7 CHALLENGES FOR RETAIL MEDIA

This is Vinny O’Brien. And I want to talk to you about two words.

Good catch.

In their natural habitat, these are two of the finest words in the English language.

A father. A son. A garden somewhere in suburban America. Late afternoon light. A baseball. The kind of conversation that only happens when nobody is looking at a screen.

The father winds up. Throws. The son reaches out. Grabs it.

Good catch, son.

And in that moment — something is passed between them. Wisdom. Love. The gentle suggestion that life’s problems can be navigated if you just keep your eye on the ball.

Good catch.

Beautiful. Wholesome. Exactly what it should be.

And then.

There is the other kind.

You are in a meeting. A client meeting. A real one, with real people, and a real agenda.

You have used an LLM to prepare something. A brief. A report. A strategy document. A set of numbers.

The client spots something.

Something off. Something wrong. Something that does not add up.

You go back. You look. And there it is.

You open the chat. You type in what the client found. You paste it back.

And the LLM says —

“Good catch.”

Good catch.

Not — “I apologise, that was incorrect.”

Not — “here is the correct figure.”

Good catch.

As though you are the son in the garden. As though this is a teachable moment. As though the LLM is proud of you for spotting the thing it got wrong in the document you used to brief a client twenty minutes ago.

Your embarrassment is existential.

Here is what “good catch” actually means when an LLM says it.

It means: I wasn’t sure. I filled in the gap with something plausible. I said it with confidence because confidence is the one thing I never run out of.

And it means you, or worse — your client — had to find it.

You should not be catching things.

You should be in a pair of hands that doesn’t drop them.

Sumo Blue has been doing this work, with real people, real accountability, and a marked absence of the phrase good catch — for over ten years.

We check our work. Because our name is on it.

Sumo Blue. Safe hands. No surprises.

LEGAL DISCLAIMER : ”Sumo Blue confirms that the phrase ‘good catch’ has never once been used in a client deliverable. It remains exclusively reserved for fathers, sons, gardens, and the general direction of American family television. We intend to keep it that way.”

Not the kind that follows a long weekend. (for me caused through excessive red wine). It is The kind that shows up on your P&L.

App bloat.

Agency bloat.

Headcount bloat.

It builds slowly. …

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The average number that actually get implemented?

Three. On a good year.

Somewhere out there, eleven agency decks are sitting in a folder called “To Review FINAL (2)” gathering digital dust and emotional baggage.You are not alone. There are support groups. I’ve seen the folding chairs.

Here’s what nobody says out loud about RFP season:

The process is broken before the first deck lands. Most brands go to market without a clear internal brief. They know something isn’t working, CAC is climbing, retention is flat, the site feels stale, but the RFP goes out as “we need a new agency” instead of “here’s the specific problem we need solved.”

So fourteen agencies respond to a vague brief with a vague pitch. And the brand picks the one with the best fonts.

Then three months in, everyone’s frustrated because the deliverables don’t match the expectation that was never written down in the first place.

The RFP isn’t the problem. The absence of a proper scope is. The brands that get this right do the hard work before they open the process. They define what’s broken. They set measurable outcomes. They ask agencies to respond to a real problem, not a PDF beauty contest.

RFP season doesn’t have to feel like speed-dating at a conference where everyone’s wearing the same lanyard and saying “omnichannel” like it’s a personality trait.

This is a PSA from myself and the team at Sumoblue because fourteen decks is a symptom, not a strategy. If your RFP process needs fewer decks and more decisions, give them a shout.

Symptoms include: blank staring during quarterly reviews, passive-aggressive Slack replies to anyone who mentions ROAS without a benchmark, and the distinct feeling that you’ve been sold a dashboard when what you actually needed was a plan.

“Are You Suffering From CAA?”

The retail/ecommerce industry has industrialised confusion. It wraps common sense in enough jargon that operators stop trusting their instincts and start chasing metrics they half-understand. CAC, LTV, AOV, ROAS, OMS, WMS, PDP, CRO, BOPIS, BNPL, D2C, B2B2C, the acronym stack is now so tall that the actual question (”is this working?”) gets lost underneath it.

Sumo Blue’s positioning: we speak human. We translate the noise back into decisions.

“If you’ve ever sat in a Monday morning review and genuinely couldn’t remember what your business actually sells... you may be suffering from CAA.”

CHRONIC ACRONYM ANXIETY (CAA) Affecting 1 in 3 brand operators. Possibly more. We stopped counting.

“Symptoms include: confusing your ROAS with your ROI. Knowing your CAC but not your customer. Optimising your PDP while your product sits in a warehouse in Düsseldorf.

In severe cases, building an entire omnichannel strategy before deciding what you’re actually trying to do.”

“CAA is not your fault. You were handed a dashboard when you needed a direction. You were sold a framework when you needed a plan. The industry gave you the acronyms. Nobody gave you the answer.”

“At Sumo Blue they treat CAA the old-fashioned way. They ask what’s working. They ask what isn’t. We tell you the truth in plain English, or whatever language you actually think in. No jargon. No deck with sixty slides and one vague recommendation. Just common sense, applied with intent.”

Sumo Blue. For operators who are done being confused by their own business.”

[SUPER SMALL DISCLAIMER TEXT, blink-and-miss-it, classic pharma style]: “Sumo Blue is not responsible for the sudden clarity that follows. Side effects include: better decisions, shorter meetings, and the vague feeling you should have done this sooner.”

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But here’s what that story is actually ab…

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But here is the brutal reality from the partner briefing:

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Medals are handed out.
Interviews are done.
And somewhere, someone is thinking:

“If only we’d prepared differently.”

After BFCM, founders always say the same things:

• “Email carried us.”

• “Flows saved us.”

• “We should’ve done this earlier.”

You know what no one ever says?

“Thank God we stayed put out of fear.”

Regret is just fear with hi…

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Biathlon. Ever heard of it? Neither had I until my research phase. Cross Country skiing I called it. My mistake. Expect memes this Winter Olympics.

You ski flat-out…
Then you stop.
Then you shoot, calmly, precisely, without panic.

Speed alone doesn’t win.
Control does.

Peak season is the …

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It’s beautiful.
It’s terrifying.
And it’s not the moment you try new equipment.

At 120km/h, gravity is not forgiving.
Neither is BFCM.

Every year, brands tell themselves:

• “We…

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The Winter Olympics are on.

The flags are flying.
The jackets are shiny.
Everyone looks relaxed, because the hard work already happened months ago. Maybe even years.

Or, do they?

Here’s the bit nobody puts on TV unless they do the Netflix BTS special, which, they probably will, but let’s move on:

No athlete decides during the Olympics to change s…

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2025 rewarded the decisive. Brands that picked their category, picked their channel mix, picked their efficiency floors, and then committed outgrew everyone else. The ones that hedged, tested endlessly, and waited for more data spent a year running on the spot while their CAC climbed and their MER slid.

The market in 2026 will be the same: be decisive, …

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Every click, scroll, and abandoned cart boils down to one thing, trust.

And trust doesn’t come from your ad copy or that one influencer who ghosted you after the free sample. It comes from real people, saying real things, in real time.

That’s why REVIEWS.io exists, to make trust stupidly simple.

Why Reviews Matter

Social proof used to…

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