It was not an easy task for Looney Tunes to transform its decades of popularity among consumers both young and old into a fresh and engaging social strategy—one that would appeal to digitally native Gen Zers and millennials. 

In 2020, Looney Tunes’ parent company, now known as Warner Bros. Discovery, set out to revitalize the cartoon’s bland and disjointed online presence and make it more relevant to social media audiences. The team, led in part by Ashley Woodall, the company’s VP of franchise development, animation, partnered with social media agency Movement Strategy to put a comedic, personalized spin on Looney Tunes’ social channels. After initially kicking off these efforts with the introduction of the “Acme intern,” a fictional character who “lived amongst the Looney Tunes and was an intern running the social accounts,” Woodall and the team continued to combine the cartoon’s beloved characters with a humorous and social-savvy brand voice, she said.

With this strategy, Looney Tunes’ TikTok account has soared to just shy of two million followers since its 2022 launch. The animated series has also seen increased engagement and boosts in followers across Instagram, YouTube and other social platforms in the past three years, too, she said. 

“We don't have a paid budget behind our TikTok account, so it's all been organic, explosive growth,” Woodall told Ad Age. “For us, it's really been about leaning into the algorithm and using that to our advantage. Our characters are so dynamic. They are perfect for the platform. And the stories that we tell with them are perfect for the platform.”

Woodall has played a central role in developing the series’ impish, tongue-in-cheek social media presence. Although she and her team oversee the social strategy for the entire Warner Bros. Discovery’s animation portfolio, their primary focus is shaping how consumers engage with and connect to Looney Tunes across social media.

Woodwall spoke in-depth with Ad Age about her team's social media strategies. 

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. 

How do you and your team create content? Is it planned out far ahead of time or typically more reactionary?

I would say that about 75% of our content is planned and about 25% is reactive. So, when we're building out our social calendar, we really want to take into account what's happening with our franchises. Is there a new launch or a new series coming out? Is there a key product collaboration that we want to promote? And we're also taking into account everything that we know that's happening in pop culture, and then planning accordingly. We call this our “planned reactive,” and it’s essentially us planning for an event and anticipating that there’s going to be a lot of social media conversation around it. 

If and when a [pop culture moment] takes off, then we can really evaluate how we want to participate in that conversation while building off all these existing ideas. So, we're typically working about a month or so in advance with those bigger beats that we knew were going to happen, and then leaving space for whatever the internet might serve up on a given day, because we know that there's always going to be something that we're going to want to react to and play off.

It's really impossible to predict what's going to resonate, so we work really closely with our agency, Movement [Strategy], to monitor trends. They are extremely tapped into the social, cultural zeitgeist, so with their help, we're really picking out those moments that we feel confident are going to pop across social media.

I think the other thing that really is our sort of guide posts is our fans themselves. We’re constantly working with Movement to analyze our post engagement and their performance, and we've really developed this strong sense of what drives our fans’ excitement and the types of trends they’re going to appreciate. That has given us a really good sense of what we should be leaning into and what we should be staying away from.

How do you decide where to engage and what trends to lean into?

When it comes to these types of pop culture moments, we've really found that because our characters are so relatable, it's really easy to make a Looney Tunes connection to most things. And it just means that we need to be selective about what we lean into, because we could go in any direction with them, essentially.

In general, we tend to gravitate toward topics that are inherently more comedic and lighthearted, and really aim to steer clear of serious or negative subject matters. We aim to push boundaries, but we want to be clever and witty versus subversive or snarky. For example, I think we would’ve been hard-pressed to escape the ‘Barbie pink’ trend that just happened over the past several weeks. And obviously, that being a huge priority for us at Warner Bros. Discovery, we knew that it was going to be big. So, we had posts ready to go that leaned into some of our Looney Tunes characters and referenced Barbie and the film. And as soon as the moment was right, we were able to hit post and lean into that bigger collective, cultural moment that was happening.

[Read more about Barbie marketing here]

The same thing happened with “Succession.” We knew that the finale was going to be a really big moment, and our “Duckcession” post ended up being a huge favorite. You wouldn’t think “Succession” and Looney Tunes would go together, but Looney Tunes got its start in that kind of cultural zeitgeist back when it was first created—with these characters kind of offering social commentary. And so, we find that we’re able to use these characters to really play off of a wide spectrum of topics.

What’s the biggest risk you’ve taken on social media?  

One risk that we’ve taken is in the way that we have interacted with some of these newer brands, like a “Succession” or a “Barbie.” There may be people that feel like Looney Tunes should just sort of stay in its own lane as an “animation brand,” but I think by expanding ourselves and going after those pop culture moments, while there’s a risk that we might upset some of the more ‘true animation fans,’ the reward of reaching a whole other audience that sees a lot of humor and comedic value in the pairing of two really different brands is worth it. 

Another risk I think we took was giving the Looney Tunes social accounts a voice. This was a few years ago, and we were really trying to figure out “how do we break through the clutter and the noise?” So, we worked with Movement to develop this idea of the “Acme intern.” It was really kind of groundbreaking and exciting at the time because it gave the account a way to participate in these conversations that we normally wouldn't be expected to participate in. I would say that it was definitely a risk to do that, but it definitely paid off and I'm really happy that we went in that direction.

What’s the biggest way that working in social media has shifted in the last few years?

TikTok’s emergence as this dominant social platform really has been a huge change, and just the push to video overall, has been one of the one of the leading areas that we've noticed a difference in. And with TikTok, we’ve sort of gone from this place of a creator-led model to this algorithm-based model where it’s almost about trying to figure out what the algorithm is going to pick up on and to play to those strengths. There are some of our posts that hit huge numbers just because they happened to hit the algorithm in the right way, and they took off in a way that we couldn’t have expected. Sometimes you hit that ‘lightning in a bottle’ moment and a post takes on a life of its own. Everyone wants to go viral, but it’s not something you can just plan to do. You just sort of have to take all of the inputs and sort of see what historically has worked with the algorithm and then and go for it.

How does your team find creators to work with, and what role do they play in your social strategy?

I mean, I think we're very lucky that Looney Tunes is such a beloved franchise, so we actually see a lot of creators and celebrities talk about our characters organically. And we’ve selectively partnered with some influencers on these bigger franchise moments—for Pride Month last year, for example, we partnered with [drag queen] Aquaria. 

But in general, we almost look at our own characters as our influencers. These characters, like Bugs [Bunny] and Daffy [Duck], are household names, in a sense, and we really have a lot of fun leveraging them in the same way that other brands might leverage a more traditional influencer.