The best cybersecurity PR campaigns of 2026 share one throughline: they turn a real security problem into a story people repeat, backed by a number a reporter can check. Virgin Media O2's AI scambaiting campaign drove 1.7 billion earned media impressions off a 20,000 British pound media budget, and Adaptive Security's Conan O'Brien training launch generated 28 placements and nearly 700 million impressions in a single week.
Which Cybersecurity Campaigns Built Lasting Authority in 2026?
Virgin Media O2's "Daisy vs The Scammers" campaign turned an AI chatbot into the UK's most-discussed anti-fraud story. Daisy, an AI persona built to sound like an elderly grandmother, answered real scam calls in real time and kept fraudsters talking for up to 40 minutes at a time, according to Virgin Media O2's own launch announcement.
The company seeded Daisy's number into scam call lists, paired the launch with former Love Island contestant Amy Hart, and spent just 20,000 British pounds on paid media. The result, documented in an Ads of the World case study, was more than 2,000 press articles, 1.7 billion earned media impressions, 36 million British pounds in advertising value equivalency, and a 10 percentage point jump in customer satisfaction with O2's anti-fraud efforts. The campaign was named Highly Commended in the Technology category at the 2025 PRWeek Awards.
Adaptive Security took a different route to the same kind of authority. The company paired its 15-film employee security training series, covering deepfakes, voice cloning, and AI impersonation, with comedian Conan O'Brien for a June 9, 2026 launch. 5WPR's media outreach matched each threat category to the right beat: cybersecurity reporters got the AI impersonation story, HR reporters got the employee-engagement story, entertainment reporters got the celebrity story.
How Did a 5WPR Client Earn Cybersecurity Coverage?
Adaptive Security had no access to Conan O'Brien for interviews, so 5WPR built the story around the training product itself rather than the celebrity appearance. That decision produced 28 media placements, including syndications, and 699,689,879 media impressions in one week, per 5WPR's own campaign reporting on the launch.
TechRadar covered the series as a story about comedy fighting employee disengagement around AI scams, and Variety covered the Conan O'Brien partnership as an entertainment and technology crossover. Neither outlet had access to O'Brien directly: the coverage came from the threat-category pitching, not the celebrity booking.
What Cybersecurity Campaign Is the Industry's Cautionary Tale?
CrowdStrike's response to its own July 19, 2024 global outage remains the cybersecurity sector's most-cited example of a PR response that made a crisis worse. A faulty Falcon sensor update crashed roughly 8.5 million Windows devices worldwide, grounding flights, disrupting hospitals, and knocking some broadcasters off air.
CrowdStrike then sent some of its channel partners a 10 dollar Uber Eats gift card as a "thank you" for the extra work the outage caused, according to TechCrunch's reporting on the gesture. Several recipients found the voucher had been flagged and canceled by Uber before they could use it. Delta Air Lines separately said the outage forced it to cancel 7,000 flights at a cost of 500 million dollars, and CrowdStrike's own threat intelligence lead later told a House subcommittee, "we let our customers down," under questioning about the incident.
The lesson for cybersecurity PR specifically: a response has to match the scale of the harm. A 10 dollar food delivery voucher, sent to business partners still fielding calls from affected customers, read as tone-deaf precisely because the underlying failure was measured in billions of dollars and millions of disrupted devices.
What Patterns Separated the Winners From the Failure?
Daisy and the Adaptive Security launch both built their pitch around a documented problem, not just a product. O2 cited its own research that 71 percent of Brits wanted to get back at scammers; Adaptive Security built pitches around specific, named threat categories like voice cloning and QR code scams instead of a generic "security training" pitch.
Both winning campaigns also matched the outreach to the audience instead of sending one pitch to every reporter. O2 split the story between tech, consumer, and entertainment press; 5WPR split the Adaptive Security story by beat, from HR to cybersecurity to entertainment.
CrowdStrike's failure came from the opposite move: a single, uniform gesture, the gift card, sent to every partner regardless of how much damage that partner had actually absorbed. The response needed to scale with the harm and instead stayed flat.
| Campaign | What Happened | Measurable Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Virgin Media O2, "Daisy vs The Scammers" | AI grandmother persona answered real scam calls to waste fraudsters' time | 1.7B earned media impressions, 2,000+ articles, 36M GBP AVE on a 20K GBP media spend |
| Adaptive Security x Conan O'Brien | Celebrity-fronted security training series pitched by threat category, not by celebrity access | 28 placements, 699.7M impressions in one week |
| CrowdStrike outage apology | 10 dollar Uber Eats gift card sent to partners after a global outage that cost Delta 500M dollars | Widely mocked response, Congressional testimony, ongoing litigation |
How Does AI Search Visibility Change Cybersecurity PR Results?
5W's own AI Cybersecurity Visibility Index found that five vendors, Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, Microsoft, SentinelOne, and Fortinet, are most consistently surfaced in AI-generated answers about cybersecurity, regardless of which buyer question is asked. Specialists win their own category instead: Wiz leads cloud security answers, Okta and CyberArk lead identity, Zscaler leads zero trust, and Splunk leads SIEM.
The Index also found that a concentrated set of sources, including Gartner Peer Insights, Forrester Wave reports, G2, and PeerSpot, gets cited repeatedly across AI-generated cybersecurity answers. That concentration means earned coverage and analyst placements feed directly into what AI engines surface, which is the same inventory a PR campaign produces.
The same Index found that CrowdStrike still ranks second overall and first on being described as "industry-leading" in AI answers, despite the 2024 outage. Earned media volume and analyst placements built over a decade outweigh a single bad news cycle in AI visibility, which raises the stakes for the companies in this list's cautionary tale: the content record survives even when the single response does not.
5WPR's cybersecurity PR practice builds campaigns around this same split: real incident data and named threat categories drive the pitch, and a response plan sized to match the actual stakes sits ready before launch day, not after a crisis breaks.
FAQ
What made Daisy vs The Scammers successful?
Virgin Media O2's Daisy campaign combined a real anti-fraud problem, O2's own research on consumer attitudes toward scammers, and a low-cost AI build to generate 1.7 billion earned media impressions and 2,000-plus press articles off a 20,000 British pound media budget.
What is the Adaptive Security and Conan O'Brien campaign?
Adaptive Security partnered with Conan O'Brien on a June 2026 employee security training series covering deepfakes, voice cloning, and AI impersonation, which 5WPR turned into 28 media placements and nearly 700 million impressions in one week.
Why was CrowdStrike's gift card response a PR failure?
CrowdStrike sent partners a 10 dollar Uber Eats gift card after its July 2024 global outage, a response widely seen as disproportionate to an incident that cost Delta Air Lines 500 million dollars and 7,000 canceled flights.
Does AI search visibility survive a security crisis?
5W's AI Cybersecurity Visibility Index found CrowdStrike still ranks second overall in AI-generated cybersecurity answers, showing that a decade of earned media and analyst placements can outweigh a single reputational crisis in AI visibility.
For more on how cybersecurity brands build AI-era authority, see 5W's AI Cybersecurity Visibility Index and The Best Technology PR Campaigns of 2026. 5W's GEO optimization services help brands turn earned coverage like this into AI-citation authority.
