Enjoy your college years, kids: They blow by all too quickly and you wake up one day in a bad job market with student loans and credit card debt wondering why you tried so hard to graduate on time.

At least some of you are getting something out of college. A company called All By Students is partnering with colleges and distributing five-subject spiral notebooks to students—for free. In 2006, two students at Northwestern University decided that money spent on advertising could be put to good use. In All By Students notebooks, the subject dividers are paid ads that target the college-age audience (everything from Monster to AXE to the NBA). The first eight pages are reserved for the universities and carry calendars, schedules, maps, etc. This semester, ABS notebooks were distributed to 750,000 students at 70 campuses, and next January ABS hopes to reach 1.1 million students on 110 campuses.

Hats off to you, ABS! You've created a new way to deliver relevant messages in the post-advertising age to an audience that is happy to be interrupted. You've created an ad that is more than an ad: it's a useful tool for the student that, with customized covers designed by each university, helps nurture school spirit.