By Adi Granot Bar-Lev, VP Brand & Communications at Pentera, and Aviv Cohen, Chief Marketing and Corporate Strategy Officer at Pentera – both G-CMO members.

We’re in love with our brand, but in a market as loud as cybersecurity, love isn’t enough. 

Darn it.

If you don’t live in the cyber industry, here’s the backdrop: cyber marketing has mostly sounded like a warning label. Black hoodies, red alerts, skulls, countdown clocks. The pitch is almost always some version of “do this, or else” – fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD), dressed up as a value proposition. For a long time it was treated as the only lever worth pulling. It works, in the way warning labels work. It also means every brand ends up saying the exact same thing, in the exact same voice.

You could easily count 3,000+ security brands, with over 500 new ones born every year. All of us are competing for the attention of the CISO and her direct reports. All of us are competing for mind share and wallet share. All of us promise to preempt, prevent, detect, respond, or recover from the next breach. All of us singing AI and next-gen.

Yet all of us are, in some way, the same. We boast about being the best platform to… blah blah blahbity bloo blah! We become part of the white noise.

I recall a conference where I met a prospect, gave him a demo, and called him the week after, assuming we’d pick up where we left off. “Remind me who you were out of the 100 vendors I spoke with” was what I got when I finally reached him. That stung, and it stuck with me.

The way to think about it: you’re selling insurance. Zero differentiation in the product itself. It’s all brand, getting people’s attention, and entertaining them as you market to them. Bundle your original message with entertainment value, and you get remembered.

This is the path we chose at Pentera from the early days, and it paid dividends. Here are five concepts anyone can follow, with an example for each.

#1 Exaggerate real-life situations

When you ridicule a real-life situation, it often comes out funny. At Pentera we wanted to show what would happen if you ran penetration testing 24/7, so we showed a family living in the office as a “24/7 pentesting service” with cooking, washing, a baby crying, and everything else not office-appropriate. It got the message across. Watch

#2 Ride the wave of sports

Everyone loves and relates to sports. For the last FIFA World Cup we wanted to show how Pentera changed the cyber game, giving defenders an unfair advantage over their adversaries. In sports it’s all about fairness. In cyber it’s the opposite. Pentera came out as the force of nature that gets you the win. Watch

This campaign also had a few after-gigs worth enjoying, including a streaker running naked across the soccer field. Watch

#3 Make your buyer the hero

Pentera’s Super Bowl ad used two elements: the likeable animal kingdom and the personal success story of our buyer. The ad follows Gary, a security manager and (scape)goat, who turns with Pentera’s help into the cyber G.O.A.T. – the Greatest Of All Time. Watch · Teaser

#4 The song and dance

Pop culture and the arts are always good to relate to, if you have the knack for it and can tap dance around copyrights. At one of the Black Hat conferences we turned our booth into a nightclub with cyber-themed rap battles by real rappers. It was definitely a hit. Recap. This category can extend to Broadway shows, like Wiz did, or parodies of known classics. Wiz Broadway

#5 A twist to a classic tale

Often you can tell a classic story with a twist of how it would have gone with your solution in the defender’s hands. Good examples are AppsFlyer’s “Three Little Pigs” (not cyber, but great) and Band’s “Orc-estrator”. Sometimes the register matters more than the specific tale – our children’s book, Castle Defenders: What Do Cyber Parents Do?, borrows the familiar shape kids already trust to explain what a cyber defender actually does. It hit Amazon’s bestseller list in its category. See it here

#6 Make it a monthly habit

Campaigns are bursts. For something that compounds, we run Cybertoons – a monthly comic that runs on the actual inside jokes and daily grind of security practitioners: budget fights with the board, alert fatigue, 2 a.m. incident calls, the tabletop exercise nobody wants to run. No pitch, no CTA, just the shared language of the job, drawn out once a month. pentera.io/cybertoon

Like in the Pixar movie Monsters, Inc., laughter is worth ten times more than any serious or scare tactic. First you need to be remembered by standing out and telling your story, wrapped nicely in an entertainment wrapper. Get those creative juices flowing, try out a creative campaign. You’re likely to score big.