About the Project

Art Direction | Copywriting | Strategy

Our challenge was to get Duolingo into the hands of 16-22 year olds, opening their minds to new forms of language learning. This audience already spends an abundance of time scrolling through wastelands of social media and content. How do we get these young adults to pay attention to language learning? It came down to a single insight: kids want to curse, and they want to know how to do it behind the backs of their parents, teachers, and peers. So, what if Duolingo helped kids secretly curse? We created Duolingo: Uncensored—a curse word module built into the app. We kicked off this module with a campaign of ads that only Duolingo users or native speakers would understand, with an activation to download the app and learn the explicit phrases. We also created a TikTok challenge to get kids to put their learning to practice.

This campaign was submitted to The 2021 Denver One Club Awards and was selected as a Bronze medal winner in the Student-Campaign category.