Guest
Paul Blackburn
Chief Growth Officer, Vudoo
A quarter of a century in digital media, from media sales to product and growth, now driving commerce at Vudoo.
About
Paul Blackburn is Chief Growth Officer at Vudoo, the shoppable and transactable media company founded by Nick Morgan. He is known for bringing a commercial lens to product, building ads that let a consumer buy in-stream without leaving the page or cutting the retailer out of the deal.
Blackburn began in digital media before the dotcom boom and, by his own telling, was always the salesperson who wanted to help build the product rather than just sell it. He came up through media sales and commercial leadership before moving deeper into product, data and growth, a route he describes as the rarer way round, driven by a passion for building digital products and a sense that frontline selling is a younger man's game.
At Vudoo he leads growth on a product that ingests an existing ad tag, adds a shoppable overlay and traffics it across the programmatic ecosystem, keeping the transaction in-stream. He says the company is the exclusive partner of Amazon in the US to enable a transaction off amazon.com, works with the Coles group in Australia, and won five awards at the DRUM Commerce Media Awards for its Mattel campaign. He is now building conversational commerce for AI surfaces and experimenting with MCP and UCP protocols, predicting agentic commerce within a year.
Career16 years
- 2025 to now Vudoo Chief Growth Officer
- 2025 Vudoo Chief Strategy Officer (CSO)
- 2024 to 2025 News Corp Australia Director of Commercial Data & eCommerce
- 2022 to 2024 News Corp Australia Director Commercial Data, Video, & Product
Show earlier roles: News Corp Australia, NewsLifeMedia, SheSpot, Pacific Magazines
- 2022 News Corp Australia General Manager, Video
- 2019 to 2022 News Corp Australia General Manager, Digital Revenue and Marketing Services
- 2017 to 2022 News Corp Australia General Manager, Key Accounts
- 2016 to 2017 News Corp Australia General Manager, Network Sales - NSW
- 2016 News Corp Australia Commercial Director - Lifestyle
- 2015 to 2016 News Corp Australia Director, Sales & Strategy - NewsLifeMedia
- 2014 to 2015 NewsLifeMedia Director of National Sales
- 2012 to 2014 NewsLifeMedia NSW Sales Director
- 2012 SheSpot NSW Sales & Integration Director
- 2010 to 2012 Pacific Magazines Account Director
How Paul thinks3 convictions
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Consumer-first product design
Blackburn takes his cue from Apple, arguing that Vudoo focuses on the consumer before anyone else in the chain. Get the experience right and the marketer, retailer and agency benefits fall out of it. His version of frictionless is a consumer who buys without being dragged off the page they came to read.
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A commercial lens on building
Blackburn builds product by starting with the problem to solve for the client and the outcome it can demonstrate. It is the instinct of a salesperson who wanted to make things, carried into a product role. He frames it as two things held together: what needs solving, and how to prove the result.
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Patience over speed
Moving from sales into product taught Blackburn patience, because legal, data privacy and complexity all take time. He favours building fast, prototyping and iterating, but doing it properly, because a handful of bad early experiences make customers very hard to win back. Speed without care, in his view, is a false economy.