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- [00:00]
Jon Evans
Foreign.
- [00:06]
James
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to SoundCentre CMO. Now, in this episode, we're talking about entertainment and just how important entertainment is to drive brand growth. And I'm joined in this episode by James, the creative director of Duolingo, one of the most entertaining brands on the planet and the most talked about brands in the world. How have they gone about growing their brand so successfully and especially with their brand mascot duo? And as a bonus as well, I'm also joined in this episode by Dan from Small World, who's done some research on the power of entertainment and how it builds brand growth and some of the tactics that you can deploy as a brand to use entertainment to grow your brand. This episode is full of Pat's of great stories. It's very entertaining and lots of practical advice. Here it is. James, great to have you on the show.
- [00:49]
Dan
Yeah, thanks for having me.
- [00:50]
James
Good to be here. Good to be in Austin as well. South by Southwest.
- [00:54]
Dan
First time here actually.
- [00:55]
James
Is it your first time? Yeah, yeah. Mine as well.
- [00:57]
Dan
Yeah.
- [00:57]
James
So we just finished our panel, which seems to go right.
- [01:00]
Dan
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of energy.
- [01:02]
James
There was a lot of energy, yeah, indeed. And a lot of love for Duolingo as well, which is great, if that was. Interestingly, like most people in the room were aware of the death of Duo as well. So like a few, A few people kind of discovered that, didn't they?
- [01:14]
Dan
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's great to see that. Yeah. Killing a mascot for your brand. Well, we'll create some good conversation.
- [01:23]
James
Indeed. Well, before we get into that, I'd love to find out a bit about you and how, how you got here today. So what's been your kind of path to.
- [01:29]
Dan
Yeah, you know, I actually, I started off going to school actually at the School of Visual Arts in New York. And what got me going there was actually loved. I was really big in the emo rock scene, emo band scene, and I was designing T shirts for bands at the time. And I was like, looking, how could I actually, you know, do a little bit more of this design and kind of get a little bit closer to music and artists? So I started, you know, jumping into a lot of T shirt designs and that got me into design. Went to School of Visual Arts while I was there, really got into advertising, coming up with the ideas behind the actual design. And from there I landed an internship at BBDO New York, which is, you know, a big creative agency at the time, and was able to sign an internship, interned for About a year, which is very long time. Worked on a lot of different projects there. Everything from tv, some super bowl work to a lot of digital campaigns, things that really didn't feel like advertising. Eventually yeah, spent about six years there, jumped over to my first brand experience actually to zocdoc and at the time they were the third largest startup in New York. I jumped into the brand side, did not know what I was getting myself into. The first time was a very different vibe of a place now from where I am now and I learned I needed to learn so much more than I actually did. Coming from a creative agency where creative is first you jump into brand side and they're like performance marketing, how do we sell hospital networks? I'm like, oh, what did I get myself into? So I spent a year there, then finally jumped over to learn a little bit about all the different areas that I didn't know that much about on the brand side. So I jumped over to VaynerMedia working with Gary and his team there for about four and a half years and worked on a lot of different brands from PepsiCo to Anheuser Busch, a lot of Budweiser work and, and some GE and a few other, few other brands over the course of the time there. Yeah.
- [03:24]
James
And when did the call come in for Duolingo and what tempted you to join?
- [03:29]
Dan
Yeah, I got a call from recruiter actually from Duolingo who spent some time at Droga actually another agency back in the day. And I knew her from the past there and she was like, hey, I think you should like come in for this. And I was like, you know, I was looking for a brand side like opportunity to go back to, to take some of that knowledge from both, you know, both agency experiences and really go into a brand that I think, you know, I would love to sort of be a part of and actually have good impact. And yeah, that just hit. I kind of took the first interview not really expecting to be that excited about, to be very honest. And then once I learned a little bit more about the, the business, the product, the opportunity and you know, just the audience and how much people love the brand without even doing any marketing for me was like a no brainer, like the opportunity and potential was, was all there.
- [04:19]
James
This is what people, I guess like so many people have heard Duolingo as well, but for anyone who hasn't yet heard, I'm sure there's not that many people out there, but it's one of those brands that become incredibly successful. We'll talk about why what does Duolingo do and in how many countries and how many users are there?
- [04:33]
Dan
Yeah, so we're the number one way to learn a language in the world. We have right now we have about 110. A little over than that now, actually, monthly active learners on the platform, and we span the entire globe. So, you know, you name it. In terms of languages, we teach about 40 languages. A little bit more than that. Those including, you know, the ones that you can imagine. English, Spanish. Right. French, German, you know, Mandarin. But then also some fictional languages, such as High Valyrian. We teach Klingon as well and a few other fictional languages. So, yeah, we cover the spectrum. And you know, for us, in terms of learners, we have. We kind of split each one or so. We split our audiences up in what we call like the English divide. There's people that are learning English from other languages, and those are really, in most cases, they're learning English to better their socioeconomic status. So we actually, while we're a very fun brand, we kind of have a bit of a serious mission as well, which is to create the best education world and make it more accessible. But, you know, we believe in the best way in doing something is through fun and, you know, the best way that it'll, you know, you want to learn anything, when you have fun doing it, you're more likely to go further.
- [05:45]
James
That makes a lot of sense randomly. I didn't study French when I was at school because, you know, I'm old enough that you didn't have to do languages at school.
- [05:53]
Dan
Yeah.
- [05:53]
James
And so I ended up like doing, doing French when I was in my mid-20s and I was learning back then with a CD where they taught you to music. And the problem is now I can't order anything in a French restaurant without singing it, you know, because that's how I learned. But because it made it fun and tuned for. And I used to, I used to study while I was in the car commut doing a sales job. Someone's going to sales calls or whatever, you know, for an hour or two in the car, I'll be listing this kind of music, French kind of thing. But it's hilarious when I go and order in France now because I sort of. They fall out laughing at me because I'm. I'm singing the tune, I'm singing the phrases.
- [06:28]
Dan
Yeah. I mean, that's definitely a new product to test out, right? A musical. A musical.
- [06:33]
James
A musical approach to it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And one of the things I think is fascinating about, you know, what you've done on the product side, though, is you've kind of gamified, haven't you? Kind of the experience. So how have you used gamification to help people learn more and to kind of stay on the platform and get better?
- [06:48]
Dan
I mean, to. To what I just said, you know, the. When you're having fun learning anything, you're more likely to continue doing it. So for us, the idea of a gamified product, right, utilizing some of the, let's say, mechanisms that keep you addicted to social media, right, Scrolling, getting the dopamine effect of some reward system, right, for us is pretty amazing opportunity to be able to take that and use it for something that you want to get better at, right? Learning something. So, you know, for us, there's, you know, there's a lot of different mechanisms that we use. We have the streak, which is probably one of our most popular gamified features, you know, that really keeps you coming back every day. We have about. I think it's about over 3 million people who have streak longer than one year with us, which is, you know, people who love the product, they're coming back every day. We have other features such as leaderboards, which is, again, allowing you to rank amongst other learners. We have friend streaks, actually now, so you can continue learning with a friend and, you know, or family members and kind of challenge each other to keep going. So there's a lot of gamified features that really are just there to keep you hooked and learning, which, again, you know, no one can really get upset at you for that. So, yeah, a lot of dopamine moments, I would say, even with our sound design and other touch points.
- [08:06]
James
Yeah, it's amazing. Like these kind of cheap. Not cheap insights, but I mean, behavioral science insights are so simple and yet so effective. I know for me, like, I'm trying to get fitter, so I'm on. On Zwift, for example, and, you know, the amount of, like, you know, we're. Same thing. It's like streaks every week that you, you know, completed a workout or the. The statistics or you get kind of, you know, feedback from other riders, you know, communication, that kind of thing. It's great when it gets put to good use, isn't it?
- [08:32]
Dan
I mean, yeah, it's. It's like when you think about, again, scrolling through your feed, you know, you're just losing all this time. Like you could be learning and you could be taking those same. The same, you know. Yeah. The same dynamics and. And helping yourself. It's sort of like a no brainer. When you think about it, in the.
- [08:47]
James
Time you scrolls, you could have ordered a pizza in Italian. Yeah. Or something like that.
- [08:51]
Dan
Exactly, exactly. And honestly, it just takes a few minutes a day as well. Right. Like, when you're learning anything, you need to kind of stay with it for you to, you know, keep it fresh. Top of mind for you. So it's. Yeah, we do what we can to keep everyone learning. And, you know, we, we have a mascot as well who, you know, does a great job at keeping you motivated, whether it's passive aggressively or, you know, or just trying to shame you into learning. Yeah, there's a lot of mechanisms that we have.
- [09:18]
James
And can you. Can you assess your personality and work out exactly what kind of prompts you know, are going to get you to do more?
- [09:24]
Dan
We know what works for certain people. We used to send a newsletter out that was Duo crying and it's. You made Duo upset and that turned into a meme. You know, earlier on in our first few years of. Of the company and people really did not want to make Duo sad. My mom actually still. Still texts me occasionally. She was like, oh, I got. I'm making Duo sad today. I didn't do my lesson. I'm like, yeah, you got to do it, Mom. Like, you got to do it.
- [09:48]
James
I love that. And then talking to technology as well, what. To what extent is AI, you know, changing the experience or helping learning?
- [09:55]
Dan
Yeah, you know, I think what we've started to implement now is actually we just launched a feature called Video Call with Lily. So Lily is one of our. One of our characters, actually her second most loved character outside of Duo. And what we've launched is a way to use generative AI GPT to be able to, in real time, understand what you're saying back to it. So it'll prompt you so you can speak to Lily and in real time, it actually could have a conversation with her. So you're really able to practice speaking for really the first time. And, you know, when you finished having a conversation with Lily, you know, you'll get a notification and an update of like, a transcript of, like, your conversations, things that you did right, things that you did wrong, things for you to improve on the next time. And what's actually interesting is there's a bit of a retained knowledge too, so she'll remember some of the things that you talked about in the next conversation. So, you know, if you say something like, oh, you really love sushi, she'll ask you like, oh, well, you know, oh, you like sushi. Right. Like, so you could really start to build a bit of a relationship with, with the characters and, you know, it again, to the gamified notion of keeping people, you know, coming back, you know, really starting to build a relationship and a feature of, like, you really are invested in learning and wanting come back. That's a. Yeah, that's another motivational tactic.
- [11:14]
James
Well, I'm immediately thinking how I can save money on Spanish tutors for my daughters. It sounds like a really good. A really good hack. Which do you see as a threat at all? I mean, I had a meeting earlier today actually, and the guy had those, those new Ray Bans and he was like, yeah, talk to me in Italian and I'll be able to hear you in English kind of thing. Do you think? Is that going to be a threat, do you think, to what you do?
- [11:34]
Dan
You know, I would say translations, especially with like Google Translate and other, other, you know, companies in that space. They've been good for several years now. We honestly have not seen any change in those wanting to learn a language with us. You know, there's a lot of motivations such as learning. Learning for love or relationships or family or other areas outside of even wanting to speak. Such as just brain training. Right. For some. And so we don't really see an impact there. And again, as I just mentioned, there's features that we have now are actually taking that technology and making it more immersive to learn, and we're seeing a lot of engagement on that front. So again, making it more accessible for everyone to learn.
- [12:14]
James
Now he talks about your mascot, Jiro. Right. And I think probably Jio is like, probably the best case in the world right now of a brand mascot. And. But it's really funny because if you look at the data, mascots are well out of fashion. I mean, a colleague of mine, Orlando, has been tracking, he calls them fluent devices. But basically like things associated with your brand that come to mind easily.
- [12:36]
Jon Evans
Right.
- [12:37]
James
So he uses the term because it covers lots of different things. It could be sound, it could be. Look, it could be characters or something. But anyway, he's been tracking over many years and they're really like in decline massively, like they're really not used anymore. What was the thought behind developing this character and the role that it plays?
- [12:55]
Dan
Yeah, I mean, I love this question because I didn't realize there was a mascot tracker.
- [12:59]
James
There is. I know, going on.
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Dan
I'm very interested in.
- [13:02]
James
I must be down the rabbit hole of research here to happen to know this, but.
- [13:05]
Dan
Yeah, yeah, you know, for Us, we, you know, at the time when Duo was developed, I think it was about a year or so into developing Duolingo as a learning platform. And you know, for us at the time it was just like we need, we should get a mascot, right? It was kind of like a no brainer thing. Like, sure, let's just do this, create a character. This is definitely before my time, so I'm sure others can maybe speak to it a little bit better than I can. But you know, for us it was okay, great. It was an owl that we created who's you know, wise owl, all knowing, right? Owls are known to be wise. And he's green because her co founder hated the color green. And you know, the CEO and others thought why not make this character green? And you know, Duolingo is the name. So Duo was actually part of his eyes at the old time. I'll have to, I'll have to share an old, an old rendering of what Duo used to look like because it was not good. He definitely got a glow up like for sure. But you know, we developed this character and we started to build out moments within the product that almost again was, he was there to be your motivator, right. His, his goal was to, he won't, won't stop at anything for you to do your lesson for you to get better. And we started to lean into that on different touch points such as newsletters, even push notifications. And then we started to see, well, how crazy could we get push notifications of like, oh, do a little sad he didn't do your last sin today. Or you know, now he's crying and now he's like, oh, like what's happening now? He's like very passive aggressive and almost these human states to, to a mascot or to you know, a character. And we saw that people actually loved this, this human nature because it's almost like, it's almost like a friend, right. Pushing you to, to, to be better. So you know, I think that that really resonated and that took on a life of its own, especially on social media, whether it was YouTube and some of the content that we created earlier on and we really just seen the Internet take off and really become attached to Duo and some of these like mechanisms of wanting, you know, to keep you motivated. Yeah.
- [15:06]
James
This is all things so interesting about it. As a case study, you almost Duo's taking on human personality because I mean the logic of like a distinctive brand asset usually is the role of it is to be remembered. So I, oh, I can point out the McDonald, Ronald McDonald, if it was back in the day, you know what I mean? It becomes associated with your brand and it does that thing of triggering memories and associations, that kind of thing. But, but you've taken that to a whole nother level, which is like, there's a whole world around Jira. There's personality and like, what Jira says on, on, you know, in social media can know, catch fire. There's. There's a massive great, you know, world you created. Was that always the plan or is that kind of like, emerged as you. You've kind of, kind of created him and. Yeah, engage with, you know, the audience?
- [15:48]
Dan
Yeah, you know, I think, I think it's. It's a little bit of both. Like, there's ideas that we had around, around Duo, but really what started to really work was, you know, for, for fans to really just take. Take our brand and have fun with it. So I would say our first moment that this happened was around an April Fool's project. Again, we saw people starting to be like, wow, Duo's just harassing me, right? Like, I'm getting notifications, I'm getting emails, I'm getting all of these, like, Duo crying. Like, this is a toxic relationship at this point. And, you know, we started to see people really fall in love with that. So we said, okay, what if we just created a mascot suit and you know, actually have, like, in, you know, in. In real life and go around, create a video of, like, Duo is now coming into real life to now harass you. Like, he's taking a form in, you know, he's coming after you now and he won't stop at anything. So that went super viral in April Fools. And people started then commenting around all these different topics. There's a phrase that kind of came to life of Spanish or vanish, right? If you don't do your Spanish lesson, you're going to vanish. Duo is going to come after you and kidnap you. And we just started to lean into all of these things that we started to see. So we saw half of our social posts were people were commenting Spanish or banished. Do your lesson now, now, now. And the brand really just started to kind of create its own meme. And it became like a meme pretty much. Like we're like a memeable brand. And when we looked at the marketing, especially when I joined about five years ago, this is just on the heels of some of this, some of this work. And we're just like, wait a minute, we just gotta lean in. This is already what people are talking about this is what people love. Let's lean into that and start to develop content that allows other people to actually tell us what they love about our brand. And the social media landscape is just ripe for that. So we've honestly been able to have a lot of fun with that.
- [17:46]
James
I love the fact you learned from April Fools. Cause most brands will kind of use April Fools as a, a temporary, you know, joke and then they'll go back to what they did before. But you've done, you'd use it as almost an experiment to go, whoa, that works, let's do more of it. So what are you doing this April Fools? Can you. I mean, we're recording. It's just in the run up to it. Yes, yes, anything you can.
- [18:04]
Dan
We, we are. So we're known to really, you know, kind of really commit to the bit, is what we say. Right. For April Fools. I think that, you know, now there's a lot of brands that are, you know, you know, the fake scent that smells like this and it's, you know, it's very straightforward. So our most successful project that we've done, whether it was creating a fake reality TV show, Love Language, from a few years ago to last year that we launched a fake multilingual musical on Ice and partnered with Seatgeek to sell tickets that you can get, you know, there's a landing page and everything. We're really committed to the bit. All the details are there, the track list of everything that we have, who the producer is, the creators of the music. Right. We really go all the way down even to like legal disclaimers. So for us, it's really about finding opportunities and ideas that you can really make it feel like this. Is, Is this real? Is it real? I think it's real. Wait, no, it's not. But it would make so much sense if they did do this. So sorry, this is a very big preamble. So for, for what we're doing this year is we're launching a five year cruise. It's the first multilingual cruise that will take you into the next decade. In 2030. Could ring in 2030 with your new multilingual background. So we're partnering with Carnival Cruise Lines to launch a five year cruise where we'll stop at 130 countries around the world and you're able to, yeah, walk off fluent. If you don't do your lessons, you may not finish the cruise. You can imagine all the chaos that happens over five years. There's college degrees that we're offering up on the cruises. Because it's more than four years. There's, It's. Yeah. Everything imaginable is going to happen on this amazing cruise.
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James
Have you worked out the price? Like, is it.
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Dan
I think so. There's, there's. There's different tiers. I think there's some type of diamond.
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James
How far do you take this idea? Like, we've got the price, got terms, conditions.
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Dan
There's, there's. There's ads for it. It'll be out of home. Billboards. There's. Yes, there's. There was filming on cruise ships involved.
- [19:58]
James
Really? That's amazing.
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Dan
Yeah, yeah, it's a good one.
- [20:01]
James
And, of course, talking to you very recently, you announced his passing.
- [20:06]
Dan
Yes.
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James
Which. Yes, was pretty tragic. Right.
- [20:09]
Dan
I know we didn't receive any flowers from you, which, you know, we're a little.
- [20:12]
James
I know I was kind of like, you know, you know, so devastated.
- [20:17]
Dan
I. Yeah, I can imagine a lot.
- [20:19]
James
Of people felt the same. You know, just what would you do? I mean, you know, it's like, you know.
- [20:23]
Dan
Yeah. You know, we actually really did get flowers, though, from. From people. Yeah. Into the office. They sent flowers. And what was, you know. Yeah, it was. We, we. We had this idea to kill Duo. It was around maybe for about three years or so. And we were thinking at the time, we're like, look, maybe we'll do this one day. It was something that was floating around for. For quite some time. The issue of why we didn't do it earlier was we couldn't affect the product that at that moment in time, it was too many touch points of Duo everywhere. Right. How can you kill off a mascot if he's in the app, you know, on all the different touch points he's in the lessons. Right. That's the experience. It's like, wait, what do you mean you killed him off? He's still here. So what we ended up doing this time around was we had an opportunity to create our update, our app icon, so that in and of itself now is reachable to about 110 million people a month. And what we wanted to do was we said, look, there's no other moment to actually affect product than this moment now. So we said, okay, great, we're updating it. We had Duo with little X's over Duo's eyes in terms of the artwork. And we got into a room and we said, hey, how do we go ahead and kill Duo? Right. It was the social team, a lot of our brand marketing team all coming together. And, you know, it was just okay with some ideas from before Duo gets killed by cybertruck? Or is this a, like, whodunit sort of, like, storyline? Right. And, you know, a ton of different ideas flowing. And I think within three days we had outlined, okay, here's the plan for. For what's going to happen, and we're killing off Duo on Monday. So it was three days notice. I think we were telling our marketing managers across the globe, like, hey, by the way, FYI, if we're going to the weekend, we're killing off Duo, our mascot. Everyone's like, what? I think in Brazil, actually, we're having a Collab launching with McDonald's and literally on TV and she was like, what do you mean? What do you mean you're killing our mascot? We have a collaboration with McDonald's and duos on TV. We cannot kill our mascot. But, yeah, I mean, it's an idea that, you know, that came to life again, one that we had but then really resurfaced and it just. The team kind of all rallied together around it and, you know. Yeah, did insane numbers for us. Right now. We're still calculating all of it.
- [22:34]
James
Yeah, because this was around super bowl time, wasn't it?
- [22:37]
Dan
As well?
- [22:37]
James
Because I remember this. Everyone was talking about it, like, in the run up to super bowl, like, more than they're talking about super bowl to some extent.
- [22:44]
Dan
It was. Yeah, Honestly, it was crazy. We did our first post during that kind of alluded to Drake, actually. We made a comment about this and then the next day, we killed Off Duo. So everyone was making connections to what happened during Drake because we were dissing Drake at the time. We were jumping into cultural conversation. And they're like, yeah, Drake killed Duo. And we're like, oh, okay, great. So people think Drake killed Duo now. Now let's create this whole narrative of, like, who actually killed Duo. Right? And we had. We had a video of like a cyber truck, you know, getting. Getting killing Duo. We then had a ton of creators, you know, fans, creators, all coming in with their own versions of, like, who they thought killed duo. We had Mr. Beast actually do a video of him that he was him in the cyber truck that actually maybe killed him. And everyone started to get on board and it created this, like, real, real world whodunit story. And the best part is none of this was planned.
- [23:42]
James
None of these, none of the influences and stuff.
- [23:44]
Dan
No, it was all organic. All organic. So we created all this conversation. All the brands that jumped in to create all this conversation. Everything was organic. The campaign, I think we spent maybe like 20k on like shipping costs for things.
- [23:58]
James
That's the most insane roi, isn't it, on any campaign ever.
- [24:02]
Dan
Yeah. I think right now, again, we're still, like, crunching numbers now, because I think we're still getting a few things coming in, but I think we estimate at least over $20 million of earned media, like impressions, like, worth three Super bowl spots.
- [24:14]
James
Now, the one person I really want to know how she responded, of course, was Dua Lipa.
- [24:18]
Dan
Yes, Yes, I skipped over that one. She was for one of our biggest creators. I mean, half the reason why we maybe faked her death was to get her attention finally. So we sent her a box with Matcha powder, which looked like it was duo's ashes straight to her. And she didn't acknowledge the ashes. But, yes, we. We sent it to her. Yeah. In a interesting way. Yeah. We apparently found her address. I found this out today, actually found out her address because she was trying to do renovations in her basement for a pool, and she had to apparently, you know, create a document, legal document, the word somewhere. It's somewhere on the Internet. So that's how we found her address and sent her do ashes.
- [25:02]
James
And did you get a response?
- [25:03]
Dan
Not yet. To that? She did tweet at us, though. Yeah. Yeah. When we first announced sending her love and condolences.
- [25:10]
James
Oh, brilliant. That's amazing. I mean, I mean, talking of partnerships as well, one of the things I love about what you do is how you partner with other. You know, like, you talk about Game of Thrones earlier, weren't you? So who have you partnered with? And what role does that play in kind of extending the brand to new audiences?
- [25:23]
Dan
Yeah. You know, for us, the way that we look at brand partnerships has been really focusing on finding the core intersection of a fandom or of what people are really passionate about, and then the intersection of where we come in, of how can we help them get the most out of what they love. And whether that was partnering with Game of Thrones for House of Dragon around teaching high Valyrian inside our app, which is, again, a great way for people to connect to their ip. Or most recently, what we did for Squid Game with Netflix, we launched in the first season that launched, actually, we saw 40% increase of people learning Korean when Squid Game launch. And like, whoa, there's something really here. People really love this content. They're really immersed in, in, in, in this, in this. And they wanted, you know, they wanted a better way to actually connect. So for season two, we were talking with Netflix for. For quite some time around, wanting to Collaborate. We were reaching back out to each other and we said, hey, I think we're ideating together. And we said, you know, all right, so what if Duo joins the pink guard? And now he's trying to get everyone to do their lessons now, you know, it's learn Crane or else, right? This, this, the storyline and it just, everyone was like, yep, Duo is just so memeable, iconic in a pinkard suit. Like this is just visually like Internet worthy. And for us it was a bit of a no brainer. So we find partnerships that again allow people to connect with the fandom that they love and in a way kind of pull a bit of their audience and you know, allow them to also leverage us for our social media presence that we have and building affinity for both brands. So it's in a way, it's a value exchange, so to speak. And we really try and tap after that audience and again to the point earlier around going after fandoms and really kind of creating content that they want to share. That is really a bit of the reason why we do a lot of our brand partnerships.
- [27:14]
James
I'm guessing that your leverage now compared to when you started must be incredibly different because everyone must want a bit of the JIRO platform now.
- [27:23]
Dan
I mean our reach now, I mean when we first started with our, our Game of Thrones was I think we maybe had a few hundred thousand followers on social. We have 16 million on, on just TikTok. And if you're including our global channels, you know, I think we're pulling in about half a billion impressions a month like organically, which is quite substantial I think when it comes to most global brands. So our reach now is pretty massive. You know, our followers and our fans really are global as well, but they span the spectrum of still like skewing younger, more gen Z. And a lot of brands are looking to partner with, with us because you know, they really want to reach an audience that you know, that has very similar interests in mind.
- [28:04]
James
Yeah, this is what I think is worried about because if you did a list and said like here's 16 and a half million followers on TikTok name which celebrity it is. I mean people, you'd be picking a list celebrities, wouldn't you? Like that? But yeah, you've got your brand mascot. Yeah, it literally in a list territory.
- [28:19]
Dan
Yeah, I mean Duo is Duo. What I say right now is like in Duo's creator kind of like moment right now, like Duo's creator era. Right. You know, I think we're starting to think about, okay, what would a world look like as Duo as a creator or as a large sort of like celebrity? And, you know, and we've seen this come to life over the last several years of Duo walking the pink carpet for Barbie or again showing up to the premiere for Squid game. Right. It's, you know, duos showing up on a lot more prominent places and, you know, we don't know where it can go. But maybe there's, you know, other red carpets in the future or something, some other events or anything that honestly, a crater could launch. You know, I'd love to.
- [28:55]
James
I'd love to know what geo's worth. As if you put a value on. It'd be crazy, wouldn't it, in terms of just the brand value of one mascot? Must be insane.
- [29:04]
Dan
That's actually a good thing.
- [29:05]
James
We should probably look into, get the CFO to work it out. I mean, you created something of huge value. And what would be lovely go back to like the early days of TikTok. So, like, there aren't many brands that have done what you've done, right? Because, you know, most brands kind of treat their, you know, social media as almost the corporate comms department, you know, like official. The official response from the brand is this and, you know, whatever. What's been the kind of lessons in how you've built up that kind of social media following? Because 16 million is. Is pretty a rare achievement for sure.
- [29:36]
Dan
You know, I think it goes back to having the right people with the right experience, with the right autonomy and trust. And I think that. I think it was about our first foray actually into TikTok. Most people may not know this, but we actually launched a partnership with TikTok around education on their platform and they were showcasing, they wanted to find more collaborators around, you know, learning. And I think we created, we partnered with several creators on the platform around creating content. This is how you say this and this phrase and this, you know, in, in Italian. This is how you say this in Spanish. And the content did okay. It was like 50, 60, 70K. I mean, numbers. Most people would be very excited for. I think for us it was like, okay, like that's fine. And we actually didn't do anything with that. Afterwards we stopped putting focus on TikTok and about. I think it was about a few months later, it was actually ipo. We were about to ipo and we had an opportunity of what's, you know, Duo's been known to send reminders to everyone and including other mascots. So we're like, what if we Just send, do it to Times Square at the time and got other mascots to do their lessons. So it was just Duo showing up with a push notification, going up to other mascots. And at the time this was still during COVID so it was still very quiet. It wasn't really that busy. And what's amazing was we saw that content actually hit like a million something viewers or views on, on TikTok and we're like, there's something here, like having our mascot with content and then we still didn't know exactly what to do with it. And Zaria, our social media manager, who's very well known now for all of her great success that she's done with, with, with Duo and really became Duo's wrangler and had a whole series of just, you know, ideas that we can do to be part of culture. And it was just hurting the mascot suit, creating content that was timely, relevant in a way that honestly wasn't about language learning. It was just fun and fun content that was relevant for trending conversation. And that really just took off. And honestly, we haven't really stopped since. I think she's done a fantastic job bringing in other members of the team into the fold to kind of build out our social presence. But it's something that honestly, we've seen huge success and now, but it's been leaning into trending culture, leaning into places where, you know, you wouldn't expect another brand to be and only in a way that we're set up to move really fast, to be able to, to, to achieve. So, yeah, but yeah, the autonomy is key. Giving someone the ability to just own it and go forth and make mistakes if there are mistakes, find where the lines are and kind of go from there.
- [32:10]
James
Because one of the key bits of your success being the fact this is all in house, isn't it? So you run your own, you run your own team. So how important has the in house bit been in terms of like, well, for example, how do you get things signed off? How long does the process take to come up with these ideas?
- [32:24]
Dan
Yeah, I mean, honestly, when it comes to day to day content, the process is very fast. It's literally the social team coming up with ideas and they're filming it, creating it, shooting it like that day, or maybe even the day after and they're putting it out. In most cases, it doesn't go up the chain, it's just them creating and posting it. If there's something that they feel could be a little spicy, you know, I may go into a Slack message with a few stakeholders to say, what are your thoughts on this? Does it follow the RPG 13, sort of like rule of content and sometimes legal, you know, we, you know, get some opinions from them, you know, in the off chance. But. But yeah, it's. It's pretty quick, pretty nimble. I think that what we've seen, what I've seen at least work well within social media setups, is reducing the amount of time and people that it takes from concept to post. That's something that Kat, our head of social and brand now, she. She speaks to.
- [33:19]
James
And what does it mean in terms of, like, talent you hired? I mean, do you. Do you have a specific brief in mind for the kind of people you bring in? Or is there like a bar you have in terms they must have done this or that or what are you looking for to get the kind of talent that achieves this?
- [33:32]
Dan
Yeah, you know, I think for us, diversity is very important. I would say if you look at our brand over the course of several years, it's maybe felt a little sassy and that's because maybe we've had, you know, creators and creatives on the team who kind of maybe leaned into that tone a little more. So really the brand has been a reflection of our team.
- [33:51]
James
Yeah.
- [33:51]
Dan
So my fandom of being really into Game of Thrones, we created a sword, we created content around that. Right. There's fandoms that we. We've all had, like duo going to a Taylor Swift concert. We have a lot of swifties on our team. Right. So it's even like anime. There's a lot of anime fans that we have. So what we really do in the way that we hire talent is we look for people who can add interest and add areas of experience that we don't have as a team. But, you know, obviously with the core, you know, the core areas that you need to be successful in. Right. And doing your creative job of, you know, being able to riff, ideate quickly, you know, you know, not being precious about ideas and being somewhat witty and spicy. I would say a bit unhinged is something that, you know, I think is always good.
- [34:36]
James
A bit unhinged. That's a great brief maybe to wrap up. If you look back, would there be like, one thing, if you could pick like one thing that's made the difference, would that be.
- [34:46]
Dan
I would say we've given our teams autonomy to, like, do the work and what they feel is relevant and exciting to them. But I also would say that we've given the opportunities for others our fans to take our brand and sort of build it. And I think that's very unique for the way that we do our brand marketing and the way that we also engage our fans, which is what I always call our learners, because for, you know, when you look at the amount of time that our fan or someone else would devote to learning with us, they're spending months and months with us. And you want to create an engaging experience, whether that's on platform or off the platform. And any way that we show up, you know, we show up as almost a reminder for them to keep learning with us. So if we're showing up in an entertaining way that's fun, we know we'll get them to continue to learn with us and keep going, which will only make their goals more reachable and, you know, be a win for. For everyone.
- [35:42]
James
You said a phrase which I love, which is, we take comments from our fans as our next brief.
- [35:47]
Dan
Yes.
- [35:47]
James
Which I thought was a really cool way of putting it, you know, that you're listening and engaging so much that a comment from a fan might end up becoming the next brief you work on.
- [35:54]
Dan
I would honestly. Most of our biggest brand moments of brand lore building have actually all stemmed from social. Whether that's do. Do us crush on Dua Lipa, whether that's Spanish, or vanish. A phrase that we've seen which now has like three and a half million streams on Spotify to. Yeah. To really, you know, buff duo of an illustration that someone created of our character that's now an inflatable mascot suit and a plushie. It's. It's. Yeah, we really let our fans sort of lean in or, sorry, share what they want, and then we lean in.
- [36:25]
James
Amazing, James. Thank you. It's a wild ride you've been on, and it's such a cool brand and a lot of people listening are going to get a lot of inspiration from this. So thank you so much.
- [36:33]
Dan
Yeah.
- [36:33]
James
Good to have you.
- [36:34]
Dan
Yeah.
- [36:34]
James
So that was part one of this episode, talking to James at Duolingo about how they built such an amazing brand through being entertainment led. Now, in the second part, we're going to be talking to Dan from Small World, who wrote the report called Entertain or Die, which uncovers how these brands grew, some of the tactics they're using, and what you can do to be more entertaining. Here it is. Dan, welcome to part two of this episode.
- [36:55]
Jon Evans
Lovely to meet you, Jon.
- [36:56]
James
Well, we've just done, obviously, a panel session at south by Southwest. We're here in Austin. We're interviewing James And Dan from Liquid Death as well. Talk about entertainment. What is it about entertainment that motivated you to put on this panel? And you've also created a report. Yeah, Entertain or Die.
- [37:15]
Jon Evans
Called aptly named Entertain or Die. Yeah, I mean I'll get the, I guess short plug out the way, I suppose. I'm Dan. I'm the strategy founder and strategy partner of creative company called Small World. Our goal is to build Entertainment first brands. We work with the likes of Duolingo to do that. The way that we build Entertainment first brands, we believe in this kind of media fragmented landscape that we live in today is by building creative teams. Not out of advertisers and marketers necessarily, but out of entertainers. So people who are creating the most entertaining content that you might see on TikTok and YouTube today, comedians, showrunners, scriptwriters, I mean Dan from Liquid Death talked a lot about the left and right brain side of their marketing team today and how they have, you know, their traditional marketing display disciplines. But more importantly, writers from the Onion, people who are animated on Adult Swim, those kind of weirdos, effectively unstandard talent we call them from other walks of life that make their content so entertaining and feel like it's not advertising itself. So yeah, that's what we kind of do as a business. So it's sort of what we are obsessed about. Dan mentioned it really brilliantly. When you go into the boardroom, the CFOs and CEOs of this world obviously need to see the raw bottom line, the numbers effectively behind if this stuff works. And he made a really good point that actually you'd be mad not to lean into Entertainment first marketing because it actually makes everything more cost effective, more efficient, quicker. He used the example of the super bowl advert that Liquid Theft just did, which was I think he said the third most effective ad at the super bowl, which is crazy considering they only spent 350 grand on the ad itself. So there is real bottom line benefit and ROI to following an entertainment first strategy. So it is effectively a no brainer. So that's what kind of motivated the research and with our brilliant data partner Tracksuit, that's the kind of report that we put together which I'm sure we'll dive into in more detail.
- [39:00]
James
Yeah, so what you basically went about doing was was identifying the most entertaining brands on the planet. Right. And then, and then creating a ranking of those and then presumably you able to connect how entertaining they were to their business results.
- [39:12]
Jon Evans
Yeah, so we, we actually, actually the hundred brands are in there, aren't necessarily the most entertaining brands. What we did, we got a kind of panel of experts or brand strategists and kind of judges from around the world and just said, look, we want to collate the very best brands in the world. We didn't say most entertaining at that point. And then we said, okay, let's take some of those brands and reorder them based purely on entertainment value without revealing too many surprises.
- [39:35]
James
Right, what kind of brands were coming at the top of your entertainment list?
- [39:39]
Jon Evans
Yes, I mean the really surprising and brilliant thing was that it was a total mix. I think the important thing to note first of all is Entertainment does pay 29 out of the 30 brands, 29 of the top 30 brands had revenue growth in the last year and more kind of impressively two thirds of those brands had double digit revenue growth, which is insane. And then, yeah, as we said, it was a real mix of brands. There were kind of more traditional entertainment players like TikTok who topped the index. Kind of no surprise there, TikTok kind of entertainment juggernaut. But then there were also brands like Duolingo, Liquid Death who are in traditionally boring categories. Of course we see them as these real entertainers, but if you break down where their sort of product comes from, it isn't inherently entertaining as a product as opposed to, to, you know, could say a category like fast food or alcohol or people at the NBA there in the, in the top 30. Those inherently have entertainment value to them. So yeah, we can probably dig into a little bit more detail, but I actually think one of the greatest opportunities is for traditionally boring categories or brands in boring categories to flex their creative muscles and flex their entertainment.
- [40:43]
James
I totally agree. I think there's a bit of logic because often I see, I mean, if I take the System1 data, often the most boring categories have the most interesting creative work. I mean the one that always makes me smile is bread in the uk, right? The bread category. I mean like you don't get more staple every day than bread and yet you've got like, you know, you've got Warburtons that do some of the most entertaining, you know, advertising out there. Tea, right. Tea is like so quintessentially British and yet Yorkshire tea again do the most entertaining category. And you mentioned to that like Liquid Death makes water Duolingo, you know, trains you on speaking languages. I mean they're fundamentally quite functional, you know, low, low cost to entry kind of categories. And yeah, they've done some of the most, you know, amazing entertaining work.
- [41:27]
Jon Evans
Yeah, honestly it's phenomenal. It's, it's. It's the real opportunity. It's actually a going back to kind of the revenue growth of it all. But there's actually a really interesting anecdote that Dan from Liquid Death sort of mentioned where he said he likes to imagine their marketing funnel as covered by a layer of ice, a kind of middling to thick sort of layer of ice. It's hard sometimes to get people to crack through that ice. That's why it's kind of slightly solid. But once someone cracks through that ice, they fall straight through to the bottom of the funnel. And it's kind of the way that I like to think about it is that entertainment is almost the ultimate loyalty program. You know, you think about the services that you continue to pay for and that you stay loyal to. Today, it's your Netflix subscription, it's your Amazon prime subscription, it's your Spotify. It's these things that constantly give you value, entertainment value on an increasing basis. So an interesting hack as a brand is to start thinking about, okay, well, if I offer entertainment today, maybe that becomes my ultimate loyalty scheme. In the same way that Netflix.
- [42:18]
James
It's funny, we have to convince people this isn't it, because, like, you just think, if I'm watching comedy, I want it to be funny. If I'm watching a, you know, a movie, I want it to be dramatic from reading a book, I want it to be surprising, you know, and yet we, you know, that's the kind of stuff we, you know, want to see. And yet when it comes to brands, somehow we forget all that and we end up producing something really boring and an average.
- [42:38]
Jon Evans
Yeah. I mean, there's again, another great kind of quote is this idea of you can't be half famous. I think that's. That is one of the main things that we wanted to get to the crux of in this research is this, this. There's this entertainment gap that exists. If I give any brand leader in the world the choice, do you want to entertain or do you Want to die? 100% of the people, if they're sane and in their right mind, will say, I would like to be entertaining rather than dying. But there is this entertainment gap where they don't quite know how to commit to the bit to lean in and actually sort of embrace entertainment first marketing. And that's both a theory and a practice thing that's, you know, the, the principles that you need to follow and the spirit that they need to have as a business, but then also the Practice. How do you need to structure your team? How do, how do you need to be working process wise? How quick do you need to be turning ideas out to make sure that you're winning maximum minutes on the Internet every single day? That's really what we want to get to the crux of, as well as showing people that this does actually work for the brands it actually works for is decoding amongst those 30, what are the key themes and the theory and the practice of how they do this on a daily basis? So you almost have a bit of a guidebook for.
- [43:44]
James
You're absolutely right about the bar, because I remember chatting to Mike Cesario last year and he was saying, we've set the bar too low. So you see, he often said when someone comes to interview at Liquid Death, do you think you can make a TV ad? Most of them say yes. And he goes, well, can you make a Netflix comedy? Most of them say no. You know, he's like, we've set the bar. Because, you know, as he would say, your competition is not other advertising, your competition is other forms of entertainment. And as soon as you get that in your head, you think, okay, the bar is way higher than I thought it was. So I'd love to know, like you've done, done the research, you looked at all these entertaining brands that collectively are growing out, forming the market. What are the key things that those brands are doing that make them entertaining.
- [44:22]
Jon Evans
In terms of like broad attributes, humor, social content, distinctive character, attention grabbing, power, memory and brand love. So again, none of this flies in the face of traditional brand science. A lot of the things that I just, just mentioned there will probably ring true with the Mark Ritzens and the Byron Sharp to this world. This is just about a modern playbook for the modern world. And when we looked at those attributes, the four that really drove the kind of most engagement or drove the most entertainment factor, Humor, social. So how engaging their social content was, distinctiveness, or what we call character, which again in the duolingo of all, we can definitely go back to and talk a lot about and then attention, what we call attention. But I guess you call shock factor. And that goes to what Mike was saying, saying there this idea of entertainment being synonymous with edge and being, being edgy, or if you look at all of the top content that we look at today across top lists of podcasts, across Netflix's top rankings, the video games that we play, you know, they really do lean into edge, which is, you know, violence, profanity, sex, all of the things that are perhaps A little bit taboo and a bit on the edge. So, yeah, those are the sort of four attributes that we sort of looked at and within brands. And then from understanding that, we then looked at kind of specific examples of work and tried to build sort of six themes that. That we looked at. And we don't need to go into all of them in detail today, but maybe we can run through three of them, I suppose. The first one that I think is really great to chat about this idea of brand law and going from brand guidelines to a brand universe, a brand world, brand law. We were talking before the podcast about a really good example of that. Duo is, for all intents and purposes, a brand mascot. A Green Hour brand mascot. There are plenty of other brand mascots that exist out there today, but they are stuck in the world of brand guidelines. So Tony the Tiger, for instance, is a really good example. Right. He is relegated to the front cover of the Frosty's cardboard box and has no other story really put behind him. Yes, it might be in a few adverts and you know his catchphrase, it's great. And that's about it. Right? Duo has inherently more character within the mascot itself. There is lore, there are stories, there's a relationship with Dua Lipa, there's his untimely death. There is all of these fan comments that are then built into the character itself and the story that is told behind Duolingo. So inherently, the brands that are most entertaining, like Liquid Death, like Duolingo, are those brands that think of themselves as a character in a TV show or the TV show themselves, like Liquid Death, as opposed to that. Instead, think, okay, we are a world, a universe. If we brought Martha Stewart into the world of Liquid Death, what would she do? What would. What would she be doing here in this weird universe? Oh, she would make candles out of severed hands. And then you can start to see how the creative process actually becomes really truncated a lot easier. You have this kind of comedy writer's room style analogy because you're treating the brand not as kind of a set of rigid, strict guidelines, but as sort of a moving, living, breathing character universe world. So, yeah, that's the first theme that I think is the most important part for the theory of this all. That's what you need to change about how you're thinking about your brand. I think the next part that's really interesting to talk about is probably in housing Hollywood and unstandard talent. I mean, again, James touched on it already in terms of how Duo operates. And you know, We've helped with when Jewa kind of landed into the uk, working alongside mother to hire and build a team of some of the creatives that duo typically like to work with in house within the States and yeah, effectively in housing Hollywood and unsandard talent is look under the hood of how some of these entertainment brands are built. You know, we looked at liquid theft, duolingo, but others that stretched out there and some of the brands that we work with as well. And I think one of the things that tied them all together was they were incredibly quick with their output and they had this process that lent into risk and had minimal layers of sign off and allowed people to go from idea on a page on a slide to execution out in the real world in a matter of 24 to 72 hours in this kind of rough and ready, rough and ready approach. You know, it was all about winning the Internet every single day. And then the talent that was making this, this content were invariably not. You know, there is, there's a good grounding of marketing science, brand people, people like Dan Murphy, for instance, who, you know, know the sort of logical side of marketing, if you will. Then when it comes to the creative side, the people that they want to, to give the keys to the castle, so to speak, the people they want to give access to are people who have an unstandard approach to creativity. So they might be content creators, they might be comedian scriptwriters, they might be people who, yeah, have worked in, in the world of animation. They're generally people who don't think about marketing necessarily, but they do think about entertainment. And then there's probably one more that we can touch on which I think is this idea of brands leaning into being media moguls. And it sort of ties to the other two things we spoke about. But these brands are inherently building their own media universes. They're acting like content creators in their own respect. And whether they're going all in on a channel like TikTok or whether they're leaning into like YouTube for instance, and building a platform there, or we're seeing lots of brands that we work with, for instance, where we're helping them build up. I don't know if you've ever seen this craze, but in China there is this basically a 60 second, there's been a boom in 60 second TV shows. So I think there's about 8,000 of these being made every single day. And it is drama cut up into increasingly small sections effectively that you can kind of watch on TikTok. And people are building these whole media empires off of 60 second TV. And we worked with a brand called Rescue Remedy to kind of lean into, into that trend and create this thing called rescuerama, which is basically their, their own attempt at creating sort of a media empire for themselves, which is borrowing formats that we know and love from TV and kind of rehashing them for social and reimagining them for social, maybe to wrap up.
- [49:58]
James
What would your advice be to a brand wanting to become more? And yes, having made the case for entertainment, you've identified the themes, what would you be advising your clients to do to become more entertainment led in their marketing?
- [50:11]
Jon Evans
First and foremost, we need to interrogate your brand and understand what your brand law is versus your brand guidelines. How can we take what you've got in brand guidelines and the codes and the distinctive assets that make your brand you and breathe life into them for the modern day, for the Internet age. Next, I would say think niche, not mainstream. Grace Kite actually has a really interesting piece in this. I know Tom Roach talks about it quite a lot, but they talk in media, at least in media strategy, about this idea of lots of littles. Right now. That's, that's the way that kind of media is going. If you can't buy a water cooler moment, of which there aren't any anyway, then you need to think of a strategy which allows you to win the Internet every single day. Or you need to think of a strategy that allows you to pop up on lots of different media channels across a period of time, rather than having one big massive media moment. And the way that we think that you do that from an entertainment first approach is thinking about the niche versus the mainstream. So what are a patchwork of fandoms, audiences, creators, people that you can kind of work with to effectively act like your media channel and earn you the reach that you would have not been able to buy effectively. So I think that's a really interesting kind of bit of theory to look at and then the practice of it all. Yeah, I think it's as we spoke about kind of this idea of industry, understand the talent. Whether you work with a creative company like ours, which I'd be more than happy to work with anyone who wants to embrace this strategy or whether you're trying to build that in house, I think it's really important to do an audit effectively of the talent that you have in your business. And I'm by no means saying that you need to hire a bunch of kind of content creators or hire a bunch of comedy scriptwriters and replace your whole marketing team with that. But you do need to kind of have a frank look at the talent that is actually making making your content and analyze whether one if they are the right people, they're set up for the right success. But if they're not the right people, how you can bring in more of the right people to support them, Those who know how to not only ideate, but actually create and create a speed and lean into humor and, you know, bottom line, entertain people.
- [52:19]
James
Yeah. Brilliant. Dan. Thank you, mate. It's been, it's been a really good, fun ride on this as well. And thank you for setting up the south by Southwest Entertain or Die panel, which was amazing. Like properly sold out. And well done for doing the report as well.
- [52:31]
Jon Evans
No, thank you very much.
- [52:32]
James
It's quality work, but thank you, mate.
- [52:34]
Jon Evans
No worries. Thank you very much.
- [52:36]
James
Thank you very much for listening or watching Uncensored cmo. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcast. If you're watching, hit subscribe there as well. I'd also love to get a review. Reviews make a big difference on other people discovering the show. So please do leave a review wherever you get your podcast. If you want to contact me, you can do I'm over on XcensorCMO or on LinkedIn where I'm under my own name, John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.