Duolingo
Video ADS
Duolingo is known for its characters. People enjoy their interactions and backstories, and it’s another element that makes learning new languages fun and interesting.
This makes for strong marketing when you can lean on internal characters that appeal to different personas. This also allows the creative marketing team to test different types of characters, stories, and media to appeal to potential users.
ROLE
Senior
Art Director
CONTRIBUTIONS
Design, ideation, concept, layout
DELIVERABLES
Design, concepts, animation, video
APPLICATIONS
THE BRIEF
I was tasked with producing different iterations of a previously successful video ad that helped increase installs. This campaign was to find out which aspect of that ad allows for more user installs.
APPROACH
Next, I wanted to plan how I would test each attribute of the successful ad. I created the scripts based on:
Usage of the word “free”
More than 1 language being used
Video length being only 6 seconds
Emotional payoff
Tying in “free” as a comedic reveal
I then used Claude to help with the structure of the scripts. I would manually edit the scripts to have the characters sound more relatable and make sure the brand guidelines were being followed.
RESULTS
I had 2-3 versions for each concept, and ultimately 4 were chosen from the batch.
Duolingo has an internal platform that makes producing video ads pretty efficient. There are some preloaded scenes that someone can choose, as well as characters to pick. There is a built-in agent from Eleven Labs that can take the text and have the characters' voices say the words. And there are enough animations so the characters’ mouths can follow the text. I could have type in the expressions of the characters’ faces as they talk.
There are two 6-second videos and two longer ones. We have one with the same characters: Falstaff (6-second video), Lin (multilingual), and Oscar (6-second video), and a video with the characters Zari and Lily (multilingual).