CrowdStrike Fal.Con 2025 | Jennifer (JJ) Johnson, CrowdStrike

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Jennifer Johnson

CMO

CrowdStrike

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Jennifer (JJ) Johnson, CrowdStrike

Jennifer Johnson

CMO CrowdStrike

In this exclusive interview from Fal.Con 2025 at the MGM Grand, theCUBE’s Rebecca Knight and Dave Vellante talk with Jennifer “JJ” Johnson, chief marketing officer of CrowdStrike. With a record-breaking 8,000 attendees from 65 countries, Johnson explains how Fal.Con has grown beyond a user conference into a global industry event - and why the brand’s momentum is only accelerating as the company heads to Barcelona this November.

Johnson unpacks CrowdStrike’s vision for the AI era of cybersecurity, including the Enterprise Graph, Charlotte AI and a fut... Read more

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Rebecca Knight

>> Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Fal.Con 2025, here at the MGM Grand. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside Dave Vellante, my co-host and analyst. I would like to welcome Jennifer JJ Johnson, the CMO of CrowdStrike, to the show. Welcome back, Jennifer.

Jennifer Johnson

>> Thank you. It is great to have you both here with us and 8,000 of our closest friends this year.

Dave Vellante

>> Amazing.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, let's talk about that. 8,000 people, 65 countries represented. Your fastest sellout ever. I mean, it's incredible. What is driving this momentum in your mind, JJ?

Jennifer Johnson

>> Well, and thank you for acknowledging that. There's other industry conferences that are, I think, maybe fighting a little bit more for relevance and a lot of other vendors have stopped doing their user conferences, and ours just continues to grow. And I think as you'll see behind us, this is really the first year where this has transcended our user conference. I mean, look at everything behind us, right? This is now an industry conference. And I think that number one, it speaks to the power of our ecosystem and everyone coming together and integrating with CrowdStrike and building on top of CrowdStrike, and that is the definition of a platform. And we're nothing without our ecosystem. It speaks to the strength of our brand. I mean, we are blessed, we have great leaders, we have great technology, we have amazing customers, amazing ecosystem partners. All of that together is... And we do pretty cool marketing, I have to say.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm really proud of you guys.

Jennifer Johnson

>> I'm proud of the work that we do. But as we know, the brand is so much more than creative. But I think we've done a really good job of... As Fal.Con has grown, this is my third Fal.Con as CMO and watching it grow, I think we're doing a really good job continuing to keep that community feel. And as it gets bigger, that's going to be something that we're going to make sure that we do keep that community feel, and people want to keep coming back. There's something here for everyone, and I think that's part of the allure.

Rebecca Knight

>> And you're going to Barcelona next with this. So, talk about the decision to go global and also, can I get an invitation?

Jennifer Johnson

>> Oh, absolutely. I think I know some people that can get you an invite. We will be in Barcelona the first week of November, the 4th to the 6th. It will be our second Fal.Con in Europe. And not to give a spoiler alert, but we're probably going to announce that we're sold out at Fal.Con Europe here very, very soon.

Dave Vellante

>> Really? Are you at the Fira?

Jennifer Johnson

>> Hmm?

Dave Vellante

>> Are you at the Fira?

Jennifer Johnson

>> Yes. Yes. It's our first time being in Barcelona. We were in Amsterdam last year, and so this is exciting for us. So, as we continue to grow out globally, and obviously, we're a global company, we have a global customer base. People love coming here, but a lot of our international customers, and not just in Europe, but in Asia-Pacific, in Japan, in Meta, it's easier for them to get to Europe and they want to go and be a part of it there. And it's bringing all of our innovations and our message and all the things that we talked about this week with our platform out, and with our ecosystem partners in Europe.

Dave Vellante

>> That said, there's a real international audience here this week, especially from Latin America. I've met a number of customers there. And despite the broad ecosystem momentum, a lot of customers here. I mean it's mostly customers, which is awesome. And that's the flywheel attracts... To me, it's like the AWS of security with the ecosystem and there are a lot of similarities. And now, you've got that flywheel going and so it attracts a lot of people and-

Jennifer Johnson

>> Absolutely. And the AWS of cybersecurity is a great one. The Dreamforce of cybersecurity is a great one. I remember when I was in San Francisco after Dreamforce, you would see people with their backpacks and all of their cool swag that they got and people had to have a sense of pride being associated with Dreamforce. It's the same thing here, right? Our swag store, I don't know if you've seen it, I didn't even look today, but in the first day, I think we had sold more than $40,000. And as of yesterday at midday we had sold over $70,000. So, I wouldn't be surprised if we're over $100,000 in swag sales. I mean, that also speaks to the power of the brand, that people want to be associated with us. I take a lot of pride in that.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well done.

Jennifer Johnson

>> Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> You're happy with your marketing, and I'd be interested in understanding how you adapted to this new AI... I wrote a piece, I didn't like the title. I called it a pivot. It's really not a pivot. It's really a line extension, and I said that in the piece, but sometimes I like to be controversial, but at any rate. From a marketing standpoint, how did you extend that brand without diluting the core of the platform?

Jennifer Johnson

>> Yeah, are you talking about it from our platform messaging or how we've embedded it in our marketing organization?

Dave Vellante

>> The former.

Jennifer Johnson

>> Okay. So, our platform? And so, if you think about our platform, I mean it was architected from the beginning to take advantage of the cloud. So, when we say we pioneered cybersecurity and we reinvented cybersecurity for the cloud era, we have purpose built a platform that was able to take advantage of the scale and the scope and all of the machine learning and everything that... We say we've been doing AI since the beginning of the Falcon platform, really. And so, this is really what we announced over this week and Mike's keynote this morning, which talks about the evolution of the platform. It's all about being able to now take advantage of AI and all of the changes and the innovations and all of the data. We talked about our Onum acquisition and being able to actually harness all that data. And of course, now there's a couple pieces to it. The first is having that data and that data, that moat, that's AI ready and you can take advantage of all of that. Our graphing technology, which has been core to our platform. Now, we've built the enterprise graph, which is able to actually... It abstracts all the complexity. So, as new AI innovations, new large language models are coming in, the platform will already be ready. There's no customization, there's no latency. And everything, as we know, staying ahead of the adversary is about speed. And then, of course building your agent workforce. That's one of the things I'm most excited about is we talk about Charlotte and Charlotte AI as our brain of our agentic SOC. Now, we have the ability, we're bringing out new agents. Now, our customers and our partners will have the ability to build new agents. So, I think it's really cool we're seeing this human and agent workforce that's going to come together to fight the adversary, which I just think is so cool.

Dave Vellante

>> Now, on the latter point of how you've adjusted your marketing organization, how are you using agents in your marketing and how are you-

Jennifer Johnson

>> Great question.

Dave Vellante

>> How are you managing them? I mean, you're managing agents and humans now.

Jennifer Johnson

>> Yes, it's very fascinating. So, every team in marketing has an agent as part of their team. And so, it's looking at what are the highest-impact areas that you can automate for productivity? That's the first level of maturity is how can you find automation through agents to help drive productivity and automate some of these tasks? And now, if you have actually think about the marketing org chart, every marketing team will have at least one, or in the future, a group of agents, just like we have people. And you still need people, just like we talked about today in cybersecurity, the same applies for marketing. Is you still need people to manage the agent, care and feed the agent. For us, a lot of it is about content, making sure that you're putting the right input in to get the right input out or the right output out of it on the other side. And you still need humans to do the reasoning and the judgment. Just like we talked about in George's keynote around agentic security and security AGI, you're still going to need human beings to do that judgment, that reasoning, building trust. I mean, we're in cybersecurity. It's an industry built on trust, so you can't completely give that to the agents, so the same applies to marketing. I would assume the same would apply no matter what function that you're in in a company.

Rebecca Knight

>> And it's driving the productivity, but also removing the tedious tasks. I was interviewing an MIT professor who said that boredom is the repetitive stress injury of knowledge work, and that's absolutely true. So, when you can remove that... So, as you've said, the theme of this year's conference is the AI era of cybersecurity. From a marketing perspective, how do you cut through the noise? How do you think about making CrowdStrike's story stand out?

Jennifer Johnson

>> Absolutely. So, look, I think it's always about being really focused on the problem that you're solving. And for us, it's really always about the adversary. You don't have a malware problem, you have an adversary problem and that will still hold true for the test of time. And I think that's been a big part of our differentiation is not just how we build the platform around taking an adversary-first point of view, but now even looking at how we're evolving the platform into AI. Listening to Adam talk today about the agentic threat intelligence and making the threat hunters now agentic. It's just AI becomes a force multiplier for everything that we always do. But I think part of what we've done really well as a company and a brand in our storytelling is making sure that we are laser-focused on stopping the adversary. Stopping the breach requires stopping the adversary, and that's part of how we do cut above the noise. I think having a really innovative brand that people... It's an emotional connection, people want to be associated with, like we talked about earlier. I think that you can't really put a price tag on that, but it's absolutely part of the magic and just always being innovative. I mean, we're arguably, I'd say the most innovative cybersecurity company on the planet. So, we want to be the most innovative marketing team on the planet, and that's how we go to market.

Dave Vellante

>> And the things that you do, like Adversary Underground, I attended last year, I wasn't able to go this year, but where it's really a deep dive into how the adversary is thinking, what their new tactics are, and it's this community that then bubbles up into your marketing into the bad guys that you have all over the place here. It's actually quite clever the way you connect that. I don't know if it's by design or it just happened organically or maybe it's a little bit of top down and bottom up.

Jennifer Johnson

>> Absolutely. Everything's always by design. But no, of course our technology is innovative and people want to come here and learn about the technology, of course. The technology is the solution. The adversary is who we're all fighting. And this is one of the things that we have all of this breadth and depth of intelligence on the adversary, and this is a big moment where people can come and learn and hear those stories. And the Adversary Underground... Have you had Adam on theCUBE yet?

Dave Vellante

>> Oh, yeah. We had him yesterday.

Jennifer Johnson

>> Okay. So, he's a wealth of storytelling and he puts his Adam Meyers spin on it, of course, his very humorous spin, and so people love to hear him talk. But really, I mean it is about we are subject matter experts on the adversaries' behaviors, their TTPs, and so we can help organizations better understand the problem and the scope of the problem, and then of course how to solve the problem with the platform.

Dave Vellante

>> But you've also brought them to life with these physical animations, which is quite amazing because I always used to ask people in cybersecurity, "Who was your favorite superhero growing up?" And then, you've brought the bad guy to life, we can all relate to that, right? The good versus evil.

Jennifer Johnson

>> Every story is good versus evil at its core, right?

Dave Vellante

>> Sure.

Rebecca Knight

>> The hero's journey.

Jennifer Johnson

>> It's the test of time. Absolutely. And the evolution of our adversary, it was such a brilliant move to put a face and a name and a persona behind the adversary. And as they've evolved, we were actually having a conversation earlier about our adversaries have evolved in their look and feel, and we did want to make them look more sinister because some of them were looking a little too warm and fuzzy and nice and they're anything but nice. And so, there's always been this conversation about are we glorifying the adversary by giving them a face and a name and making figurines and-

Dave Vellante

>> Interesting.

Jennifer Johnson

>> But at the end of the day, it's helping people connect to the problem that we are collectively fighting. And our collective mission, as cybersecurity, which is stopping breaches and stopping the adversary, I think all this does is galvanizes this whole community around fighting the bad guy.

Rebecca Knight

>> You have 110 partners at this event, AWS, Google Cloud, Okta, Zscaler. How do you think about balancing showcasing CrowdStrike and strutting yourself, while also, really emphasizing that it is a team sport and we do need collaboration here if we are going to win against the adversary?

Jennifer Johnson

>> Absolutely. Look, you can't go it alone. Like you said, cybersecurity is a team sport. I think the show floor actually articulates how we approach it pretty well. I mean, our booth is obviously in the middle, but we've made sure that everything around it is all about our ecosystem. And everybody's here, not just talking about their own solutions, but how they are partnering with us, integrating with us, building on top of the Falcon platform. And so, it's just helping to show how all of these different tools, and we all know that cybersecurity, there's many tools. This is just a subset of the ecosystem that exists in cybersecurity. So, if it's going to help our joint customers make better technology decisions and help educate them on how to actually bring our solutions together to stop breaches and stop adversaries faster, that's the goal.

Dave Vellante

>> So, the marketing always leads the adoption. What do you hope to be able to say a year or two years from now that you're marketing today and you want to see adopted tomorrow?

Jennifer Johnson

>> That when you think of agentic security, that you think of CrowdStrike, no ifs, ands or buts.

Rebecca Knight

>> .

Dave Vellante

>> I love the simple, but powerful messaging that you guys put up on all your billboards and it's good, it's solid.

Jennifer Johnson

>> We stop breaches is three simple, but very clear and galvanizing words that started with the beginning of this company, and they mean as much as they ever did, since day one.

Dave Vellante

>> And it's bold. It's bold North Star.

Jennifer Johnson

>> And it's bold. Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, JJ, a pleasure having you on as always.

Jennifer Johnson

>> Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

>> We are looking forward to CrowdStrike 2026.

Jennifer Johnson

>> Absolutely. And we'll get you your pass to Europe.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, good luck you in Europe.

Jennifer Johnson

>> We'll see you in Europe. We'll see you in Barcelona.

Rebecca Knight

>> Thank you. Thank you. Yes.

Dave Vellante

>> Super exciting. Yeah.

Jennifer Johnson

>> Thank you so much.

Dave Vellante

>> All right. Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent.

Dave Vellante

>> Appreciate it.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Fal.Con 2025. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.