Personalized ABM Comic Book

Function

Marketing

Audience

B2B

What's the play

They needed to break into T-Mobile and skipped the cold email entirely. They found one fact about the one person who could say yes: CEO John Legere was a huge Batman fan. So they built him a custom Batman-spoof comic called T-Man and Gums, casting him as the hero and their own tech as the sidekick that helps him win. The format itself was the pitch.

What was the alternative?

Another cold outbound email to an executive already buried under thousands of vendor pitches.

Results / what moved

T-mobile

target account won

100

copies sent

A hundred copies went out to T-Mobile and its agencies of record. Within a few hours the CEO was praising them publicly on Twitter. Within a few days the meeting was booked. They won the account.

Cost breakdown

A full creative team of writers, editors, and illustrators, plus a short, high-quality print run. Real money, fully unscalable, completely worth it.

Would you run it again?

Yes. For an account that actually matters, building one thing only that buyer would care about beats contacting them more.

Steps

1
Pick one account
Choose a single account that's worth a disproportionate amount of effort.
2
Find the one human
Identify the single person who can actually say yes.
3
Dig for one specific fact
Find a real detail about them. Here it was that Legere loved Batman.
4
Build something only they'd care about
Make the format itself the argument, not a themed pitch deck.
5
Get a creative team on it
Pull in writers, editors, and illustrators to make the object real.
6
Print a small, high-quality run
Rush copies to the buyer and their agencies of record.
7
Let the object do the work
No hard pitch needed. The thing in their hands carries the message.

Notes

The whole thing hinged on one detail about one human. They treated the deal as B2H, business to human, instead of B2B. The comic landed because it did two jobs at once: it proved they understood him, and it showed off the exact creative firepower they were selling, in a single object he couldn't scroll past. This doesn't scale. Save it for the accounts worth the effort.