1-800-I Feel OK

Nostaglia over a soft drink that barely happened that made us all feel OK.

[1800ifeelok]

More sayings, more coincidences, more feelings of OK

fizzledout.com/continued-ok-ness-pics-and-more/

[1800ifeelok]

‘OK-ness’ is available to all but invisible to many

OK Soda

[1800ifeelok]

For more detailed information, for those inclined to that sort of thing. 

[1800ifeelok]

Things are going to be OK

I grew up in suburbia tending towards the countryside. It wasn't dense, and it wasn't a farm, but somewhere in between. There were a few small farms on my road, in fact. We had two acres on a rocky hill, with a big backyard and I had friends in biking distance down the street. We were only a few miles from the nearest city, small by most standards, but I never felt close to metropolitan culture. 

It was 1993 and I was a senior in high school. Popular culture was something that I had recently become aware of. Music from Nirvana and the wave of attitude and fashion that was the early nineties began in earnest the year before. I was feeling confident in myself for the first time, just in time to leave high school and start on the first peg again at college. 

I was an art kid, a skateboarder, a band geek, a non-athlete. I doodled logos in my sketchbooks. I had no idea there was a profession for "Graphic Design". I thought Commercial Art was what I was headed for. I noticed design and typography, but I didn't know how to express it yet. The Mac was already making inroads in the design profession, but I had no idea that computers were going to run my life — yet. 

I'm not sure when I saw it — it was probably at the local Almacs grocery store (this was before Stop and Shop took over). Black and white with odd illustrations, the only bold red color was in the logo. It simply said "Ok". 

What was it? It was in the soda aisle... what did it taste like? No where on the package did they explain the flavor. Instead, the label was riddled with cryptic, subversive text and strange, cartoony illustrations. Little did I know that it was a targeted product for the Gen X market from a big brand name. It was planned to be subversive. I was planned to target those that hated advertising. It was full of inside jokes.

I loved it almost immediately, and it didn't matter what it tasted like. 

Design-savvy Wieden+Kennedy were behind the conglomeration of underground comic book culture (ComicCon was FAR from mainstream yet), stark typography and subversive copywriting. The marketing mind behind the failed "New Coke" and the later successful Fruitopia was at the helm of marketing for Coca-cola. 

It rolled out into only a small group of text markets. Luckily for me, Providence Rhode Island was on the list. Rhode Island is an ideal test market, actually, for its small size and relatively high diversity. 

I was the perfect age and inclination for their target audience. I was a budding design savvy person, and between OK Soda and the similar subversive tactics of skateboard magazine advertising, I was on the path to being a lover of smart copy and subversive messaging.