The last couple of weeks have been a bit wonky, and you've likely guessed part of the reason from the new look and feel of this layout.

Over the past week I've been putting the finishing touches on updated branding for my fractional CMO practice (The Chief Marketer) and for this newsletter. The update has been a long time coming.

When I started my fractional CMO work more than three years ago, I wasn't too worried about branding it. The whole point was to operate as an executive, albeit a part-time one, inside other companies.

Over time, and especially once this newsletter came into the picture, it became clear the ad hoc approach to how everything looked and fit together had to change. I've known for a while that a unified system was overdue, but the overhaul kept losing out to the client work in front of me.

While reworking the visual side of the newsletter and main website, I decided to also take a hard look at the tech stack behind The Chief Marketer.

For the longest time I ran on WordPress. As a solo operator it was easy to maintain, and for years I weighed its risks against its conveniences. I was religious about updating the WordPress core and every plugin. On top of that, I ran security tools that constantly scanned the environment, and used techniques to tightly limit backend access.

The risk calculus, though, isn't what it was even 18 months ago. I believe relatively cheap AI models will soon be capable, if they aren't already, of running highly sophisticated and scalable agentic attacks against the online tools we've all come to rely on. The ability to scale will move the attack point from enterprises to mid-market and smaller very rapidly.

A quick aside: my websites, personal and professional, have almost always run on a CMS. It goes all the way back to 2007, when my marketing agency used a custom CMS called Reactor Engine, originally built by a friend for a client project.

Now, after nearly 20 years, my main website has moved to a static site. Part of the motivation was the changing security landscape. The other part was simpler: I didn't need all that code running behind a site that barely changes. It was like putting Jabba the Hutt on an electric scooter. No matter how streamlined or optimized, it was never going to go far or fast. A CMS was never going to be a great fit for a site like mine.

The newsletter itself, and its post archive, still run on Beehiiv.

My goal with all of this, the brand refresh, the move to static, and a leaner stack, is to give you a less cluttered reading experience, and to give myself a foundation I can actually build on as the threats get cheaper and smarter by the month.

A cleaner look with less between you and the ideas. That felt like the right shape for what's coming next, and it's a shape I couldn't keep putting off.

I'll be back next week with a regular, in-depth article. Thanks for sticking with me through the quiet week.

Until next time,

Tobias