It arrives via e-mail once a month, not another dull corporate intrusion or obnoxious exercise in self-promotion, but a colorful diversion capped with a guaranteed chuckle. No, we're not talking about a humor column: We're talking about spam. But not just any spam -- it's Rigney Graphics-brand Spam, which originates from a 13-employee graphic design firm in Glendale, Calif. The humorous, often tongue-in-cheek e-newsletter is not only bringing in new business, it's attracting subscribers of its own, says business owner Bruce Rigney.

Smart Answers columnist Karen E. Klein talked to Rigney, 60, recently about a sharp and savvy marketing strategy, how he put a hip spin on what might easily have been just another bland, boring and largely unread missive in so many overflowing in boxes. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow.

Q: You send out this newsletter every month that obviously takes a lot of time and effort to create, and yet it never makes an overt pitch for new business. Why?
A: Because it's not your ordinary spam! That's our "spam promise"; if we used it to promote the company, it would violate the whole principle of the thing. We show people what we can do in terms of art and design, and that we know what we're talking about in terms of the content, and we include our contact information, but the major rule is that there's no "sell" at all. Occasionally we put in examples of new type styles we've done, but that's as far as we'll go.

The main thing we're trying to do is make it fun. But it does take a lot of time and effort: It takes probably 10 hours to 12 hours to do it every month. My son, Brett, works long hours on it, mostly at home, but he gets paid for it, and he loves to do it.

Q: Who came up with the idea of turning a negative -- spam -- into a positive?
A: It was Brett's brainchild. He's our art director, and his concept was to create a kind of spam that you actually like to get, as opposed to everything else that clogs your e-mail box. He designs and writes it, and I edit it -- and try to keep it under control sometimes! -- and also make amendments.

Q: The e-newsletter includes tidbits about graphics and marketing as well as the history of various advertising slogans and brand icons, like Mr. Clean and the Pillsbury Doughboy. Where do you come up with the content?
A: We have a few people on staff who love to research bits and pieces about marketing and design and then submit them to Brett as possible entries for the spam. Our clients tend to be interested in advertising and design, and so are we.

Q: Why do a newsletter at all?
A: Well, obviously it's a way to get attention -- current clients and potential clients -- and show them what we can do. We're also in a business that has a lot of deadlines and pressure, and we like working with people who like to have a good time at work. It's a pleasure to have a client who isn't serious all the time, and it can get dreadful when someone's always gloomy. We like to be playful with our clients, and we have a lot of them who are very playful.

I started the company in 1982 on my dining room table in North Hollywood, and back in the old days, we had a print newsletter that I wrote. It was the same kind of thing, telling people about printing and design, and it also had a regular silly feature that was very popular. It was called, "Roman Bodoni, type investigator." Roman was a Raymond Chandler-type character who went around busting bad typography and typos and catching other weird things. Brett drew the character in a trench coat and hat. So, we have a history of showing clients that we aren't overly serious.

Q: The current newsletter projects a young, hip image. Is that deliberate?
A: Definitely. Since I started the company more than 20 years ago, the technology we use has been totally revolutionized. We resisted the changes for a long time because the early computer typography was gruesome, but by 1994 we realized we had to transition into the digital media or go out of business, like a lot of our competitors were doing. So I started messing around with a Macintosh computer in my spare time, and it almost brought me to my knees trying to learn how to use it! But, eventually, I saw that we could do it and we made lots of changes.

My two sons started working with me -- my wife and daughter also work with me now -- and then I wanted to expand, so I hired another guy about my age. He was so willing, but it just took him so long to learn the technology that we had to let him go because it was too much of a leap for him to master it. The next guy I hired was 19 and he knew nothing about graphics but he knew computers, liked graphic art and was smart. He picked up the business and was making me money within two or three weeks. Now, myself and my quality-control guy, who was my typesetter in the old days, are in our 60s and the rest of the staff are age 32 and under. That's the demographic that we want to project.

Q: Who gets the newsletter and what's the reaction to it?
A: We send it out to a list of about 550 clients, associates and friends on Friday afternoons because we figure that's a time when people are kicking back and would like to see something diverting. Typically, within four or five minutes of sending it, we start getting all these e-mails coming back at us like a wave of applause: "I have to tell you, I've been getting this and I love it!" The kudos we get are just marvelous -- when you do promotion and marketing, there's typically a long period where you have to wait and see whether people like it. With this, the reaction is immediate and it's always going to new people because our clients like it so much, they forward it to their friends.

We get people who aren't even clients who subscribe to it and people who go to the spam repository on our Web site to read back issues. Sometimes, I'll meet strangers and when they hear the name of the company, they go, "Oh, you're the guys who do Rigney Graphics Spam! I love that!"

Q: Have you actually traced new business to it?
A: Absolutely. I had a printer friend I met about 15 years ago and I dug up his e-mail address when we started sending out the Spam and put him on the list. He has a print shop in Los Angeles, and he sent it to his sales reps who started talking about it with their clients, and we wound up with four major corporate accounts just from them. We've gotten lots of referrals off of it for Web site design work, and it also cements our relationship with our existing clients.




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