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

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.

Field Marketers Mixer

For the marketers turning events, regional programs, and face-to-face experiences into real business impact. Meet fellow field marketers to exchange ideas, compare notes, and talk candidly about everything from sales alignment and event strategy to attribution and proving ROI._x000D_

What if tomorrow you were told: no more forms? No gated whitepapers. No registration walls. No lead lists tied to a single download. How would you know who was actually in market?

This session will explore a future in which demand generation shifts from gating leads to consuming third-party engagement signals.  The value is in access to these signals over time.  And access allows marketers to combine those signals with their own CRM, web, advertising, and intent data to determine what buyer behavior actually matters.  To them.

Visibility into your own gated content, the cornerstone of measuring attribution for decades, provides a glimpse into only a fraction of the relevant signals available.  Without capturing the research, competitive exploration, event attendance, and digital content engagement that may have occurred outside your ecosystem you end up with a limited glimpse into the buyer's journey.  And perhaps more importantly, limited opportunity to influence potential buyers.

Ecosystems with known, first-party subscribed audiences can see a very different version of that journey. Gated and ungated content consumption, product category interest, competitor engagement, in-person event attendance, changes in activity and multiple people researching within the same account can create signals that traditional attribution systems rarely see.

We'll talk about attribution, content strategy, intent data and the future of leads.  And show how marketers have the ability right now to capture current demand, while at the same time influencing future demand using engagement signals.

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Many cyber marketing teams waste budget on tactics their team and/or organization isn’t ready for. Drawing on 10 years of hands-on experience—from startup to global enterprise—this talk introduces a practical demand generation maturity framework. You’ll learn which initiatives fit each stage, from simple content syndication and intimate executive events for early-stage companies, to ABM and partner-driven campaigns for mature players, always with sales alignment at the core.

Cybersecurity buyers are not looking for reasons to believe you. They are looking for reasons not to.

That is why documentation matters long before onboarding. When a product page promises easy deployment, enterprise-grade controls, AI-powered detection, seamless integrations, or fast time to value, buyers eventually look for the technical reality underneath the claim.

This session reframes documentation as a pre-sale trust channel for cybersecurity companies. Attendees will learn how to run a Docs Trust Audit across five dimensions: claim alignment, technical evaluability, implementation clarity, proof and limitations, and freshness. The goal is not to make docs sound like marketing. The goal is to make marketing more defensible by connecting claims to clear, current, buyer-useful technical evidence.

Attendees will leave with a practical framework they can use with PMM, content, docs, product, sales engineering, and customer education teams.

Is your swag strategy actually tied to a goal, or are you just shopping?In this session we’re delving into the murky, sometimes controversial, world of physical branded material as a strategy to answer two questions: Is swag done wrong still worth doing? And more importantly, how do you actually do it right? Swag should be so much more than cheap crap given out at a tradeshow booth. Just like any technical marketing campaign, physical touchpoints require a clear definition of "what does good look like?". We’ll break down how to map physical branded items across the entire GTM lifecycle, from pipeline generation and sales enablement to customer onboarding and building "IYKYK" user advocacy. (Bonus points: we’ll also cover how to strategically leverage swag internally for team alignment and employee rewards to justify those super cool jackets we just HAVE to have).We'll explore the friction points that standard strategies ignore: the critical balance between clear branding and aesthetic appeal, whether to use logos or memes on executive vs. booth apparel, and how to calculate the lifespan of your items against shifting product positioning so you don't get stuck with obsolete inventory. We’ll also look at how to scale your swag's impact beyond a single event, ensuring your physical themes seamlessly reinforce your social, email, and webinar campaigns.Look, I don't have a crystal ball, so I’m not going to tell you which specific item works every single time. I'm also not here to talk about pricing, budgets, or the logistics of setting up a store. What we are going to talk about is how to stop wasting money on poor execution, and instead how to use high-quality items to entice movement of leads into qualified opportunities, the power of messaging on your packaging, and how to gain actual visibility into your CRM.Stop letting accounting hate your promo line items. Swag is a massive GTM lever if you use it right, let's put an end to bad swag!

Marketers often still think of influencers as a media channel: give creators a message, have them turn it into content, and put it in front of their audience. But that’s only one part of what creators can bring to a marketing program.The best creator partnerships give brands access to much more than reach. A creator can help shape content ideas, develop messaging, translate complex products into compelling stories, and produce the content while also providing a direct line to the audience. In other words, you’re not just hiring a media channel—you’re tapping into a creative and marketing powerhouse.This session will explore how marketers can think beyond sponsored posts and start relying on creators as strategic partners. Attendees will learn how to structure partnerships that unlock the full value creators can bring, rather than treating them as simply another channel for delivering a brand message.

Antu Buck, who built the customer marketing function from the ground up at Gigamon and previously led programs at McAfee and Intel, challenges the common misconception that customer marketing is merely a content function. Instead, she positions it as a core growth driver that directly influences revenue, retention, and product direction.

In this session, Antu breaks customer marketing into three strategic pillars: customer advocacy (testimonials, case studies, and reference programs), community engagement (executive briefings, advisory boards, and social channels), and customer lifecycle management (onboarding, renewal, and expansion in close partnership with customer success). She shares how maintaining authentic voice-of-the-customer requires resisting over-scripted narratives—favoring open-ended questions that surface real insights and credible stories.

Through real-world examples, Antu demonstrates how customer feedback reshaped Gigamon’s messaging from public cloud to hybrid cloud, and how a customer advisory board directly influenced the launch of precryption. She also introduces her “credibility loop,” powered by transparent internal communication and executive dashboards tied to business outcomes.

Attendees will walk away with a practical starter playbook: align to business goals first, implement foundational tools within 30 days, establish advocacy and reference programs early, and progressively layer in win-loss research and advisory boards. This session is ideal for marketers looking to elevate customer marketing into a measurable, strategic growth function

Want to build your founder brand? It starts with knowing how to communicate your story, expertise, and vision with clarity, confidence, and consistency.

In cybersecurity, a strong founder brand can establish trust, create market visibility, attract customers and talent, and position both you and your company as credible industry leaders. But turning deep technical expertise into a compelling public presence requires more than simply knowing your subject—it requires thoughtful messaging, memorable storytelling, and media readiness.

In this interactive workshop, founders will learn how to define the ideas and perspectives they want their founder brands to represent—and communicate them effectively across interviews, podcasts, panels, and other high-visibility opportunities. Participants will explore how to develop concise, audience-focused messaging, translate complex cybersecurity topics into engaging narratives, and respond confidently to difficult or unexpected questions.

Through guided exercises and real-world scenarios, attendees will practice staying on message, delivering memorable sound bites, and connecting each media appearance to their broader founder-brand and business goals. They’ll leave better prepared to build executive visibility, strengthen market credibility, and become trusted voices for their companies and the cybersecurity industry.

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Cybersecurity buyers don’t want to be sold to- they want to validate, learn, and hear from people like them before they ever take a meeting.

So they turn to community.

Whether it’s private Slack groups, Discord servers, niche forums, or in-person conversations, the real buying journey is happening in places most marketing teams don’t control and often don’t participate in effectively.

This session breaks down how to turn those community spaces into a deliberate, scalable growth motion without killing the trust that makes them valuable in the first place.

I’ll share how we’ve approached community-led growth in cybersecurity, including what actually drives engagement (and what quietly kills it), how to activate practitioners as advocates in a way that feels natural, not transactional, and how to connect community efforts to real business outcomes like pipeline influence and deal acceleration.

This is not a “start a Slack group” talk. It’s a practical look at how to meet buyers where they already are and earn your way into the conversation.

Most cyber founders I meet think analyst relations is something you do "later": a tax you pay once you can afford Gartner, run by marketing, aimed at getting a distinct dot on a chart. That belief costs them one of the cheapest, fastest sources of market truth a startup can get.

In this session I'll reframe AR for CEOs and founders as a growth and traction tool, not a marketing or PR line item, drawing on a decade running AR across tech, VC, and cybersecurity and 300+ analyst engagements with significant outcomes in terms of number of mentions, category creation, and influence over pipeline and revenue. The analysts who write the reports also take inquiry calls from hundreds of your buyers and every one of your competitors. Engaged well, they become a feedback loop that provides upfront feedback on your positioning and category, a credibility signal that adds confidence and removes friction for a CISO betting on a startup, and an influence channel that touches deals and shapes how investors see you.

I'll show you what AR actually does for product-market fit, traction, and revenue; when to start (earlier than you think) and with whom; an MVP cadence a small team can run; and the moves that only founders can make. I'll separate the real impact from the expensive theater, so you spend scarce time and money where it yields results to your growing startup.

Join us as we close out this year's CyberMarketingCon with final thoughts, key takeaways, and a look ahead to next year.