the ok soda manifesto: coca-cola's attempt at marketing to gen x

I'd have polled this elsewhere but alt.fan.ok-soda just isn't what it used to be

Credit to my friend who quipped at the time that Pepsi would introduce its own Gen-X cola, Epsi Pe.

they went a different direction with crystal pepsi iirc

Reading these, it feels like the stuff that Gen X thought was ironic, millennials take as guiding principles. Like how many of these could go unchanged from "ironic slogans from a multibillion dollar company" to "sincere slogans for a millionaire Instagram influencer"

"What's the point of OK? Well, what's the point of anything?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNtTEibFvlQ

I feel that in crafting a faux ironic marketing strategy, wieden + kennedy might have hit upon too much pay dirt and just written actual credos on the cans

the Dan Clowes can design was kinda awesome tbh

oh yeah, I never had an OK soda but the entire thing stuck in my head for all these years

the cans are pretty cool and the merchandise could slot right into 2019

actually, this thumbnail is small enough you could mistake the logo for shepard fairey obey merch, although he didn't start merchandising until after the OK soda era

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/OK_Soda_Prize_Can.jpg

I remember this so well. The cans were great.

I remember my brother managing to snag some cans but I don't think I ever actually drank one? no memory of what it tasted like.

unlike, say, Ziema.

er ZIMA

biggest mistake was not naming it OK Pop

Zomething Different

The design was pretty rad

With so much thought given to OK's slogans and packaging, what about the reddish-brown beverage itself? Coke says the flavor evolved from the fact that teens consume a variety of drinks that range from colas to lemon-lime. The company therefore concocted a new soda that would blend all these tastes into a single drink.

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,164486,00.html

iirc, a reasonable facsimile of ok soda could be constructed with a 50/50 mix of coke and orange soda plus a splash of dr. pepper.

Maybe that's how Coke have recently come up with the worst drink I've ever tasted, Peach Diet Coke.

thanks cad, going to try that combo when I go to somewhere with one of those coke freestyle machines

"OK Soda reveals the surprising truth about people and situations."

I swear I've seen that one repurposed without knowing the source...or is this itself a riff on something else? or maybe just Whiney otm, this sounds like the tag line to some third-tier BuzzFeed/Mic/etc viral publisher

OK Soda says, "Don't be fooled into thinking there has to be a reason for everything

Very wise

OK Soda says, "Don't be fooled into thinking there has to be a reason for everything

Very wise

"OK Soda does not subscribe to any religion, or endorse any political party, or do anything other than feel OK."

ok soda as a paragon of ambivalence in the face of the system is a little too on the nose

that enthusiasm for commas seems off brand though

The core, the heart soda

i do like the art direction for this soda i have just found out about from reading this thread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biNPg50jN3g&

https://thumbs.worthpoint.com/zoom/images1/1/0211/09/charles-burns-ok-soda-promotional_1_670850907151ee79a97f1e2469b161b4.jpg

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ba/f9/fc/baf9fcf5679afb8e82d6930982d4d380.jpg

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a1/08/7c/a1087c9a29115b6f9fb39449af2b7e20.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vT7Gv-oOERs/U30dZXy6kYI/AAAAAAAAJhw/Gv4CdTtiHGU/s1600/enhanced-buzz-12460-1361646745-0.jpg

oh man, I had forgotten Burns contributed art/design too

OK Soda may be the preferred drink of other people such as yourself.

my shitty high school punk band covered dillinger four's "smells like OK soda" and tbh this is the first time I've learned of what it was referencing

i feel like they should reboot this shit and just make no changes to it and it will work this time

not sure how gen z would react mind you, quite possibly not favourably

soda is on the outs tho

oh yeah it would just have to be a flavoured soda water

the other day i drank some water that was not even flavored, it just had a ring in the lip of the bottle that made your nose smell the aroma of the flavor

they could do some shit like that, that would be O.K.

OK Soda revolutionizes our perception of bodies and spaces

"What's the point of OK? Well, what's the point of anything?"

this is the sort of hard truth i want, nay expect, from my soda provider

I imagine all of these being spoken by Daria

I honestly have zero memory of this. Did it make it outside the US?

Remember when there were shirts and stickers that just said "Mean People Suck"?

OK, lol, Atlantic Canada (!) was one of the testing locations but it didn't even make it to all of the US.

I'm not sure I have any memory of this at all

it's sorta weird to have lived in a test market for somethin and just assume "everyone" experienced it (as age-appropriate). but not everyone is "everyone," which _was_ ok, but now i'm not sure that is ok.

Coke says the flavor evolved from the fact that teens consume a variety of drinks that range from colas to lemon-lime. The company therefore concocted a new soda that would blend all these tastes into a single drink.

this is amazing.

I'm not sure I have any memory of this at all

SOMEbody wasn't reading the "funny/miscellaneous" two-page spread in the front of The Comics Journal every month

ok soda's pointed refusal to oppose toxic masculinity makes it utterly unsuitable for millennials

wow this is the first Ive ever heard of this drink!

my generation deserved a soda that affirmed the scientific consensus regarding climate change, and this is why i now favor nationalization of the coca-cola company

Don't remember which friend told me about the OK Soda hotline, but I remember we called it over and over just to hear the manifesto, which I think we only liked because it didn't make sense to us and it was said in a funny voice. That was years before I learned what a manifesto even was. Never once drank the soda

Was this before OK Computer?

yes

Things were generally OK in the 90s and when they weren't, that was OK too.

OK Computer was released in 1997.

A lot of those have a strong resemblance to the SAMO/J M Basquiat/Al Diaz graffiti epigrams.

the question is, was OK Computer released after OK Soda

read the poll intro, buddy

didn't the baffler do a big thing about OK soda. they were against it iirc

I was unaware!

luckily for us, here it is: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/id-like-to-force-the-world-to-sing

and wow, this article really does feel like 2001 looking back at 1995, especially the assumptions about marketing demographic

I know I've been on ILX too long when I can recall the other thread that mentioned The Baffler article Oh dear lord it's the OK SODA THREAD - OK Soda is a weird cultural comet that comes around every six years. I never saw any of it out in the wild, but I was a fan of Clowes and demographic marketing so it was an oddly ephemeral product. Hey did you know Sinbad played a genie in that movie?

ah crap I did search and was going to link the other thread(s) and forgot

I used to buy it, it tasted pretty good. Better than OK.

wasn't there a Baffler article about OK Cola (and similar things) that was published contemporaneously to the "trend" -- like 1994? 1995? pretty sure Thomas Frank wrote it.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

used a coca-cola freestyle machine yesterday and my attempts to recreate the recipe ideas were hampered by my gravitation to “orange coke” instead of “coke plus orange fanta”

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

re: 1994 thomas frank https://thebaffler.com/salvos/dark-age

But the big prize for social amnesia has to go to the disgusting campaign for something called “OK Soda,” with its idiot “coincidences” and pre-fab Gen-X cynico-cred: “Don’t be fooled into thinking there has to be a reason for everything,” reads the legend on cans of the loathsome liquid. For OK Soda, as for virtually every other product around which we make our lives, there is obviously no “reason” other than the glittering logic of the marketplace. The constant flux that supports us all, consumerism’s endless piling of new upon new, can be bound by no tradition, reason, language, or order other than the simple mandates of ceaseless, directionless rebellion and change.

He also piles on henry rollins!

all I wanted was an OK Soda, and she wouldn't give it to me

hey @CocaCola, any comment on why the classified OK Soda documents have not been released?? This 1990s commercial CLEARLY says they would be declassified in the 2010s. pic.twitter.com/uBIec47Tf0

— rstevens 🐳💨 (@rstevens) January 15, 2020