Stop by the Registration Desk on the 2nd Floor Foyer and pick up your badge, swag bag, official conference notebook, and official conference t-shirt!

Explore the Expo Hall, the Fun Station, and join one of the workshops that we have set up on Sunday!

Curious about Claude but not quite sure what to do beyond opening a chat and asking it questions? This hands-on beginner workshop is for you.

Designed specifically for cybersecurity marketers at CyberMarketingCon, this session will help you get comfortable using Claude for real marketing work — without requiring any technical or AI expertise.

We’ll cover the basics of how to work with Claude effectively, how to give it the context and direction it needs, and how to start using it across everyday workflows like research, campaign planning, content development, messaging, analysis, and more.

You’ll work through practical examples alongside other cybersecurity marketers and leave with ideas you can put to work immediately.

Bring your laptop and your corporate or personal Claude account. No AI expertise required!

Ready to move beyond one-off chats and start building repeatable AI workflows?

This hands-on workshop is designed for cybersecurity marketers at CyberMarketingCon who already use Claude and want to take the next step: turning the work you do repeatedly into reusable systems.

We’ll focus heavily on Claude Skills—what they are, when to use them, and how to build them around real cybersecurity marketing workflows. We’ll also explore more advanced ways to structure Claude around your work, connect context and resources, and create repeatable processes that can help you and your team work faster and more consistently.

Rather than spending the session perfecting individual prompts, we’ll think bigger: How do you teach Claude how you work once, then reuse that knowledge again and again?

Bring your laptop, your personal or corporate Claude account, and come ready to build!

Cybersecurity marketing is defined by constraint: dense jargon, complex concepts, and audiences who demand precision. The challenge isn’t a lack of creativity; it’s finding space to play, experiment, and make ideas feel truly memorable inside those constraints. This workshop is designed as a creative reset for marketers whose brains have been on “perform under pressure” for a little too long… or those who know they are over-relying on AI for tasks that used to feel fun.

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Using the bold, irreverent naming culture of roller derby as our playground—think Penelope Bruise, Hermione Danger, Momentum Mori—we’ll explore what happens when you step away from AI and lean back pure sporting instinct. We’ll treat derby naming as a proxy for branding; names must instantly signal identity, tell a mini-story, and provoke a reaction, just like the best campaigns.

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The workshop starts with a short individual warm-up to get people out of polished marketing mode and into free thinking. Attendees will quickly jot down the words, frustrations, and ideas that feel most “stuck” or overused in their day-to-day work—terms they’re tired of, value props that feel flat, or product areas that feel impossible to make exciting. This becomes our raw material.

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From there, we’ll move into guided prompts such as:* “If this product or problem were a derby skater, what kind of troublemaker would they be?”* “If you could lean into FUD as a joke, what would you really call this thing?”Participants will then work in small teams, remixing their raw material into surprising combinations: pairing technical jargon with unexpected metaphors, fusing emotional states with security concepts, and bending industry clichés until they become something stranger and more interesting. The focus is less on “getting it right” and more on seeing how far they can stretch a concept without compromising accuracy. Teams will, for example: - Take a word from someone else’s list and combine it with their own to create a new character or brand.- Build a “family” of three related derby names that could all be features of the same product.
Additional playful constraints will push their creativity further: limiting word counts, forcing a quick pivot from serious to absurd, or asking teams to defend a ridiculous name as if it were going into a boardroom deck. Each round builds on the last, moving from silly and safe to sharper and more deliberate.

As the workshop progresses, teams will converge on a brand concept and tagline born from this chaos—something that still nods to the original cybersecurity idea but now feels alive, specific, and ideally, fun to scream out loud.

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Throughout, we’ll surface the meta-lessons: how constraints can unlock creativity instead of shutting it down, and how embracing a bit of discomfort or a “bad idea” often leads to better ones.

Attendees won’t leave with a rigid framework or a perfect campaign. They’ll leave with at least one absurd-but-delightful concept, a renewed sense of creative confidence, and a reminder that even in a jargon-heavy, high-stakes industry, there’s room to play for points.

There will be NO NAPPING during this workshop, where everyone will stand up, talk, move around, and learn how to be a professional business “flirt.” We challenge both extroverts and introverts to come to this session and learn how to make in-person cold connections, find *the* person in the room you need to talk to, and qualify someone for a potential business relationship. Check out this video from our workshop at Cyber Marketing Con 2023. If you attended the 2023 workshop, come back again! This brand new workshop is loaded with new exercises.

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CyberMarketingCon 2026 Welcome Reception: Choose Your Own Character

Every adventure starts with a character. Who will you be?

We’re kicking off CyberMarketingCon 2026 and our theme, Create Your Own Adventure, by inviting you to dress as your favorite character—from literally anything. Anything!

Here's some ideas: Indiana Jones, a medieval knight, an enterprising elf, Taylor Swift, the CISO at the last company that you sold into, Steve Jobs, Skyrim guards, a boxer, or someone entirely of your own creation.

Go all out or come as yourself (if you’re your own favorite character, that's totally fine)!

Join us to meet fellow adventurers, reconnect with friends, and get the CyberMarketingCon conference started!

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The promise of AI is speed and scale, but without guardrails, it becomes a free‑for‑all where every department speaks its own version of the brand. Everyone has it, but no one owns it. So your identity becomes a patchwork of inconsistent messages and AI-generated noise.

In this session, you’ll learn how to build a shared AI system - regardless of which tools you use - that solidifies your brand voice across every touchpoint. Content Workshop will also share findings of where cybersecurity companies map to the AI Marketing Maturity Model and share insights on how members can level up to keep pace with their contemporaries.

How well do you really know your fellow cybersecurity marketers? Find out in “Read the Room,” a fast-paced, interactive game show where the audience—and their opinions—take center stage. Using their smartphones, attendees will answer 10 thought-provoking questions about cybersecurity marketing trends, challenges, strategies, and preferences. Three randomly selected contestants will compete to predict the most popular response to each question, earning points for successfully “reading the room.” Along the way, we’ll reveal fascinating insights into what cybersecurity marketers really think about lead generation, content, webinars, AI, job satisfaction, and more. Come ready to vote, cheer on the contestants, compare your opinions with your peers, and discover whether you really know what makes today’s cybersecurity marketers tick. Bragging rights—and prizes—are on the line!

Most cybersecurity firms compete on the same claims: advanced detection, rapid response, superior technology. The result is a market where every vendor sounds identical and differentiation lives almost entirely in marketing spend. I built a different kind of firm.

Data Defenders serves municipalities, counties, nonprofits, and healthcare organizations, the organizations most cybersecurity vendors do not pursue. Six years ago, I entered into a managed security engagement with a mid-size Illinois city. I designed the governance architecture, managed dual IT and OT operations, and ran the program from implementation through sustained operations. That engagement produced 35,331 threats detected and mitigated, 351 high-severity threats eliminated, zero major security incidents declared, and operating costs 77% below what an equivalent in-house Security Operations Center would have required.

Those are not marketing claims. They are documented operational outcomes, and they have produced the thing most cybersecurity firms spend their entire marketing budget trying to manufacture: proof.

This session examines what six years of operating in the market nobody builds for teaches about firm positioning, client delivery, and the strategic value of doing the work before writing the case study.

During WWII, David Stirling walked into British Army HQ with a one-page memo and bold claim: a team of 60 men could destroy more enemy aircraft than the entire Air Force. BBC's series the Rogue Heroes follows what happened next - which turns out to be the most accurate description of how to build an empowered growth team that I've ever seen. This talk maps the SAS founding story chapter by chapter onto the real experience of building a growth team at my previous position at BitNinja: starting from a culture where nothing shipped on Friday, customer work got thrown away at 4pm, and releases were avoided so nothing would break - and ending with a team the rest of the company modeled itself after, weekly sprints, churn cut in half, and trial-to-paid conversion doubled. Executive alignment, 'stealing equipment', the first catastrophic failure, thwarting the negative voices, friendly competition, leading from the front - it's all there. History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, and so do playbooks.

Most cybersecurity companies treat marketing, events, and alliances as support functions. That’s the mistake.

In high-performing MSSPs, these functions are not overhead, they are revenue-driving, customer-facing engines that directly influence pipeline, deal velocity, and trust.

This session breaks down how to operationalize a true commercial strategy model where alliances, marketing, and events are aligned around shared revenue outcomes, not vanity metrics.

Drawing from real-world experience scaling over $10M in new cybersecurity revenue and building Microsoft-aligned partner ecosystems, I will walk through how to:

• Turn alliances into a net-new logo engine through build-with and sell-with motions• Use events as confidence accelerators that shorten sales cycles• Reframe marketing from impressions to pipeline influence• Align everything with RevOps to measure what actually drives growth

This is not theory. It’s a practical blueprint for leaders who want to move from fragmented GTM efforts to a unified system that produces measurable revenue.

Rebranding a cybersecurity company isn’t just about logos or taglines—it’s a full-on overhaul that demands focus, cross-functional alignment, and, frankly, a whole lot of grit. In this session, I’ll take you behind the scenes of what it takes to lead a company through a successful rebrand—especially when it sometimes feels like your actual job is herding cats and managing executive egos. I recently led this process at Silverfort, where we reimagined the brand from the ground up. One of the toughest challenges? Getting a room full of smart, passionate execs to let go of legacy messaging and rally around a single, focused brand strategy. (Tl;DR: it required some hard conversations, resetting expectations around timelines, and constantly keeping scope creep in check.) I'll take you through some of most critical lessons I learned along the way—from setting realistic timelines and resourcing the work properly, to navigating internal dynamics and spotting red flags in agency contracts.

Let me tell you about the one thing that got me most excited this past year: the signals-based GTM conversation hit an all-time high. Marketers are talking about it, building toward it, posting about it, and that makes my demand-gen soul so happy. But most of that conversation is still happening at the layer of capture: which signals to collect, which platforms to use, how to score and correlate them.

So now let me tell you about one thing I’m shocked to not see more of this past year: The layer underneath, aka how you actually architect the first-party signals themselves. And it's the layer that determines whether your signal-based GTM engine is interchangeable with every competitor's, or genuinely unique to your brand and your product.

I like to call this part the intersection of taste and strategy when it comes to building a signal-based GTM engine. The signals you design are downstream of the use cases you choose to lead with, the language you choose to use, the formats you choose to publish in, the moments you choose to build around. A team with strong brand instinct and strong PMM partnership will design a completely different signal arsenal than a team next door, even if they're selling into the same ICP.

This session is a practitioner's walkthrough of how to architect first-party signals at the source, in a way that's genuinely yours. We'll walk through how to architect first-party signals across paid media, content, and launch motions, all anchored in the PMM positioning and use cases that make every signal legible to sales.

The payoff is two engines running in parallel: an evergreen GTM engine that continuously surfaces accounts in-market, and a launch engine you can activate around specific moments with surgical precision.

The math checks out:

(Custom-designed first-party signals with intention and taste) + (second and third-party signals) = high-fidelity, multi-stage detections of high-intent accounts.

The kind of intent that actually warrants action, whether that's sales follow-up or a use-case-specific event invite that lands because you already know exactly what that account cares about.

Don't worry, I'll come with receipts: how I built these demand gen engines from scratch, multiple times across cybersecurity startups, including real campaign architectures and correlation logic.

And what do you walk away with? The architecture and framework to design a signal-based GTM engine that's uniquely yours, because you designed the first-party signals flowing into it from the ground up.

AI search has become a real acquisition channel, and cybersecurity companies are competing for a spot in the answer. Some of the strategies we're seeing will compound over time. Others will work for a bit and then stop. In this session, Scott Johnson, Founder of Amplifyed, walks through what cybersecurity marketers should be doing, what they should stop doing, and how to stop helping your competitors' AI visibility.

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Find your people at CyberMarketingCon. Held in our dedicated lounge in the Expo Hall aka Marketing Land, these hosted mixers bring together attendees with shared roles, challenges, and interests. Your host will help spark introductions and conversation, making it easy to form meaningful connections within your corner of the cyber marketing community.

For the marketers turning partnerships and ecosystem plays into real business impact. Meet fellow partner, channel, and alliances marketers to exchange ideas, compare notes, and talk candidly about everything from partner alignment and event strategy to attribution and proving ROI.

The Partner, Channel & Alliances Mixer is Sponsored by Introw! Introw helps B2B companies manage partner relationships and collaborate with resellers, distributors, and referral partners through a partner portal connected to their CRM. Keep partners engaged, share resources, and track deals in one place.

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Website: introw.io

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Benchmarks can inform planning, budget conversations, and performance expectations—but their usefulness depends on how closely they reflect your business.

This session will examine marketing benchmarks relevant to the leaders in the room, with attention to company stage, resources, and go-to-market model. We’ll explore what the data can tell you, where comparisons need context, and how to use benchmarks to ask better questions about your own performance.

Come ready to consider how external data can support investment decisions and more productive conversations with your executive team.

Take a moment to recharge, grab refreshments, and connect with fellow attendees. Use this afternoon break to continue conversations from the day’s sessions, visit sponsors and exhibitors, visit more locations on the Treasure Map, and prepare for the rest of the CyberMarketingCon 2026 program!

Marketing is the engine behind scalable, data-driven growth—but without a clear roadmap, even the strongest teams can lose momentum.

In this session, Kelsea Morrison, Director of Marketing Operations at Varonis, shares how to build a marketing roadmap that aligns with business goals, energizes your team, and drives measurable impact.

You’ll learn the essential steps to “plot it like it’s hot,” starting with how to structure your plan for success and define a mission that actually inspires action. From there, get practical guidance on running effective planning sessions that bring out real ideas—not just polite nodding—and how to turn those ideas into a strategic, actionable roadmap.

Whether you’re a team of one or leading a department, this session will give you the tools and frameworks to deliver results that matter.

Influencer marketing is no longer a “nice to have” in B2B. It’s quickly becoming one of the most effective ways to reach technical buyers, especially as paid channels are getting more expensive, and buyers are increasingly tuning them out. At the same time, developers and security practitioners are turning to trusted voices, creators, peers, and community leaders for real insights and recommendations.

Yet most teams still treat influencer marketing as an experiment. They struggle to justify budgets, choose the right partners, or connect efforts to real business outcomes.

In this session, we’ll break down how you can build and scale your influencer program from the ground up, turning it into a repeatable, measurable growth channel tied directly to pipeline and revenue.

You’ll learn how to:1. Position influencer marketing as a core part of your GTM strategy (not a side experiment)2. Unlock and reallocate budget from traditional channels3. Work with influencers in a way that resonates with technical audiences4. Measure performance beyond vanity metrics, and tie it to demos, pipeline, and revenue.

You’ll walk away with a clear, actionable framework to build, scale, and prove the impact of an influencer program in a modern B2B organization.

Cybersecurity brands have long understood the stakes of crisis preparedness, but the emergence of generative AI has fundamentally expanded the ways brand reputation can be tarnished. No longer confined to data breaches or ransomware incidents, today’s crises can be manufactured at scale: convincing phishing campaigns impersonating executives, AI-generated recruiters targeting candidates, deepfakes, and fabricated online personas that erode trust before a company even realizes it’s under attack. For marketing and communications leaders, this shift demands a new level of vigilance, coordination, and strategic foresight to protect both brand reputation and stakeholder confidence.

Featuring marketing and communications leaders from OneTrust, Pentera, and Rubrik, this panel will discuss how cybersecurity marketers can evolve their crisis planning for an AI-driven world. Drawing on their own experiences, brand protection strategies, and crisis comms planning, this group will go into detail on how they are getting cross-functional groups on the same page, monitoring the many channels in which the brand lives and building proactive frameworks that anticipate—not just react to—evolving brand risks.

Make the most of your CyberMarketingCon experience with these complimentary experiences. Reserve your spot in advance—or stop by to see if a walk-in time is available.

Podcast Studio

Record a podcast, interview, or video in a private, professional studio. Four microphones and an AV technician are included, so all you need to bring is your idea. Walk-ins are welcome when the studio is available.

One-on-One Expert Consultations

Get complimentary, personalized advice from experienced professionals—including cybersecurity industry analysts. Book a session to discuss marketing, channel strategy, graphic design, career strategy, your LinkedIn presence, or the cybersecurity market.

Professional Headshot

Refresh your LinkedIn photo, speaker profile, or professional bio with a polished new headshot. Visit the headshot studio in the Expo Hall, located behind the Fornix Marketing booth. Walk-ins are welcome when space is available.

Fun Station & Postcards

Add some personality to your conference badge with stickers, supplies, and badge ribbons—or write and mail a postcard to someone back home. Stop by the Fun Station in the Expo Hall aka Marketing Land whenever you’re ready for a creative break.

Stop by the Registration Desk on the 2nd Floor Foyer and pick up your badge, swag bag, official conference notebook, and official conference t-shirt!

Good morning, CyberMarketingCon! Join us at 8:00 AM for complimentary coffee and breakfast, catch up with fellow attendees, and explore the booths in the Expo Hall, aka Marketing Land!

We’ll have a set number of breakfasts ready to welcome you, available first come, first served while supplies last.

There’s plenty to explore: send a postcard from our fun station, drop in for a fresh headshot, catch content on the Expo Hall stage, or settle into a seat for networking and meetings. Come grab a bite and start the day with us!

How do you get someone to open a door, bend a rule, or trust a stranger? Magicians, con artists, and social engineers have spent generations figuring it out.

In this funny, interactive keynote, Brian Brushwood (host of Discovery's Scam School and National Geographic's Hacking the System) takes you on a fun, funny tour inside the attacker's mindset. Through stories and demonstrations, he explores how trust, urgency, authority, and familiarity can be used to steer decisions, and why smart people are still vulnerable to a convincing story.

For cybersecurity marketers, it's a look at the human behavior behind the headlines: how believable deception gets constructed, why it works, and how understanding those mechanisms can help us recognize manipulation. Expect a talk that's fun, funny, and just a little bit dangerous.

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Most growth marketing sessions focus on channels, tools, or that magic campaign that'll solve everything. This isn't one of them.

In this session, Nicole Gates, VP of Global Growth Marketing at Varonis, shares the three things she found actually determine whether your growth team scales or stalls: the metrics you choose to optimize for, the people you hire (and why), and the culture that makes growth at the center of everything you build.

Because real growth happens when your strategy becomes shared thinking and your team can carry the vision without you in the room.

This session is for marketing leaders at every stage of building - whether you're making your first growth hire, restructuring a team that's outgrown its design, or trying to figure out why a talented team isn't producing the results the strategy promised.

In Q1 2026, CIS launched its first-ever flagship campaign, Secure by Design, and the results rewrote our marketing playbook. In one quarter: 96% engagement rate to our campaign landing page, 85% audio completion rate, 3,000+ guide downloads, 1,400+ leads, and 900k+ paid media impressions. None of it happened by accident. This session is a candid, step-by-step breakdown of how we built an integrated paid, owned, and earned campaign around a single idea and made it work for two completely different audiences simultaneously. You’ll leave with a replicable framework, the lessons we learned, and the one number that surprised us most.