Movement Strategy Packs Its Bags for Looney Tunes’ 'ACME Road Trip'

The Looney Tunes are on the move - and possibly coming to a city near you. Needing to travel from California to NYC for the reopening of the long shuttered Warner Bros. (WB) New York office, ACME’s irreverent intern is packing his bags and bringing Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Sylvester, Tweety and many other iconic characters along for the ride. And, of course, they’ll be documenting their adventures on social media for the 'ACME Road Trip' - the latest Warner Bros. campaign from social media agency Movement Strategy. 

'ACME Road Trip' is the continuation of the agency’s enormously popular 2020 'ACME Intern' effort - a previous storyline created by Movement Strategy that put an intern in control of the Looney Tunes social accounts. Playing out like an episode of Looney Tunes on social in real-time, the campaign was immensely successful - earning new fans and proving the power of episodic storytelling on social media.

This latest story takes The Intern to New York from Burbank, California, the unmistakable home of WB, with Movement Strategy continuing to manage the social accounts and producing countless pieces of content as well. Like any road trip, The Intern and his animated friends will stop by well-known locations, causing havoc along the way. “After over a year of working from home and long walks along Venice Beach for The Intern, we needed a new setting to refresh the content and evolve the storytelling,” says Movement Strategy CEO Jason Mitchell. “We just kept thinking ‘how cool would it be to see Bugs on the NYC subway?’ But we needed to get him there, which led to the ACME Road Trip.  It’s already been a big year for Looney Tunes and we saw this as a great way to create some dynamic, fun content while continuing to raise the bar on episodic storytelling  and character building narratives on social media channels.“

While the characters are cartoons, the campaign is anchored by a real 14-day road trip which necessitated detailed production planning involving a team on the road and another for post-production - no easy feat during a pandemic. Movement Strategy also collaborated with WB partner World Of Mayhem to leverage their existing Looney Tunes materials to create brand new social content. 

“In many cases, the production timeline was very short which meant our production and post-production process had to be seamless,” explains Mitchell.  “It was an enormously collaborative effort between the account and project management, our data insights and strategy teams which work closely together to constantly optimize, and our creatives who were able to tell a story as entertaining as the Looney Tunes themselves.”

Mitchell continues, “These are some of the most beloved characters in the world and their fans want to see more of them in real life settings, interacting with the real world. It was a seriously complex undertaking to make that happen -- one that was only possible because of the amazing trust we’ve built with WB over the years and their willingness to try something new. Scripting this story and seeing it evolve and connect with fans has been very rewarding and we’re working hard to deliver more fun stories that we can be proud of.”