A client emailed me on Thursday with a subject line of four words and no body text. Subject: can we do OK boomer. That was the whole message. I read it twice, poured more coffee, and wrote back asking what he wanted it to accomplish, which is the strategist version of stalling.
Two weeks ago the phrase lived on teenagers' phones. Then the Times wrote it up at the end of October, and now it is on hoodies, on stickers, in a trademark filing, and in the mouths of at least four brand accounts I follow that are run by people my age.
Which is exactly the problem.
OK boomer is not a joke. It is a refusal. It is what you say when you have decided the other person is arguing in bad faith and you are no longer going to spend your afternoon proving climate science to someone who thinks you are lazy for not owning a house. The two words do the work of a door closing.
A phrase whose entire function is dismissing institutional voices cannot be safely spoken by an institution, and every brand that tries becomes a live demonstration of what the phrase was invented to dismiss.
Three things worth saying before your December content calendar gets built.
One. You cannot buy standing in a joke. Wendy's and MoonPie and Steak-umm did not earn their internet voices by adopting slang the week it peaked. They built a character over years and then said things in it. The brands reaching for these two words have no character, so all anyone sees is the reaching.
Two. The half-life is brutal and already running. This thing went from a niche reply to a merchandise category in under a month. Anything on that curve is finished by the time your legal team clears the artwork. I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, where the meme approved in the Tuesday meeting is a fossil by the Friday it ships.
Three. The underlying grievance is real and durable, and that is where the actual opportunity sits. Wages, rent, debt, a climate bill nobody wants to pay. Patagonia did not need a catchphrase to be trusted by people under thirty. It needed a decade of behavior that cost it money.
You cannot buy standing in a joke.
So my answer to the client was no, and then a better question: what would we have to change about the company for a twenty two year old to defend us in a comment section without being asked. That is a harder brief. It is also the only one with a shelf life.
I saw the phrase on a tote bag in the Salt & Straw line Saturday, worn by a man roughly fifty five, laughing. Two more weeks, tops.