Differentiation or death. Cybersecurity edition. With Nate Burke, CMO, 7AI

Cybersecurity marketing is a crowded room full of identical hoodies and identical taglines. So how do you stand out without turning your brand into a stack of webinars and wishful thinking?

In this episode of Marketing Mischief & Mayhem, Russell Quinan (Chief Strategy Officer, TheorySF) sits down with Nate Burke, CMO at 7AI (launching an agentic security platform built to give defenders an unfair advantage).

Nate’s also helped take Axonius from early stage to unicorn trajectory—and along the way learned a brutal truth about B2B growth: Brand and demand gen aren’t two separate teams. Brand is the story. Demand gen is the distribution system.

We get into the real work: Why “just doing stuff” is the fastest path to marketing mediocrity

How Nate measured brand and moved aided awareness from 9% to 37% in 18 months

The surprisingly effective campaign ingredient nobody expects in cybersecurity: Simone Biles (yes, really… and yes, it worked)

How to sell bold creative ideas to “bean counters” using engineering logic and funnel math

The difference between “feature soup” and a narrative that actually cuts through

Why B2B should be B2H: Business to Humans

How to spot stale messaging before your market starts saying, “Wait… isn’t this exactly like everyone else?”

When a brand refresh is actually necessary (hint: it’s not “because we’re bored”)

If you’ve ever walked an RSA floor and thought, “Why does every booth look like a stock photo with a security word salad?”—this one’s for you.

Subscribe for more conversations with the marketers building categories, picking fights with sameness, and occasionally committing strategic mischief.