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By Lydia Lee

April 17, 2000 |  Post Communications sends out millions of e-mails each week, for Web retailers like Petopia and CDNow. You might consider these commercial solicitations just another form of spam, contributions to the deluge of "get rich quick" missives, pornographic solicitations and other motley messages that fill e-mail boxes everywhere.

But talk to Hans Peter Brøndmo, 37, founder and chairman of Post Communications, and you might be persuaded that this e-mail is a great service to you. Brøndmo may be an e-mail marketer, but he's as passionately anti-spam as any frustrated user could be. "Spam is unsolicited, unwanted, unexpected and soon to be unlawful e-mail," says Brøndmo. "What we do is help companies establish communications with existing customers -- everyone has signed up and given permission for the company to communicate with them." But even legitimate companies, Brøndmo adds, send too many e-mails." If companies keep sending users so much mail, then users will stop responding, just as they stopped clicking on banner ads."

Prior to Post, Brøndmo focused on technology for video editing. In the '80s, he worked on digital video at the MIT Media Lab. He started a video editing software company called DiVA, which he sold to another video company, Avid, before founding Post in 1996. Next on his career path? Authordom: His book, "Engaged: The New Rules of E-mail Marketing," will be published in August by HarperCollins.

E-mail marketing doesn't sound all that glamorous for an MIT Media Lab guy. How did you get into this business?

After I left Avid, I didn't want to start something just because it was a really cool technology. I wanted to find a need in the industry, a pain in the market. And what companies were saying four years ago was, "We're collecting more information about our customers; we have 3 million names in our database; we're worried about privacy and spam; we want to have an effective dialogue."

You've said companies misuse e-mail. What's wrong with the way they use e-mail?

What a lot people are doing is saying, "Well, we have direct mail, so let's do direct e-mail." And direct e-mail works pretty well. It is better, faster, cheaper -- it's got a higher response rate, it's cheaper to contact people, it's got a faster turnaround time. But it's just doing exactly what we've done in the past, instead of engaging customers in an ongoing dialogue.

What's a good example of one of these dialogues?

There's a great company called Wegmans, a grocery chain out on the East Coast. Wegmans is a very customer-oriented company -- they help people with menus, they have a nutritional advisor on staff, they have very loyal customers. So we developed an e-mail marketing concept: Let's not use the Web to sell customers, since you want them to come into the store. Let's use e-mail to service your customers.

As a customer, you tell them the number of children, any dietary concerns -- maybe Junior has diabetes -- whatever the primary issues are for your family. And then, every Monday morning, Wegmans sends you an e-mail that says, "Here's your suggested meal plan for the week."

Next page | The problem with spam? "It works too well!"