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.

“PayPal is uniquely positioned to shape a new era of commerce discovery, help merchants acquire new customers, and reengage existing ones,” Grether said in a post Tuesday on his LinkedIn page.

Anderson, most recently head of products and payments at the fintech Plaid, will be responsible for PayPal's consumer business, including product strategy for PayPal and and it’s peer-to-peer unit Venmo. Before joining Plaid, he spent a decade at Meta in various roles.

Anderson noted on his LinkedIn page that he’s returning to his roots, in some sense, by joining PayPal because he spent earlier years at eBay, which spun off PayPal. He noted that the new job will be a challenge.

“We have our work cut out for us,” he said Tuesday in a LinkedIn post. “Reaccelerating growth on PayPal’s global scale will not be easy.”

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.

By Chris Kelly on May 28, 2024
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