Talk title: What it must do in a programme of 400 contributions

A talk title decides, at a professional conference with hundreds of contributions, whether your talk is chosen at all, as it-sa Expo&Congress 2025 in Nuremberg shows. According to the it-sa press release of 10 October 2025, 28,267 trade visitors came and more than 400 forum contributions ran on six open forums. Spread evenly across the three days of the fair from 7 to 9 October 2025, that makes around 22 titles per forum to choose from each day. For speakers, this means that the title must state topic, audience and benefit without any explanation, both in the programme list and in the call for papers.

it-sa Expo&Congress 2025: what the press release of 10 October 2025 reports

it-sa Expo&Congress in Nuremberg is a trade fair for IT security with an accompanying congress. As the press release of 10 October 2025 reports, 28,267 trade visitors from 64 countries came in 2025, compared with 25,830 from 65 countries the year before. The number of exhibiting companies rose from 897 to 993, and international participation grew by more than 22 per cent. The programme included more than 70 sessions and workshops at Congress@it-sa and more than 400 forum contributions on six open forums.

According to the organiser, the forum programme included the “it-sa insights” with panels, for example on career opportunities for women in IT security, and the new format CIO Match, which brought C-level executives together with exhibitors. BSI president Claudia Plattner announced that the Federal Office for Information Security will become the notifying and market surveillance authority for the Cyber Resilience Act. Event director Thimo Holst describes the fair as a meeting place for the cybersecurity community. The next it-sa Expo&Congress takes place from 27 to 29 October 2026 at the Nuremberg exhibition centre, as the press release announces.

Talk title: what it does in the programme of a professional conference

A talk title is the heading under which a talk appears in the conference programme and in the call for papers, the public invitation with which an organiser collects talk proposals. In a programme with hundreds of contributions, a visitor reads the title first, before opening an abstract, and the title decides which room the visitor walks into. How an organiser curates a programme is described in our article What is a professional conference?.

At it-sa, part of the programme is spread across six open forums. A title competes there with every other contribution in the forums and with the conversations at the exhibitors, which a visitor also plans for. The press release says nothing about how visitors choose their contributions. In our assessment, a visitor in this situation has little more than the title to go on when judging whether a contribution fits their problem.

What more than 400 forum contributions mean for the visitor’s choice

The calculation is simple. More than 400 forum contributions on six forums over three days come to around 133 contributions per day and around 22 per forum and day if spread evenly. This is an assumption, because the press release gives no distribution, and since 400 is a lower bound, there were probably more titles to choose from.

Suppose a visitor can hear five of a forum’s 22 contributions on one day, because conversations at stands take time. The visitor then decides against 17 contributions, which is about three out of four titles, and makes that choice in seconds. A title that explains only in the abstract what the talk is about gets skipped in this situation.

Talk title in the call for papers: the first line the committee reads

In the call for papers, too, the title comes first. A programme committee reads many submissions one after another, and in our assessment the title shapes the first impression with which the committee approaches the abstract. A title with a clearly stated topic and benefit gives the abstract a frame that it can then fulfil.

At the same time, the title is what later appears in the programme and in the announcements once your proposal has been accepted. You therefore write it once for the committee and once for the audience, and both read it without you. How meetups and user groups work as a starting point is described in our article on small stages as a first step, and on such stages a title can be tried out before you submit.

Writing a talk title: three features by which visitors recognise it

A title that holds up in a long programme list names, in our assessment, three things: the topic in the word your audience uses, the target group or problem, and the benefit for the listener. The comparison below uses freely chosen examples from IT security and does not come from the it-sa programme.

Five steps to a talk title that gets chosen in the programme

1. Fix the search word: Choose the word for your topic that your audience uses itself, and put it at the start of the title.
2. Name the audience: State in the title or in the first half-sentence who the talk is for.
3. Formulate the benefit: Describe what listeners will be able to do or decide after the talk.
4. Read it without the abstract: Read the title aloud and ask yourself whether a stranger knows what awaits them in the room.
5. Test the title: Try it before submitting on two colleagues or clients and at a meetup.