Allen & Gerritsen is bringing back Amperspam, the Spam-built font that turns a holiday greeting into a fundraiser. After raising more than $1,000 for local food banks last year, the agency is rolling out Amperspam 2.0 on January 12, expanding the idea—and the impact—around food scarcity in Boston and Philadelphia, where the agency has its offices, which it calls “third spaces.”
The original project transformed canned Spam into a downloadable typeface, with proceeds supporting Greater Boston Food Bank and Philabundance. This year’s update adds three new fonts — Amperspam Grilled Bold, Nibbled Neue, and Out The Can — along with a new line of merch available via donation.
CEO Andrew Graff framed the sequel as a response to a worsening need.
“Last year’s Amperspam resulted in over a thousand dollars from downloads that we were able to give directly to our local communities,” said Graff. “This year, given the climate of food scarcity, we were determined to do more. The ampersand in A&G means a lot of different things for our agency — most importantly, all we can do together — but in this case, it stands for Action & Goodness. We want to make a difference by spamming people’s inboxes for good.”
The launch also includes the Amperspam Collection: meat-themed T-shirts, socks, hats, and stickers designed by A&G’s team. Creative svp Chris Fernandez called it a passion project—one that mixes humor, craft, and a practical outcome.
In pulling the effort together, Fernandez said that the agency started with practicality, peppered in a bit of 3D and some Photoshop, plus a heavy dose of AI fine-tuning.
“With any of the creative work we do here, we like to keep a core team to create ownership and drive the idea. But, like last year’s effort, it was essential we integrated the whole agency to launch. The tech team built the emails, font and merch shops. The social team outlined a social strategy. And our PR team picked up everything we were putting down – creating an outreach plan and amplifying this the right way,” said Fernandez.
He continued that it has been impossible to ignore that food insecurity has only become more acute over the last year, so the option of trying something new, as opposed to building on last year’s Amperspam effort, was not an option. Instead, in the face of that bigger, more entrenched and troublesome issue, they made Amperspam bigger, bolder and meatier.
“We took loose inspiration from the tropes of the Hollywood sequel machine — teasing out the work, building anticipation, adding new cast (by turning a single font into a full font-family) and even creating a complementary streetwear > meatwear merch line. All while keeping our aim true — to bring light and support to those that need it most,” Fernandez concluded.
To see all of the Amperspam 2.0 fonts and merch available with donations, visit the site here.
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Kyle O’Brien is managing editor of Indie Agency News.
