OK Go and Post Settle Lawsuit Over Same-Name Cereal
Indie pop band OK Go and breakfast titan Post have settled their legal action against each other stemming from a planned line of “OK Go!” cereals.
As Rolling Stone reported in April, after Post launched their new line of on-the-go, just-add-water cereals in a few test markets, lawyers for the “Here It Comes Again” band reached out to the company about the similarly named product and concerns that it seemed like the band was promoting the cereal.
OK Go’s Damian Kulash, a father of two young kids, also worried about the band name being branded onto a product he had health concerns about. “I’m very conscious about what goes into those two little bodies,” Kulash told Rolling Stone. “Cereal as it already exists is just puffed-rice sugar bombs. But they somehow found a way to make it even more synthetic and processed.”
After OK Go’s lawyers reached out to Post, the company offered the band a nominal fee to drop the matter. When OK Go declined the offer, Post responding by suing the band. “Their assumption is that they can just keep forcing us to spend money on lawsuits until we go away,” says Kulash. “It’s corporate bullying.”
Just a week after OK Go went public with the absurd lawsuit, both sides reportedly (and quietly) reached a settlement in early May. A month later, on Friday, lawyers for both sides asked a Minnesota judge to dismiss the lawsuits permanently following a confidential settlement, Billboard reported.
Both sides would “settled this action on terms agreeable to all parties,” which include Post and OK Go paying their own legal fees. A representative for OK Go did not respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment at press time.
While terms of the settlement were not revealed, it appears the dueling legal action perhaps gave Post pause about calling their new product “OK Go!”: All mentions of the forthcoming product have been scrubbed from the company’s site, and the original URL for the OK Go! line now reroutes to the main Post page.
In their initial legal action, OK Go wrote that Big Breakfast “chose to steal the name of our band to market disposable plastic cups of sugar to children.”
Post couldn’t exactly argue ignorance regarding the existence of the band: Over a decade earlier, the company hired OK Go — known for their viral music videos — to act in an admittedly unfunny YouTube video promoting Honey Bunches of Oats where they magically appear in the break room of a cereal factory and interact with manic employees named Honey and Joy.
“Given the length of time that has passed since that limited collaboration over a decade ago,” the company responded in a statement, “the very small number of views indicated on the YouTube videos you referenced, and the general consuming public’s rather short attention span, it will also have absolutely no bearing on consumer perception of Post’s mark OK GO! used with cereal or cereal-based snacks, and will not lead to any mistaken association with OK Go.”
