How Wiz Traded Panic for Play at Cybersecurity Trade Shows -

Roy Katz, Head of Brand, Wiz

The doom of cyberattacks is real at security and tech trade shows, where dark colors and actors dressed as hackers dominate the show floor. It’s high stakes, high stress all the time. Wiz, a cloud-security company, flipped the script on panic with a booth drenched in pinks and purples and activations that kept chief security information officers experiencing something they rarely expect to feel: fun.

From “Shift Left” hotdogs and “Toxic Combination” milkshakes at the Wiz Diner at AWS re:Invent, to “Go Phish!” and “CISO’s Against Calamity,” cheeky takes on popular games at the CISOtopia—a toy store-themed booth at RSAC—the brand continues to find ways to speak its audience’s language to build connections and expand its reach. But it wasn’t always like that.

EM sat down with Roy Katz, Wiz’s head of brand, and Jasmin Ozeri, head of strategic events, to talk about the evolving strategy and why serious experts can’t get enough of toy stores.

Themes as a Winning Strategy

When Wiz first started coming to trade shows over three years ago, it had zero brand awareness and few prospects of standing out among established companies, says Ozeri. “Our booth was empty, and no one wanted to listen to our pitch. We had to find a way to capture the attention.”

One of the early booth themes became the Wizard of Wiz, complete with the yellow brick road and actors dressed as Dorothy and the Tin Man. Then the Wiz Diner went a step further and introduced the company’s products through menu items wrapped in inside jokes. The audience ate it up.

Jasmin Ozeri, Head of Strategic Events, Wiz

“We started to understand that by continuously introducing new themes, we rekindle the curiosity of our existing customers, drawing them in to explore our latest innovations,” says Katz. “This strategy not only strengthens our relationships but also amplifies our brand awareness.”

For WizMart, the idea was to connect everyday products to cloud security, such as the “Cloud Visibility Spray” with a nod to a glass cleaner from the supermarket. A year later, a video store-themed booth brought attendees into the world of reimagined blockbusters. Currently, the annual trade show strategy is centered on two themes that must be scalable across 24 global strategic events.

In 2025, the main theme has been CISOtopia, the brand’s cybersecurity toy store filled with popular games, such as Uno, Monopoly and Lego, reimaged to represent the company’s products.

“It started as an April Fools’ joke,” Katz says. “We created an online store offering products with inside cybersecurity jokes, like a giant panic button and a keyboard with only Shift and Left keys.”

On the show floor, the concept translated into a store-themed booth where attendees went on a treasure hunt by scanning the QR codes under the toys to learn about the brand’s products and win exclusive swag that has become a coveted part of the experience (Design and Build: Exhibitus).

The second theme for this year is still a secret.

Granular Measurement

“As soon as we started doing themes at conferences, we got 3.5-times more leads than at events where we didn’t do themes, because more people came to our booth,” Katz says.

Every interaction is measured, starting with pre-show social media presence, to QR code scans during the games, heat mapping, badge scans during presentations and demo sessions, to Salesforce campaigns and the social media posts and mentions post-event.

“We measure each of those touch points separately because we want to know how people are engaging in our booth and how that influences the pipeline,” says Ozeri. “Post event, we also look at how many people added us on LinkedIn, registered for our hosted events, and even visited our Careers page.”

To Swag and Beyond

The brand’s first giveaway was pink socks with a unicorn riding a rocket, celebrating having reached the unicorn status.

As the strategy shifted from pure brand awareness to introducing a wider product range and building deeper connections, the brand had to find a way to balance being approachable with engaging with qualified leads. One way to do that was to put the scavenger hunts on the booth’s outside perimeter while moving the swag counter into the middle and only giving away the items after certain tasks. Custom sneakers are still a cool draw.

At CISOtopia, even empty game boxes had a hard time staying on the shelves. “We were surprised by how many people wanted to buy the games even though they were not for sale,” Ozeri says. “We’d tell them it’s empty boxes but they’d say, ‘I don’t care. I want it for my Zoom background.’”

Along with cool swag and deeper product knowledge, the brand’s aim is for attendees to walk away with positive memories that are easily triggered with follow-up emails. “We say, ‘Thank you for having a doughnut with us,’ and they instantly know what booth and product we’re talking about,” Ozeri says. “The experience continues, and they’re excited to respond.”