Dive Brief:
- PayPal announced plans to create a new advertising platform rooted in transaction data generated by its nearly 400 million active accounts, per details shared with Marketing Dive.
- To lead the ad platform, PayPal has appointed Mark Grether as senior vice president and general manager of PayPal Ads. John Anderson has been appointed senior vice president and general manager for the company's consumer business.
- The ad business, which will include PayPal's recently launched advanced offers platform, comes as other entrants from financial services and hospitality industries enter the crowded retail media market.
Dive Insight:
PayPal is getting into the ad business with plans for a new ad platform that will rely on the transaction data generated by its nearly 400 million active users. The payments company is pitching the offering as a way to help merchants sell more products and services while acting as a discovery engine for consumers.
“Commerce and advertising are deeply connected, and we believe that the advertising platform we are building at PayPal will become a must-use marketing channel for merchants big and small,” said Diego Scotti, executive vice president and general manager for PayPal's consumer business and global marketing and communications, in a press release.
Central to the new offering is the company's advanced offers platform which was announced in January. The platform analyzes nearly half a trillion dollars of transaction data with artificial intelligence to generate consumer insights and offer more personalized deals. With advanced offers, merchants pay for performance — not impressions or clicks — potentially making PayPal an attractive ad partner in the crowded media network space.
Grether joins PayPal from Uber, where he was vice president and general manager of Uber's ad business. The executive helped grow Uber Advertising into a $1 billion business that serves more than half a million advertisers globally. Previously, he led product strategy for Amazon's ad business and was a leading executive at ad platform Sizmek and WPP's Xaxis.
Anderson, most recently of financial services company Plaid, will be responsible for PayPal's consumer business, including product strategy for PayPal and Venmo. Before that, he spent a decade at Meta in various roles.
By launching an ad business, PayPal joins financial players like Chase Bank and hospitality companies like Expedia in launching media networks that are attempting to mirror the success of retail offerings that use companies' first-party data to sell advertising in a variety of channels.
