Remove the friction between the ad and the purchase. Keep the retailer in the loop. Prove the outcome, never the vanity metric.

Vudoo exists to make the transaction process seamless. It started eight or nine years ago as a video analytics business, founded by Nick Morgan, whose background was in e-commerce. Morgan wanted to measure the effectiveness of video, and the ultimate proof of that is a purchase. He saw it as wasted money sending people around the internet with low click-through rates, only to lose them to cart abandonment. Take the friction out and you get more return on advertising and a better consumer experience. The first shoppable video campaign ran with Moet & Chandon, which Blackburn says won an award at Cannes, and the company now works to make advertising and content across the open web, social media and CTV instantly transactable.

Plenty of people talk about shoppable media. The difference, Blackburn says, is that it all happens in-stream, and Vudoo does not take a cut of the transaction. Shopping with Amazon inside CNN is a pass-through, so the consumer buys with Amazon without ever leaving CNN's environment and can add to cart for later.

The content is ingested into the Vudoo ad centre platform, which integrates via API to the D2C site, the e-commerce platform, the payment gateway and all the product data. Vudoo then sends the same ad placement back out with a shoppable overlay and traffics the same tag across the programmatic ecosystem, working with partners like PubMatic and Index Exchange to curate high-attention inventory.

The obvious names are starting to nail it. Amazon are doing cool work and have launched a new CTV product, Criteo have strong retargeting, and the Walmarts of the world are moving fast. But Blackburn's hot tip is that next year the conversation will be about creators being able to create transactions as well as the brand part.

In the US, Vudoo is the exclusive partner of Amazon to enable a transaction off amazon.com, by his account. Add an influencer who resonates with an audience, tag their Amazon affiliate account, and they earn commission on the content they create, while the brand amplifies it into the open ecosystem. Retail media has got its basics right this year, and the next step is the creative layer that carries the transaction wherever the consumer meets the brand.

Blackburn wants the same shoppable experience inside LLM surfaces, and has a conversational commerce product ready for the LLMs. Where OpenAI got it wrong, he argues, is that it disintermediated the retailer and lost retailer support, and failed to understand that a real shopping experience matters. You need to filter products, check sizes and see prices. A buy now button does not give the brand experience customers need to feel comfortable and trust the environment before they buy.

Trust is the factor. Blackburn cites a stat that 40 per cent of Americans use AI every day but only 2 per cent trust it. That is why Vudoo puts work into trust signals and only works with trusted retailers. With Amazon, the shoppable ad in a publisher environment looks, feels like and is essentially Amazon, with the login and all the cues. In Australia it works with the Coles group, and he says it is in conversations with Sainsbury's and Argos, names that are trust signals in their own right.

Vudoo runs a CPM model, but outcomes-based, so the price has to more than account for the outcomes it creates. Because the platform can see how many products were added to cart and checked out, a brand can read the purchase generated for the spend. Not everyone buys the first time, but they add to cart, explore and come down the funnel, and with the right data at the right moment they convert.

Blackburn points to five DRUM Commerce Media Awards for the Mattel campaign, where shoppable outcomes came from a brand piece of creative across CTV, online video and display. That is double duty, the marketer's dream, because CFOs push for return and performance while marketers know they still need to build a brand. His advice to a CMO is to focus on the actual sales or transaction outcome, not the vanity metrics.

Blackburn positions Vudoo as adjacent to AI, an enabler for LLM environments rather than an AI company. He is building conversational commerce inside ads, so a consumer can ask in natural language whether something comes in blue or will fit a certain size and be guided to purchase. Prototypes are running with publishing partners, and the team is experimenting with MCP and UCP protocols and universal cart to integrate faster.

He predicts agentic commerce arrives within a year, but warns these protocols are not silver bullets, at least in the next 12 months, because under the hood at most retailers there is always something bespoke. With Moet & Chandon there are regions that cannot be sold alcohol, a bespoke API the protocols may not account for. That complexity, he says, is exactly what Vudoo has solved before.

Blackburn started in digital media before the dotcom boom and saw gaps in the products even then. He describes himself as the annoying sales guy who always wanted to help build products, so he now starts with a commercial lens: what problem to solve for the client, and how to demonstrate the outcome. He moved into product because frontline sales and the wining and dining is a younger man's game, and he did not want to be the old guy trying to stay cool with the agency kids.

The lessons are patience, because things take longer than the sales team think and the legal and data privacy work takes time, and focus, because it is tempting to build the world overnight. Better to build something, prototype fast and iterate, while still doing it properly, because a few bad early experiences make customers very hard to win back.

Blackburn says cross-functional success comes down to communication: get everyone on one strategy and repeat it, week after week, so each team owns its part of the goal. On the sales side, it is doing the brilliant basics well and it is a numbers game. The face-to-face meeting is critical, because people do deals through relationships. Echoing Benioff, he argues AI can do all the setup, but people are the ones that close the deals.

The potential, he says, is a win for everybody. Vudoo focuses on the consumer first, learned from Apple: build great consumer products and everything follows. The consumer gets a frictionless process, the marketer avoids complexity and sees an immediate return, the retailer gets incremental revenue and less friction, and the agency gets a simpler process.