Volume 62

This Week’s Featured Media, Articles, & Breaking News

🎙 Secured Podcast

Podcast | Secured: Episode 18
Identity is moving upstream, and physical security has a choice to make.

This episode covers the growing gap between how the rest of the world is thinking about identity and how our industry is still talking about credentials, readers, badges, and access control. From wallet convergence and AI agents to intelligent badges, hybrid work, and IAM investment, the question is not whether the category is changing. It is whether physical security helps shape the answer before someone else writes it for us.
YouTube: Listen here

From West to East, the conversation doesn’t stop at the show floor. This podcast series brings together 45 voices from across the industry to share what’s actually top of mind right now. You can stream right from our Secured Youtube channel.

Shikhar’s episode: here
Leor’s episode: here
Ryan’s episode: here
Jason’s episode: here

Secured Presents: XPod from The Security Event
Over two days at The Security Event in Birmingham, we set up a microphone, called it XPod, and sat down with more than forty operators, founders, and leaders from across the global physical security industry.

We asked everyone the same four questions. What came back was not a recap. It was a read on where the industry actually is, told through the people doing the work.

Three episodes. Three theses. Thirty-three voices.

This week: Episode 1- Identity Is The Center, Hardware Is The Floor.

You’ll here from:
Jamie McMillen | Suprema Inc.
Carter T. Kennedy | Soloinsight (CloudGate Platform)
Paola Martin del Campo | Envoy
Zak Habgood | ID-ware
Michael Maxsenti | Genea
Steve Riley | Comelit-PAC
Andy Milton | ISEO Ultimate Access Technologies
Saulius Martinenas | CredoID access control by Midpoint Security
Stefan Aimer | SystemHouse Solutions AB
Dominic Bruning | HID

Don’t miss out on the previous EP: Intro: What We heard at TSE

You can stream directly from our Secured Youtube channel.

If you spend much time in physical security marketing, you’ll notice a pattern. Most of the messaging sounds like a spec sheet: resolution, read range, frame rate, open API, mean time between failures. These details matter, but they rarely explain why people actually buy.

I work in marketing and spend my days in this industry. The biggest gap I see is that we focus on selling the box, the device, the platform, or the technical features, while buyers are really trying to solve a problem—and the box is just one piece of that.

A security director looking at an access platform is not losing sleep over credential formats. They are worried about passing audits, fixing offboarding gaps that create risk, answering the executive who asks “who had access” after an incident, and whether they can get that answer in five minutes or five days. The product helps solve these problems, but if your marketing only talks about the product, you make the buyer do the hardest work: connecting your features to their real concerns.

This is the shift to make: focus on the problem you solve, not just the product you sell. It might seem obvious, but it’s actually rare. Walk around a trade show and notice how many booths talk about what their product is, instead of what it helps customers stop worrying about. The first approach is just a catalog. The second gives people a reason to talk to you.

When you stop focusing on the box, a few things begin to change.

First, the buyer becomes the hero, not your technology. The best security marketing shows the customer as the one who looks smart, sleeps better, and passes the review because of their decision. Your product plays a supporting role. This isn’t just a softer way to sell; it’s a more honest one. People buy things that help them do their job better, not just things that look impressive.

Second, proof matters more than adjectives. Words like “industry-leading,” “next-generation,” “seamless,” and “robust” are used so much that they have lost their meaning. Buyers tune them out. What stands out instead is being specific: mention a real customer, share actual numbers, show a before-and-after, or tell a concrete story about a stadium, campus, school district, or distribution center that faced a problem and what changed. Proof is the one thing your competitors can’t copy just by updating their website.

Third, your marketing should sound like your people. This industry is built on relationships; everyone says it, and it’s true. But marketing is often where that belief falls apart. We spend months building trust through introductions, referrals, trade shows, dinners, and just showing up, but then send a cold, jargon-filled PDF that sounds like it was written by a machine. Your marketing should sound like the same people who show up at the dinner, not like a different company.

There’s another reason this matters now. Buyers are changing how they evaluate you. More of them are running your deck, one-pager, proposal, and website through an AI tool for a critical review before they even talk to you. That tool isn’t impressed by claims like “world’s first.” It looks for real substance, checks your claims against what’s actually out there, and points out any weak spots you hoped to hide. If your message only works on a rushed human, it won’t hold up against a careful AI review.

So the discipline is the same as always, but now it’s less forgiving: be clear about who you serve, be honest about what you do better than others, and back it up with proof that a buyer, or their AI, can check. Vague messaging used to cost you some attention. Now, it can cost you the meeting before you even know it was possible.

You don’t need a bigger budget or a rebrand. What matters most is resisting the urge to talk about the box. Before your next campaign, launch, or trade show booth, ask yourself what the buyer really fears or wants. Can a stranger tell in one sentence who this is for and why it’s better? Would your claim hold up to scrutiny?

If you get these things right, your campaigns, content, and events will have a solid foundation. If you get them wrong, you’re just adding more noise to a spec sheet nobody wants to read. The industry is shifting from hardware-first thinking to focusing on software, service, and outcomes. As products start to look the same on paper, what sets you apart won’t be written down. It will be how clearly you explain what you do for the person on the other side of the door, and how well you can prove it.

Stop marketing the box. Start marketing the relief.

👀 As Seen in the PhySec Community this Week:

#marketing-communications

• Hilary Gallagher shared

  The marketing industry has a burnout problem nobody is talking about.

#deal-activity

• Tony Dong shared

  -Motorola Solutions Acquires D-Fend Solutions for Airspace Security

  -Goldman Sachs Investment Banking’s Post

#shameless-plugs

• Tony Dong shared
  - Donate to the Cherryville FireWatch Society

  -Today I woke up to President Trump appointing Federal Housing Finance Agency
  -The Bottom line up front: I am coming to my network today, hat in hand, to ask for donations.

• Auston Bunsen shared
  -What has been your experience with AccessGrid?

• Matt Antos-Lewis shared

  - Rhombus and LenelS2 Elements: Bringing AI-Powered Video and Cloud Access Control Together
  -Insight-Driven And AI-Powered: Future Focused Security From LenelS2 And Rhombus.

• Andrew Kosinski shared
  -The video channel for RiTA Technology Services, a technology consulting firm specializing in custom access control and video surveillance solutions.

Unify is coming up June 16-18, and we’ll be there joining the conversation on what Aliro could mean for the commercial sector.

Lee will be moderating a session on why commercial may be the next sector to move, covering interoperability, offline and online access, quantum readiness, multi-badge challenges, and what it takes to move Aliro from inevitable to deployed. Register here.

ACS26, The Access Control Summit, is heading to New Zealand in 2026, hosted in collaboration with our city-host, Gallagher Security. Join us October 6–7, and sign up here to be notified first when registration goes live.

🗣️ Your Voice Matters.
Share your feedback, suggest topics, and tell us what questions we should be answering. Help us shape future issues and contribute to the conversations that move the industry forward.

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