Marketing Trash
Is anything sacred? I love New York city trash and now, in addition to avoiding bed-bugs, I have to look out for GPS tracking devices.
This from a recent article in the New York Times Magazine:
And so in early November, a marketing agency’s “street team” began scattering a client’s products on the sidewalks of Manhattan and Brooklyn. The client was Blu Dot, a Minneapolis design studio and maker of furniture that has enjoyed the praise of the design press for some years now. The product: Blu Dot’s Real Good chair, a slim metal seat that comes in several colors and normally costs $129. Twenty-five were placed on sidewalks. They stood out visually, and about half of them came with something extra: a hidden global-positioning-system device. This allowed the object’s movement to be tracked and its new owner located and, ideally, interviewed for a video that will be shown in Blu Dot’s SoHo store on Dec. 14, marking its one-year anniversary in New York.
“I suppose in this day and age,” he observes, “it’s only a matter of time till something like this happens to each one of us.”