Two creators explain how they invented OOT, a hand gesture that spread through sports media. They showed it at events, got high school athletes to use it repeatedly, and turned it into a viral meme. A simple symbol became a way to build community and brand recognition.
The hand symbol. Tell me, what's the hand signal? Every great gang in the world has a hand sign. We need a hand sign. And I was like, OOT, which is hilarious. Just imagine your CEO sitting in an office and he's just throwing up symbols.
He's like, I'm really working on something today, guys. It's going to be big. Okay. You told your people, you're like, if you go to this event and you record, you got to get them at the end to be like, put up the O and say, shut up, overtime, man. Because I remember I saw it once, forgettable. Saw it twice, forgettable. Once you see it like 25 times and you got the cool high school athletes to do it, now it's a thing.
I've had people do it to me at TF USA when they see my shirt and stuff like that. If you want there to be community, you have to give community a way to interact and to share what makes that special with them, right? So you've given us this common language to say, I don't know who you are, we may have nothing in common, but we got one thing for sure in common.
