Turning security teams into heroes at the RSA Conference

Brief

Expel’s marketing team came up with “Heroes Assemble,” a booth that celebrated our customers and our own security team as heroes. My job was to make that land with a floor full of security professionals, and turn the attention into live product demos.

Challenge

Hero-themed booths had been done at RSA before, and they felt childish. This had to be fun for a security crowd without tipping into cartoon. We were also working inside an existing booth structure, with fixed lighting and a logo already in place, and my team was down a designer on sabbatical.

Solution

I took the look toward cinematic sci-fi, the worlds our CEO loved, and got leadership and the booth vendor behind it. I designed the booth wrap around the fixed lighting and the screens for the video, storyboarded it and developed the hero characters with the AI photo booth company. An 18-foot screen cycled our customers and SOC team as heroes, pulling people in from across the floor. Inside, the photo booth used the same style, so what attendees saw on the wall was what they got when they stepped in.

The swag was the lever. The internal push was for heavily Expel-branded giveaways, the standard conference playbook. I pushed back and designed every patch myself, with a security-community sense of humor, and our own security team voted on which ones made the cut. The only way to get one was a live demo. One day the line wrapped around the booth.