Business Leader First, CMO Second with Tracey Moon of BlackCloak

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

You're listening to the CyberWire Network, powered by N2K. Welcome to the Breaking Through in Cybersecurity Marketing podcast, where we explore the hottest topics in cyber marketing, interview experts, and help you become a better cybersecurity marketer.

Gianna Whitver (0:25)

Hello, listener. Today, we have a very special segment episode. That's right. We are playing our CyberCMO Confidential segment, where we interview some of the best marketing leaders in cybersecurity and dive really, really deep into what they're thinking, how they do things, and the hard decisions they've had to make. Enjoy and send us a note, leave us a five-star review, or give us some feedback. Podcast at cybersecuritymarketingsociety.com.

Enjoy the episode.

Charles Gold (1:00)

Welcome to CMO Confidential, the only podcast that gets to the bottom of the burning question, what the f*** are CMOs actually thinking?

Gianna Whitver (1:09)

In each unfiltered episode, we interview a top cybersecurity marketing leader to drill into the issues that drive budgets, priorities, projects, and, occasionally, the desire to quit.

Charles Gold (1:20)

Listen to laugh, learn from the top, and commiserate.

Gianna Whitver (1:29)

Hello, and welcome to another special episode of Breaking Through in Cybersecurity Marketing. I'm your co-host, Gianna Whitver, here with my fabulous co-host, Charles Gold.

Today, we have another excellent episode of CyberCMO Confidential, where we dive into what makes top-leading cybersecurity CMOs tick. Tick with joy or tick with anger? Tick with rage, like a ticking time bomb. It depends on what the topic is. Today, we have the amazing Tracey Moon. She is a multi-time CMO in the cybersecurity industry, and she is currently Chief Marketing Officer at BlackCloak. Tracey, thank you so much for being on with us.

Tracey Moon (2:16)

Thanks for having me.

Gianna Whitver (2:17)

You're so fun to talk to also, so really excited for this.

Tracey Moon (2:21)

It'll be fun.

You already said my name, so everybody knows I'm Tracey Moon. I have been in the tech industry for a really long time, and I'm not going to tell you how many years. In and around all types of software, professional services, what have you, and cybersecurity for the last many years. As you said, Gianna, I've had the opportunity to work at some interesting startup environments.

Now, I found myself a BlackCloak, and so what BlackCloak does is our mission is, we call it Digital Executive Protection. It's a category that the company has actually coined. Our founder and CEO coined and saw a gap in the market. What we do is we protect executives and their families and their personal lives to help prevent breaches from happening to the corporation. A lot of major breaches that you read about, I'll throw out the last pass one, which was very famous. That was an engineer who happened to access the company's systems through their VPN at home. That was how the threat actor got through and got to the company. You see that executives, senior leaders have to access sensitive data all the time, and they do it from their personal lives, and that creates an element of risk. So we protect what we call outside the corporate perimeter because companies can't legally, frankly, protect you and your personal life because you can't put corporate tools in your home. It's your, right, your privacy line, even though in the US we don't have a whole lot of privacy protections, there is that one left where the company can't monitor your activity and put tools on your phones or your home networks and this and that and all the other stuff.

Gianna Whitver (4:05)

Cool. That's cool.

Tracey Moon (4:06)

Yeah, so it's pretty interesting.

Gianna Whitver (4:08)

How big is your team, Tracey? What does the marketing org look like?

Tracey Moon (4:11)

Yeah, my team, we have a total of seven people. And if I got the number wrong, I'm going to figure that out as I tell you how we're structured. So we have seven. And then I also have my band of Mary Fellows who follow me around where I go. And I like to create kind of an internal and healthy amount of independent contractors around us, because then you sort of get that outside in view and a lot of objective advice, which I crave many times.

So we have what you would typically find. I don't create a lot of hierarchy, and I'm not probably as traditional as some folks use. So we do have a focus on digital, and we have to build content. And we have people that do marketing ops, and work our systems, and do all of the reporting.

And then we focus a lot on process and efficiency. So I have what I call kind of an uber program manager, even though she's so much more than that. She knows contents campaigns. She does a little bit of product marketing, but she's the one who builds our whole infrastructure, I'd say, of how we operate, and we do that based on Asana. So she's amazing. And then if we work with agencies, they're always very small, because I don't like being agency-ed, if you know what I mean. And so we have a small creative group out of the UK, and then our content strategist is actually technically external, even though we treat her like part of the family.