TikTok wasn’t another fad (like BeReal would later turn out to be). Parvez saw a prime opportunity for Duolingo to make an impact in uncharted territory. Brands, at that point, had much trepidation about how they should be using the channel. Many held off, unsure if it even made sense for them to have a presence. They lost ground fast. Early adopters were rewarded handsomely by the algorithm with mass engagement and accelerated followership. Duolingo may have reaped those rewards the hardest.?

“I thought there’s this mascot suit, I’ll create some videos, they’re not gonna do so well, but at least it’ll create diversification of content,” said Parvez of her initial TikTok strategy. “It was more something to get me creatively inspired. I thought my first video would hit ten thousand views.”

It hit half a million.?

Parvez had made her way to a deli where Duolingo was hosting a marketing initiative (and meet some of her team for the first time as they’d yet to connect IRL because of pandemic lockdown measures). The campaign, called “Yiddish for Bagel,” was fun and smart. Duolingo had launched a new course to revive the endangered language of Yiddish, which was spoken by more than 13 million people before the Holocaust but only 600,000 in 2021. (Bet you didn’t have “Holocaust” and “big green owl” on your bingo card for today.) The brand had taken over several delis across the country and encouraged people to order in Yiddish for a free bagel. By turning this dying language into currency, people were more likely to give it a try. And many were surprised at how much the dialect is already interwoven with our everyday patter. If you’ve ever ordered a bagel before, then you’ve spoken Yiddish: “Bagel” is Yiddish for “bagel.” Then there are words like “chutzpah,” “nosh,” and “schlep.”?

Each location had custom wax paper, napkins, bags and other merch. The experience was designed to be highly shareable on social. Parvez was 90 percent going so she could finally meet her team in-person and snag a free bagel. Ten percent might be content capture. The activation lent itself to video well, so she shot footage on her phone and posted her debut TikTok with the viral audio, “sheeeeeesh” (IYKYK).?

Parvez explained: “The audio made no sense at all, but it’s trending. It blew up. All of the comments were like, ‘this is the first brand to use this audio.’ If I were to post that video today I don’t think it would go viral. It was this mix of the first brand to do it, for us to use this almost insider, brain rot audio I was listening to on my own for you page, and putting it together for an official brand felt very new and niche at this time.”

No doubt this helped power the campaign’s success. It smashed all metrics. “Yiddish for Bagel” dominated national and global TV coverage, even earning a front page article in the Wall Street Journal. It garnered around 1.4 billion earned media impressions. Duolingo had put exactly $0 behind paid media, meaning all success was down to PR and online talkability. Before the campaign launched, the brand set a target of 75,000 new sign-ups. The end results was more than 350,000. Ultimately, Duolingo became the home for more Yiddish language learners than actual native speakers. It increased the total number of potential Yiddish speakers by nearly 60 percent.?

“My Superpower Was Not Knowing”

Parvez basked in the instant social success of her TikTok virality. But wrote it off as a one-hit-wonder of sorts. An anomaly. She paused for several weeks to focus on business as usual. Then posted on TikTok against another trend. Another viral hit—this time with views in the millions.?

“That’s when I thought, ‘oh shit,’” she said. “This is something that’s here and I should take a step back and really figure out how to develop this in a way that makes sense and can be scalable. That’s when I started asking questions like who’s Duo’s persona, what’s the lore, what are things we can build on, what are different skits to bring these to life? I wanted to bring in this idea of community management and optimizing things other brands weren’t.”

The social savant started where any chronically-online person would: Memes. Parvez dove deep into the recesses of Duolingo’s internet footprint. It was there she unearthed chatter from users that would direct the account’s voice, tone and personality: One that is annoying and pushy. She wrapped these characteristics up in a cheeky, playful, IDGAF attitude that is blissfully aware of its own innocent arrogance. Most brands wouldn’t touch these memes with a ten foot cyber-pole. Parvez made them Duolingo’s superpower.?

She believes every brand has the ability to lean into their community’s social trash talk, but too many are fearful. “I genuinely think that leaning into the memes that people make about you will not make you look negative or bad—it just makes you seem like you get culture. Brands are still scared to do it because they think it’ll reflect negatively on them.”

Parvez upended traditional brand architecture. It’s not unusual for strategists to spend months and months figuring out the mechanics behind a brand’s personality to birth an archetype that’s true to what the company is trying to achieve. There are 12 major brand archetypes: Outlaw, Magician, Hero, Lover, Jester, Everyman, Caregiver, Ruler, Innocent, Sage, Explorer, and Creator.?

We could argue that some of the world’s biggest and unbreakable brands, like Coca-Cola and Disney, slot into the Magician bucket. This type of brand voice is informed, reassuring, almost mystical. Their shared message is one of tomorrow being brighter than today, and all your dreams can come true if you just believe.?

A brand like Nike, however, could be characterized as the Hero. With a voice that is full-on candid and brave. Its message is portrayed as something or someone who can make the world better because it has the determination to outwork the rest with diehard authenticity.?

Meanwhile, a company like Old Spice could slot into the Jester, and Virgin the Outlaw.?

Based on these archetypes, Duolingo might be a combination of Jester, Outlaw, and maybe Creator for its provocative innovation of its language learning tools.?

These archetypes didn’t matter to Parvez. What mattered was what Duolingo’s community was saying about the brand. From there, she could retrofit a unique voice.?

“I would love to say I’m a genius, I came up with this strategy, I presented and they bought into it and it went viral,” she told me. “But that’s not what happened. And I think my super power in this situation is that I actually didn’t know that I needed to get legal approval, I didn’t know that there are all these guardrails that other brands have.?

“I just wanted to create content that I thought was engaging and funny to a normal consumer, not someone who loves Duolingo. This is what led to success. Not these advertising things we’re taught to care about.”

The industry is swamped with architect strategists: Those who stand back and plan and plan and plan, producing blueprints by way of 151-slide decks with beauty circles and arrows and venn diagrams. It’s lovely to look at and impressive to hear. Often, though, there’s too much stuff to know what to do with, and the bridge from strategy to creative is too foggy to cross.?

Marketing needs less architect strategists and more archeology strategists: Those who throw themselves into the muck and dig and dig and dig, discovering gold and allowing that hidden treasure to dictate their next move. Through social listening, Parvez figured out what Duolingo’s brand should say. Now she could have fun deciding the most interesting ways to say it.?

“It was remarkable and honestly a little bit concerning,” said Parvez of Duolingo’s instant “oil-strike” virality and the freedom she had to wield its newfound social power. “Our marketing team was so small and no one really cared about social, so we didn’t have all these rules or guidelines. It almost became this experiment of what can happen when no one’s watching.”

Her superiors literally gave her the keys and said please drive the car, just don’t crash it by way of us getting canceled. This, right here, is without a doubt the biggest reason why so many brands experience failure to (social) launch: Fear. Layers. And ego.?

Parvez said: “What restricts people and brands is this over-insanity of pressure of ‘this is what people perceive of our brand and if we do this it’ll mean this.’ We all keep turning up with these amazing strategy decks. But good luck making content out of that. It just becomes this whole thing where everyone is repeating what everyone else is doing. And it’s very hard to find a unique voice.”

Duolingo’s social presence only grew. Its TikTok, the hero channel, would smash through one million views more often than not, with ten million-plus pretty common, and its most viral posts flying by 25 million.?

As the viewers grew, so did Parvez’s appetite for risk-taking.?

“The community eggs us on,” she explained. “They want to see more and more. The comment section is your social brief. The community is the one downloading your app and engaging with your videos and sharing with their friends, so you better figure out what they want.”

What they wanted was bigger and weirder. And Parvez was happy to oblige.?

As brands flooded TikTok in the wake of Duolingo, people in the comments were begging for all sorts of collabs. One hauntingly-beautiful post with Scrub Daddy culminated in the outrageous birth of tiny sponge owls.?

Meanwhile, playing into its success of activation at live music events, numerous Duolingo descended upon Charli XCX’s “Sweat Tour” hot on the heels of “Brat Summer”. Owl-masked concert-goers were seen throwing shapes in the front rows. User generated content flooded social, and some of the most viral videos from that night didn’t feature the popstar at all. Duolingo’s presence made perfect sense, not just because it shared the same “Brat Green” hue as Charli’s viral album cover, but because the personality Parvez creates encompasses playful brattiness.??

Burnt Out By The Speed Of Culture

Parvez took the job in her early twenties.?

Before she was 25-years-old, Duolingo’s social presence and Parvez herself had won multiple awards for the social work. The responsibility weighed heavily on Parvez. Little did she know that the entire brand world had been following in Duolingo’s footsteps. In many ways, her account was the tonal and creative bar for brands everywhere. If Duolingo does it, then we can too.?

Pressure mounted. One day, all of a sudden, a million views was nothing to clap about. That was just the bar. The new normal. And anything below would raise eyebrows and potential scrutiny from leadership. Her team had doubled-down on the brand’s social success, offering more resources and extending creative freedom. But expectations had also tripled-down.?

She got promoted. She became a manager, with two people reporting to her for content strategy and creation. She got promoted again, this time to senior global social media manager. She spoke on panels all over the world in front of thousands of people, from huge events including SXSW to VidCon.?

Then she burned out and took a leave of absence.?

Burnout in advertising and marketing is all too common. Especially among social media managers. This job’s success is anchored in someone’s desire and ability to be chronically online, constantly swiping through cyberspace to mentally upload trends. Social’s culture has a new agenda every single day. The speed at which it moves is hard to grasp. The faster and bolder a company can react to social culture (in a way that is authentic to the brand) the bigger the rewards usually are.?

It’s a role dominated by a dozen micro-actions: Ideate, capture content, edit, craft post and captions across multiple platforms (usually across X, Instagram posts and Reels, TikTok, LinkedIn, and YouTube Shorts, at a minimum). Rinse and repeat. As many times a day as possible no matter where or when. It’s relentless—and a social media manager’s vice is only feeling as good as their last post. Somewhere along the line, that online passion can evaporate.?

Parvez’s newfound success came with the burden of goals for more views, higher engagement, and increased followers. Enough was now never enough. The stress had been mounting for a while, but she brushed it under a rug until the anxiety bulges were too large to ignore.?

After she decided to take a step back, Parvez took to LinkedIn to lay down her feelings (full post here). She hoped it would serve as a guiding light for other social media managers—or any young person in the sector—struggling to cope mentally.?

She wrote: “When I was 25, I took a leave to help me cope with the anxiety that built up from being a top performer and not letting myself just be in my 20s.” Parvez goes on to say: “To this day the toughest question I get asked is: ‘how do you deal with burnout as a social media manager?’

“I dread being asked this question because as much as I hate admitting it, our TikTok success was founded on burnout I endured. I really do wish innovation can come from living a balanced life, but at some point something (or someone) has got to give. And there's really no pretty way of saying it.”

She explains that “as eat pray love as that sounds, many studies have actually found that creating something small with your hands can provide you with a sense of control and purpose.”

Whether that’s making content, cooking a meal, writing a physical card to the penpal, making jewelry and a thousand and one other tiny physical actions. For Parvez, it’s about finding her sense of control in creating, and figuring out how those creations have a positive contribution to her life.?

TikTok Ban Fuels A Doubling-Down On Duo’s Cult

With this renewed clarity and energized focus, she came back and supercharged the Duolingo social.?

As she did, a threat loomed: TikTok might be banned in the U.S.??

When the news first emerged, Parvez wasted no time in redistributing her content efforts over other platforms. Don’t sleep on YouTube. Duolingo’s channel has more than five million followers, and Shorts, YouTube’s answer to TikTok, is sending Duolingo’s content flying. Parvez said in summer 2024 that Shorts was having a 2021 TikTok moment. As the rival platform was late to the party, so were brands. And early adopters were being treated to high views and engagement.?

Her be-first social savviness paid off again. Today, Duolingo YouTube Shorts are routinely getting more than ten million views, with its most viral smashing through 40 million.?

The loss of TikTok would have been a blow. But what Parvez has built has evolved far beyond the ByteDance app.?

The correlation between Duolingo’s social success and its brand growth is so unignorable that Parvez’s work now informs other disciplines. For example, Duolingo’s developers infuse the brand voice Parvez birthed into app icons and widgets, which regularly get changed up to pique user interest and lean into the owl's unexpected personality. When you’re on a language lesson streak, the annoying mascot will pop up on your device with a (sometimes literal) cheeky reminder to keep going. One design shows weirdly caked-up tiny green buttocks perched on the widget’s ledge.

At a marco level, the direction from higher up is often “to make it more unhinged,” said Parvez, who has seen Duolingo’s userbase soar since joining.?

In Q3 2024 earnings, the platform reported daily active users of 37.2 million, a whopping 54 percent increase from the prior year quarter. Total revenues leapt 40 percent over the same period, reaching $192.6 million.

“I think if anything it was a reminder how valuable community is for a brand,” she said of the TikTok drama, which saw ByteDance remove the app for all of 14 hours. “And the need to be something that people will miss.”?

Farewell videos from Duolingo notched up more than 60 million views across its social channels. This reaction only fueled Parvez and the team to double-down on creating “an even more cult following in 2025 with a focus on user-generated content and surprise and delight.”

The love for this personality Parvez has fabricated is masterclass in community brand building. If the TikTok drama revealed anything for this burgeoning company, it’s that wherever the owl goes, its fans will likely follow (in the tens of millions). And even if they don’t, Duolingo has left an indelible mark on culture with a voice that owns the ears of a young consumer every brand is vying for.?

Zaria Parvez has made Duolingo deathproof.??

Duolingo is a client of Mischief's media practice.