Last week at Moscone, RSAC reminded us of a truth B2B marketers keep learning over and over again: when everyone is trying to be loud, the brands that win are the ones that know how to be interesting.
Beneath all the expo-floor chaos – the giant booths, the threat warnings, the glowing purple lights – some real patterns emerged. The best brands weren’t just trying to get seen. They were building worlds. Creating moments. Manufacturing intrigue. Giving people something to do, react to, laugh at, line up for, or text a coworker about later.
That’s the part worth paying attention to.
Some of the best brand experiences happened outside the event
A lot of the most memorable activations weren’t actually inside Moscone.
Wiz, Deloitte, GitHub, and Orca were among the brands creating offsite experiences that gave attendees a break from the recycled air and chaos of the expo floor. Wiz’s AI Free Zone – chess, coffee, and soft serve in a space that felt exquisitely branded and almost suspiciously calm – may have been the sharpest strategic move of the whole show. Not because it was fancy, but because it understood something important: if the show floor is chaos, then calm becomes a differentiator. GitHub’s Dock turned multiple floors near Natoma into a polished, genuinely pleasant environment for food and talks. Orca set up coffee and cookies right next door. Even the line felt peaceful, which might be the most shocking sentence I can write about RSAC.
These offsite spaces gave brands more control, more intimacy, and a better backdrop for actual conversations. They didn’t feel premium because they had nicer snacks. They felt premium because they created a different pace.
Sometimes the strongest thing you can do at an event is leave the event.
The giveaway game now comes with a hurdle
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There was still plenty of swag. Some of it was fun, some of it was junk, some of it will absolutely be living in the bottom of someone’s tote bag until 2029.
But the more interesting shift was that the best giveaways were rarely being tossed around like candy. You had to earn them. Scan your badge. Talk to someone. Sit through a demo. Play the game. Hit the target. The higher-end items – sneakers, guitars, jerseys, weirdly coveted stuffed animals – came with a hurdle to entry.
And honestly? Good.
When not everything is free-for-all, the giveaway stops being background noise and starts becoming a mechanism for engagement. It creates a little friction, which in this case is actually useful. It boosts perceived value, gives people a reason to stick around, and helps brands avoid the sad spectacle of someone grabbing merch with dead eyes and zero interest in what the company actually does.
Participation makes the brand moment more memorable. People value what they had to do something to get, even if that something was just pretending to be extremely interested in a five-minute platform demo.
Characters are still everywhere, and apparently we are all fine with that
Mascots, monsters, superheroes, skeletons. RSAC remains committed to the bit.
CrowdStrike had a giant cyber attacker creature guarding their booth. Reco had a whole lineup of superheroes for photo ops. Black Duck, Orca, and the Wiz robot all suited up. Torq had an inflatable skeleton. And there was a rogue Demogorgon wandering the floor, which raised more questions than answers, but full points for commitment.
On one level, this is all very silly. On another, it works.
Cybersecurity is an abstract category. A lot of what these brands sell is invisible – risk, identity, exposure, threat surface, misconfiguration. You cannot exactly wheel “lateral movement” onto a trade show floor and expect people to get excited. Characters help turn abstract ideas into something concrete, memorable, and photographable. And this is still a delightfully nerdy audience – the overlap between people who care deeply about cybersecurity and people who will absolutely stop for a giant robot or a villainous creature is not small.
So yes, the mascots persist. And no, I don’t think marketers are entirely wrong about that.
FUD is still alive, even if everyone claims they’re over it
If you ask most cybersecurity marketers, they’ll tell you they want to move beyond fear-based marketing.
If you walk the RSAC floor, you may come away with a slightly different impression.
There was still plenty of fear language on display. Breaches. Alerts. Attacks. Urgency stacked on urgency. Which isn’t entirely manufactured – the threats are real, the stakes are high, and AI is pouring accelerant on all of it. It’s hard to market cybersecurity without acknowledging that bad things can and do happen.
But the tension is still interesting. Brands want to sound empowering, but the category remains magnetically drawn to doom. The brands that stood out weren’t the ones pretending everything is sunshine and resilience. They were the ones that could acknowledge risk without making fear their entire personality. In a sea of “everything is on fire,” the more confident, grounded brands felt refreshingly adult.
World-building beat booth-building
This was the most fun trend on the floor, and the most instructive one.
Alice.io went full Alice in Wonderland tea party, complete with upside-down furniture and bow-tied servers. Legion had a full medieval castle with a giant dragon suspended overhead – not subtle, but visible from approximately every zip code in San Francisco. Noma built out a pizzeria. Dropzone AI had a diner, complete with checkered floors, neon signage, and a chalkboard listing the day’s specials (Threat Hunter Demo, AI SOC Analyst Demo, Photo Booth, Raffles).
And then there was Commvault, which staged an actual wrestling match in the middle of the show floor. A ring. Announcers. Trash talk. Branded luchador masks. A crowd that stopped and stayed. Carilu Dietrich had an amazing recap on her LinkedIn.
This one really stopped me. Not because wrestling is an obvious choice for a data resilience company – it absolutely isn’t – but because it committed so completely that the concept carried. It was fun, fresh, loud, and impossible to ignore. And at RSAC, that counts for a lot.
What made these activations work is that they did more than decorate a booth. They built a world people could enter. That’s a fundamentally more powerful branding move – it creates immersion, curiosity, and the very rare B2B event feeling of “wait, what is happening over there?” In a category full of sameness, world-building is a flex.
Cybersecurity is having a rock-and-roll phase
There were a lot of guitars. Truly, a lot.
Broadcom had the giant amp, the neon script, the stage-set energy. Zafran Security opened a full-on record-store activation – vinyl, guitars, lava lamps, an old CRT television on static – that felt genuinely like a Tower Records had crash-landed on the show floor. CyberArk leaned into similar territory.
The appeal is obvious. Music culture offers a shortcut to edge – a way to signal cool, rebellion, and taste in a category that defaults to corporate grayscale and threat dashboards. And the instinct is sound. Cyber brands are looking for cultural cues that help them feel more distinct and less interchangeable.
The risk, though, is real – when the activation feels cooler than the brand, people notice. A vintage record store says something very specific about personality and taste. If that energy doesn’t connect back to how the brand actually speaks, sells, and shows up the rest of the year, it reads as costume rather than character. The brands that pull this off aren’t just borrowing music’s aesthetic. They’re using it to say something true about who they are.
Customized merch is still undefeated
Customization was everywhere again. Iron-ons, patches, embroidery – all the classics, all with lines. And it keeps working for an obvious reason: generic swag is forgettable, but customized swag feels chosen. Even when the item itself isn’t luxurious, the act of making it yours changes the value equation. It stops being another branded object and becomes your branded object.
The best version of this was the Venice booth, doing custom embroidery on jean jackets in a space styled like an old-school tailor shop. Smart, because it didn’t stop at the merch mechanic. The experience tied back to a brand story. The customization wasn’t random – it was part of the concept. That’s when this trend really works: not just when it’s fun, but when it actually reinforces positioning.
So what ties all of this together?
It wasn’t spectacle. It was specificity.
The strongest brands at RSAC weren’t simply trying to be bigger or louder. They had a point of view. A feeling. A world. A reason for someone to stop and say, “Well, that was different.” And in most cases, you could feel the intentionality behind it – a decision someone made, and committed to, all the way through.
That’s the real opportunity in cybersecurity marketing right now. The category is crowded. Everyone wants to look innovative. Everyone wants to sound urgent. But a lot of brands are still using the same aesthetic shortcuts and saying variations of the same thing.
The ones people actually remember are usually the ones brave enough to be a little less buttoned-up. To build the wrestling ring. To go full Wonderland. To hand someone a soft serve cone in the middle of an AI security conference and let the contrast do the talking.
From a Sköna point of view, that’s the bar. Distinctiveness isn’t about adding more stuff. It’s about making sharper choices – and then trusting them enough to follow through.
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