No deep analysis of this is required. It's participatory, disruptive and mildly intrusive. Cloak and dagger with free stuff. In other words, gold. Fast Company wonders if this is marketing or not? Not in the conventional sense, no, but in the 'this is how it should be' sense, absolutely. Injecting a product as a simple prop into a playful life experience/experiment is a welcomed departure from the face hammering marketers usually provide. Before this, we had never even heard of Blue Dot. We have since checked them out and their name is burnt in, and they are clearly willing to take some risks, which earns them cred points ... oh, and we're telling you about them right now. Nice work by Mono.

(Source: Fastcompany.com) At 9:40 a.m. on Thursday, a white van pulled over near the corner of 68th Street and Central Park West in Manhattan. A cameraman armed with a telephoto lens watched from the corner. A video crew snooped from a rooftop. Half a dozen operatives on the street murmured discretely into walkie-talkies, calling each other "Hound Dog," "Crow's Nest," and other code names. Within minutes Andrew Haarsager, an interaction designer with the technology firm Tellart, removed a white steel chair from the van and placed it on the sidewalk. He crouched over to activate a Motorola cell phone with GPS software affixed to the underside of the seat, then skulked away.

Over the course of two days this week, Mono, an advertising firm based in Minneapolis, dropped off 25 Real Good Chairs, a $129 item designed and manufactured by Blu Dot. Whoever found the chairs was free to take them. The chairs were left outside the Apollo Theater on 125 Street (below), at the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and atop the Highline, elevated park on the West Side, among other New York locations.

Read the full article at fastcompany, or at the Blu Dot website.