California’s new law requiring the use of hands free devices while driving has been a boon to the entire hands free device industry.  One company in particular, Jawbone, has hatched a unique plan to take advantage.

They’ve began posting billboards all over Los Angeles which read “Crime Pays: Bring Your Hands Free Ticket to Jawbone.com.”   Doing so leads you to their home page, which looks like this:

All you need to do is enter your state and ticket number and you are eligible for a $20.00 discount (the amount of a first ticket for not using a headset) on the future purchase of a Jawbone headset.

So what can be taken from this? Opportunities for unique and effective advertising can come from any source.   Look for a moment at what Aliph, the company behind the Jawbone headset, did with this campaign.   They took an incoming law and turned it to their advantage,    People knew that the law was coming into effect and that the penalty would be a ticket.   So Aliph took advantage of this and shaped an advertising campaign around that concept.  This is something we can all look to do in our own advertsing, taking advantage of events outside our business and our customer’s preconceptions to create new advertising that gets attention and hopefully turns that attention into purchases.