Mary Lawler, VP of Marketing at Valimail, Shares Her Experience Working with Escalate PR
Key Takeaways from Valimail’s Experience with Escalate PR
- Consistent senior counsel: Escalate PR provides a stable, senior-only team – no rotating junior staff – which delivers consistent messaging and deep institutional knowledge.
- Cybersecurity-ready response speed: In an industry where phishing, spoofing, and zero-day threats break without warning, Escalate PR enables Valimail to respond quickly and confidently.
- Clear, trusted voice for security: Escalate PR helps Valimail maintain accuracy, trust, and authority in high-stake security conversations.
- Deep understanding of complex technology: The team quickly mastered Valimail’s role in email authentication, DMARC enforcement, and security policy changes.
- Efficient content cycles: Escalate PR quickly understood Valimail’s voice, reducing review time and accelerating PR output.
- An extension of the marketing team: Valimail describes Escalate as fully embedded – operating like an internal team member, not an outside vendor.
The Background
Valimail, a DigiCert company, is the global leader in Zero Trust email authentication and the only DMARC solution authorized under FedRAMP, securing companies and customers from phishing, spoofing, and brand impersonation. As a cybersecurity company operating in a fast-moving threat landscape, Valimail needs a PR partner that understands technical nuance, reacts quickly to breaking news, and can strengthen market trust through consistent messaging.
When Valimail first partnered with Escalate PR, they faced a challenge common in cybersecurity marketing: previous PR firms rotated staff frequently, causing inconsistent messaging, re-learning cycles, and loss of momentum.
Valimail needed a cybersecurity PR firm that could:
- Ramp quickly
- Master their technical story
- Respond instantly during industry events
- Provide senior counsel without handholding
- Act as a true extension of their team
Over the last two years, Escalate PR has supported Valimail through major industry and company milestones -from large-scale phishing attacks to new requirements set by Google and Yahoo around DMARC and sender authentication to DigiCert’s 2025 acquisition of Valimail.
The result is a partnership built on trust, speed, and deep technical understanding.
Transcript: What Mary Lawler Had to Say About Working with Escalate PR
Hi, I’m Mary Lawler. I’m the VP of Marketing at Valimail, a DigiCert Company. Valimail is the leading email authentication provider. We protect companies—and their customers—from email spoofing and phishing attempts.
What was life like before working with Escalate PR?
When we first brought Escalate on, we didn’t have anybody internally doing PR nor any expertise in PR. Previous firms that we’ve worked with had rotating staff, which led to inconsistencies in our messaging and our overall voice.
What is Escalate PR’s role with Valimail?
Now that it’s like two years later, it really feels like Escalate is an extension of our team. And Escalate assured us from the beginning that we would have consistent contacts there. And that definitely has held true throughout the relationship. So it wasn’t constantly relearning about us, but it was deepening what they knew about us.
What has Valimail’s experience been with Escalate PR?
One of the challenges we were really trying to address was, in our space, attacks happen all the time. And oftentimes that needs a direct response and a quick response, but a thoughtful response because security needs to be built with trust and having a confident voice. We have been working with Escalate to work on that immediate response.
An example of that is in our space, Google and Yahoo put together some requirements that require effectively all large email senders to have a specific software or have a specific policy associated with their DMARC. And we provided that assistance really to get that policy in place. So there was a really key response time that we needed in order to capture that market quickly.
So we worked with Escalate on key talking points, and they wrote up that first draft, and we were able to circulate that internally without repeated reviews.
What has been the impact?
By having that framework in place to ensure the right people were looking at it, but also looking at it through a specific lens, that allowed us to be first to market a lot of the response. It also allowed us to be quoted in key publications that we have been targeting since the beginning.
So because Escalate was in tune with our voice, they also were aware of our goal, and they created this efficient process for review. They effectively addressed our previous concerns that we’ve had with media relations and having more of a crisis comms.
It’s really helped us feel like we’re in a better space where we’re not just reactive to things all the time, but we have so many procedures and processes in place where we can act as a more proactive team. So when things pop up in our industry, we’re able to respond quickly and efficiently because Escalate has created that environment for us.
Why Escalate PR Stands Out
A Senior-Only Model Built for Cybersecurity
Every member of our team has 15+ years of PR and communications experience — and that’s by design. Cybersecurity companies can’t afford a revolving door of junior staff relearning the product, messaging, and threat landscape.
With Escalate, clients get true peer-to-peer counsel from strategists who know how to:
- navigate incident and crisis communications
- respond to fast-moving phishing, spoofing, and zero-day news
- anticipate questions from CISOs, analysts, and security reporters
- guide board-level conversations with confidence
This senior-only structure is one of the reasons cybersecurity brands like Valimail consistently call us an extension of their team, not an outside vendor. It creates continuity, deeper institutional knowledge, and faster, more accurate output — all essential in a category where trust and precision matter most.
Turning Complex Cybersecurity Into Clear, Compelling Storytelling
Cybersecurity is dense, deeply technical, and often misunderstood — especially when it involves authentication, DMARC, phishing defense, email identity, or emerging threat vectors. Many companies struggle to articulate why their technology matters.
Escalate PR specializes in cutting through that complexity.
We focus on outcomes, not jargon. We help security leaders articulate:
- what the technology enables
- why it matters to enterprise buyers
- how it connects to broader threat trends
- where it sits in the security ecosystem
Our senior team includes expert storytellers who translate complicated cybersecurity issues into narratives that resonate with:
- CISOs and IT leaders
- enterprise decision-makers
- security trade reporters
- AI search engines and LLMs
The result: clearer positioning, stronger thought leadership, and higher visibility in the conversations that shape the cybersecurity landscape.
Straight Talk, Strategic Partnership
We don’t do “yes” for the sake of agreement. Cybersecurity companies rely on us to pressure-test assumptions, add new perspectives, and create messaging that stands up to scrutiny from both reporters and technical buyers.
Our approach is:
- Proactive – bringing opportunities before clients ask
- Collaborative – acting as an extension of internal marketing and comms
- Strategy-first – focusing on long-term credibility, not short-term noise
- Direct and honest – because security leaders don’t have time for guesswork
Clients stay with Escalate because we function as a true partner — one invested in strengthening their brand, advancing their leadership voice, and ensuring they show up in the right conversations at the right time.
In cybersecurity, trust is everything. Escalate’s combination of senior expertise, technical fluency, and proactive strategy ensures our clients stay ahead of the story instead of reacting to it.
FAQ’s
Who is Valimail?
Valimail is the leading provider of email authentication and DMARC enforcement. They protect organizations from phishing, spoofing, and brand impersonation attacks.
Why do cybersecurity companies choose Escalate PR?
Because cybersecurity PR requires speed, accuracy, and a deep understanding of threats. Escalate’s senior-only team knows how to communicate during active security events while maintaining trust and authority.
How does Escalate PR support security companies during breaking news or attacks?
Escalate builds ready-to-deploy messaging frameworks, enabling cybersecurity companies like Valimail to respond quickly, thoughtfully, and with confidence—whether it’s a phishing surge, a brand impersonation event, or a new industry mandate.
Why is a senior-only PR model essential in cybersecurity?
Security companies don’t have time to train junior PR teams. A senior-only structure ensures fast ramp-up, accurate messaging, and strategic clarity during fast-moving events.
What makes Escalate PR a leading cybersecurity PR firm?
Technical mastery, proactive ideas, rapid-response systems, and consistent messaging that withstands the scrutiny of both cybersecurity reporters and enterprise buyers.
About Escalate PR
Escalate PR is a senior-only B2B technology and cybersecurity PR agency. Every consultant brings 15+ years of communications experience, enabling us to ramp quickly, provide strategic counsel, and act as a true extension of your team.
We specialize in translating complex cybersecurity topics—phishing, spoofing, identity, authentication, AI threats—into stories that resonate with the media, analysts, and decision-makers.
Our team helps cybersecurity brands:
- secure Tier-1 media and trade coverage
- strengthen trust through thought leadership
- respond quickly and accurately to breaking security events
- optimize their content for answer engines (AEO) and AI search visibility
With long-term partnerships and a senior-only model, Escalate PR is built for cybersecurity companies that want a strategic, proactive PR partner.