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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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!_x000D_

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!

As AI makes it easier than ever to create content and campaigns, it's also making it easier than ever to sound exactly like everyone else. The more marketers rely on the same tools, prompts, playbooks, and best practices, the more the market becomes flooded with safe, predictable, and forgettable work.

In this keynote, Nathan Burke makes the bold claim that discomfort is becoming a competitive advantage. That being uncomfortable pushes the boundaries of your work towards what’s actually new, impactful, and worth making.

Drawing from lessons learned building high-growth cybersecurity companies, working within cultures obsessed with continuous improvement, and embracing AI as a force multiplier rather than a crutch, Nathan will explore why complacency is the enemy of great work. He'll share practical ways to seek criticism instead of compliments, challenge conventional thinking, and push beyond the ideas that feel safe.

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Our industry publishes hundreds of "state of" reports, threat landscapes, and security surveys every year. Practitioners ignore most of them. But there are good news for marketers: The report practitioners actually read, cite, and share is also the one that does the most for your brand and your pipeline. Useful and effective are not opposites. But most security research is just more of the same: Recycled dwell-time stats, leading survey questions, "n=12 CISOs" passed off as data, and a single headline number nobody can map to their own environment.This session is a practical design guide for reports and surveys the practitioner actually wants to read. We'll cover survey design that doesn't generate garbage, metrics that survive a skeptical reader, why segmentation beats a scary average, and how to mine the telemetry you already own instead of running another opinion poll. The goal is produce content practitioners trust — which is the only research that earns the awareness and demand you were after in the first place.

Many marketers view working with industry analysts as a necessary evil and an opportunity to tell them everything about what makes their product or service great. Marketers may only interact with analysts during evaluations, then forget about them until the next one. Getting the most out of industry analysts, however, requires ongoing engagement and listening as much as (or preferably, more than) you speak. Embedding analyst interactions in your marketing roadmap can provide objective third-party insight at crucial points throughout the year. Hear from Recovering Marketer and Forrester VP and Research Director Joseph Blankenship (JB) who was a cybersecurity marketer for 10 years before joining Forrester as an analyst. JB will talk about what worked for him as a marketer, what he sees successful marketers doing as they interact with analysts, and how well-timed analyst interactions can inform your marketing roadmap. Session attendees will learn:•_x0009_Understanding what analysts really do and how they can inform your marketing•_x0009_Creating a playbook for ongoing, successful analyst engagement•_x0009_Embedding analyst interactions to inform your product and messaging launches

AI is reshaping cybersecurity faster than traditional product marketing can adapt. As enterprises move from copilots to autonomous agents, buyers are no longer evaluating features—they are evaluating trust, governance, and operational control. This session explores how cybersecurity PMMs must evolve from messaging products to defining categories, shaping executive narratives, and building the mental models CIOs and CISOs use to navigate the autonomous enterprise.

Join us for CyberCMO Summit introductions. We'll talk about the Summit and give every CMO in the room a chance to introduce themselves.

For the better part of a decade, the dominant gospel in B2B marketing has been measurement. If you could not attribute it, you should not spend on it. Creative became a variable to test, not a discipline to invest in. Brand became a line item to defend rather than an asset to build. The marketers who rose fastest were the ones who could read a dashboard, not the ones who could write a brief.

The results are everywhere. Categories full of companies that sound identical. Messaging optimized for search terms no buyer actually uses. Campaigns that convert in the model and disappear from memory the moment the window closes.

Eric Gaither has spent twenty years on the other side of that equation. As the brand and creative lead through some of the most consequential moments in cybersecurity marketing, including the FireEye global rebrand, the Mandiant relaunch after divestiture, and the Google Cloud Security integration, he built programs where the creative work did the strategic work. Where the words sounded like something a real person would say to another real person, not a sentence assembled from intent data.

In March 2026, he led the launch of Armadin, which raised $189.9 million in combined seed and Series A funding, the largest raise in cybersecurity history. The launch captured national media attention, drew partnerships with CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks, and reached enterprise customers in search of cybersecurity proof. The launch did not land because of a keyword strategy. It landed because the narrative was clear, the message was human, and the story gave a sophisticated audience something worth paying attention to.

His argument is not that data does not matter. It is that data without creative judgment produces marketing that is measurable yet forgettable. The most effective B2B marketing has always been both rigorous and human. The pendulum swung too far in one direction, and the companies that recognize that first will have a material advantage.

This session will cover what it looks like in practice to let data inform creative rather than replace it, why the cybersecurity category is a particularly instructive case study in what happens when messaging gets optimized into abstraction, and what the return to balance actually requires from marketing leaders who built their careers in the data era.

Join Jen, Gianna, and some other members of the team for an open conversation about what’s ahead for the Cybersecurity Marketing Society. Hear their vision for the community’s future, learn about emerging priorities, and share your ideas and feedback. This interactive session is an opportunity to help shape the Society’s next chapter.

AI-generated “spokespeople” are showing up everywhere—but the real value isn’t in letting them speak for you. It’s in how fast they help you get to a strong, human-ready message.

This session breaks down how to build Spokespeople GPTs—custom AI models trained on a brand’s voice, expertise, and guardrails—to rapidly generate drafts, talking points, FAQs, and scenario responses without replacing human judgment.

Attendees will learn how these GPTs can compress hours of prep into minutes, support comms and marketing teams under pressure, and reduce risk by standardizing first drafts—while keeping humans firmly in control of the final output.

No hype, no “AI replaces your team” narrative—just a practical framework for using AI as a speed layer in modern marketing and communications.

Everyone's talking about AI for content. This talk is about something harder and far more interesting: using AI as a genuine executive proxy to extend your judgment, not just your output.

I was drowning in reviews, my team was bottlenecked by my calendar, and everyone was frustrated. I knew there had to be a better way, so I built an AI system that knows my team, my standards, my stakeholders, and my review criteria well enough to triage decisions, draft feedback, manage review queues, and hold my quality bar—whether I'm in meetings all day or out of office for three weeks.

This isn't about prompt hacks or saving 20 minutes on a blog post. It's about what happens when you invest in training AI on how you think. We'll dive into the surprising places where it works, the important places where it doesn't, and what that distinction teaches you about your own leadership.

I'll share the real system behind the 'real' Claudia: how I documented my standards, how I trained my AI proxy, where it's saved me meaningful time, where it's failed, and what it's revealed about the gap between what I think I communicate and what my team actually receives.

Running a cyber company means constantly shifting how you talk about value. Governments, enterprises, Boards, CISOs, operators, and investors all buy for different reasons, yet most cyber firms try and sell to all of them with the same language. For a while, we did the same thing and that disconnect is one of the biggest reasons good products/services/solutions struggle in market.

This session is a candid look at what I’ve learned as a CEO of a cyber firm and Board member to several others, selling across very different customer segments. I’ll share real lessons learned, especially the mistakes, about how messaging breaks down, why differentiation gets harder as companies scale and cyber goes from being a niche to being mainstream, and how internal tools, data, and lived experience can be used to create credibility.

This session focuses on practical realities - what actually resonates with buyers, what executives and boards listen for, and how CEOs can align product, sales, and marketing around trust and differentiation. One example I'll focus on is the development and GTM of a cyber product/solution we built which ultimately required a full pivot of approach and vertical. he goal is to help cyber leaders stop sounding like everyone else and start communicating in ways that reflect how buyers really make decisions.

In the cybersecurity industry, your most successful customers are often the ones who need to remain the most anonymous. When your buyers prioritize discretion, standard advocacy programs often fail to gain traction. The key is to stop chasing public case studies and start focusing on building deep, long-term executive relationships.This session provides a practical framework for navigating these constraints. We will share 5 actionable tips for maximizing executive relationships to drive advocacy, regardless of the industry's need for secrecy. You will learn how to earn the time of security leaders, align your program with their specific business goals, and build a sustainable influence loop that thrives behind the scenes. Join us to discover how to turn your executive engagement into a high-impact engine for customer advocacy.

An informal, no-agenda meetup for anyone working at the intersection of cybersecurity brands and creator marketing — whether you're a creator looking for brand partners, a marketer looking for creators, or just curious how the two worlds are starting to collide.

We'll kick things off with a simple icebreaker (who are you, and why did you come to the influencer/cyber brand meetup?) and let the conversation take it from there!

A host will be there to facilitate introductions and conversations for the shy! :)

Many cybersecurity companies rely on partners for their route to market, but enabling those partners effectively at scale is a constant challenge. Traditional approaches fall short when partners need 24/7 support across multiple geographies, languages, and time zones.

In this session, I'll share how we built an AI agent that goes far beyond basic lead enrichment to become a true partner enablement tool. Our agent is embedded directly into partners' existing workflows—their CRMs, Slack channels, email systems, and Teams accounts—making it accessible exactly where they need it, when they need it, in the language they need it.

But here's what makes it different: our agent doesn't just answer questions. It can assess the security posture of any potential client on the planet, providing partners with actionable insights that help them sell more effectively. This isn't a chatbot—it's a true AI assistant that understands both our product and the cybersecurity landscape.

I'll walk through:- Why we chose AI agents over traditional partner enablement methods- How we designed for workflow integration (not just another tool)- The technical and strategic decisions that made this work- Real results: what this has meant for our partner relationships and sales- Practical lessons for other cybersecurity companies building similar solutions

Whether you're in leadership, product marketing, channel management, or GTM strategy, you'll leave with actionable insights on how to leverage AI to scale your partner enablement efforts.

Maisa Fernandez of Palo Alto Networks will kick off the session by sharing her current journey rebuilding the partner marketing program to be more outcome and revenue driven, with a focus on partner profitability, co-sell velocity, field activation, and measurable impact.

From there, we’ll break into smaller roundtables for candid peer discussion around the challenges and opportunities shaping partner marketing today. Participants will share real-world experiences, compare approaches, and collaborate on practical ideas they can take back to their own organizations. The highly interactive format is designed to encourage open conversation, fresh perspectives, and meaningful peer-to-peer learning.

Discussion Tables will include (pick 2):

• Improving visibility into partner-generated pipeline
• Scaling across a diverse partner ecosystem
• Driving adoption of partner self-service tools
• Identifying the highest-impact partner marketing tactics
• Open Mic: Choose Your Own Adventure

Come with a challenge and leave with the ways to solve it.

Join fellow cybersecurity product marketers for focused, small-group conversations about the challenges shaping your work. Exchange practical ideas on positioning, messaging, product launches, competitive intelligence, sales enablement, customer insights, and translating complex solutions into clear value.

These peer-led roundtables are designed for candid discussion, shared problem-solving, and actionable takeaways. Bring a question, a challenge, or a lesson worth sharing—and leave with fresh perspectives from marketers who understand the work.