Last year, the online transaction company PayPal hired Mark Grether, former CEO of Sizmek, who has also had stints as head of Amazon Advertising and Uber Ads, to lead its nascent advertising division.
And in just the past six months the company has announced a string of new products. These include SSP data integrations, shoppable creative units, an off-site ad network for PayPal merchants, the self-serve PayPal Ads Manager dashboard, plus a marketing integration between ChatGPT and Honey, the PayPal-owned online shopping and discount tool.
On Wednesday, PayPal Ads announced another bit of news. The company will begin partnering with the ecommerce tech startup Rokt to bring non-endemic advertisers to PayPal’s post-payment pages. These ads will appear when users submit peer-to-peer payments through PayPal’s own apps, PayPal and Venmo.
The Rokt partnership brings net-new advertisers to PayPal, since it’s Rokt that sources demand. Rather than displaying ads for PayPal merchant products, Grether told AdExchanger, the new post-payment ads are for discounts or free trials on subscription services, like Disney+, Apple or Uber One.
It’s a particularly sharp play for the subscription services, he said. Those services “get access to a very young audience base, an audience base that is in the mood of spending money.” And, the advertiser knows those users have the payment app open, and with a simple additional click could become a new paid subscriber.
PayNow
For PayPal Ads, the big advantage is that the funnel between when an advertiser sees an ad and when a consumer might make a purchase is collapsed into nearly the same moment.
That’s true of the Rokt integration, which entails media and other mobile subscription services drafting on peer-to-peer payments to get in front of a user’s face at a moment when they already have their wallet open, so to speak. PayPal also has a product called Storefront Ads, which are shoppable creative units. Rather than a user clicking a sponsored product listing that takes them to a retailer or merchant page, the PayPal Storefront units are, like, little shoppable elements within the page, so purchase could happen without the individual being sent off-site.
What PayPal Ads can do in these cases, Grether said, is bring retail media to new types of advertisers and ad sellers. The Storefront ad units, for example, bring retail media budgets to publishers including Vox and Business Insider, which otherwise have little access to the growing commerce media market.
PayPal is also bringing entirely new demand into retail media, not just creating shoppable ad supply on non-retail sites. During Advertising Week, PayPal’s news was an ad-selling product for its SMB merchants, most of whom are participating in retail media for the first time, according to Grether.
Large retailers and brick-and-mortar chains can unlock millions of dollars in ad revenue to subsidize the costs of their ecommerce business growth, which is “a huge disadvantage” for smaller merchants, he said.
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What’s next?
PayPal’s ad business is a strange one, partly because it flits back and forth between being an ad revenue generator for SMBs and PayPal clients, and being the ad buyer on their behalf.
For the Storefront ads, “the first phase is we help [merchants] to make money,” Grether said. Which means that other brands are placing ads on their pages. But that product won’t always just be a revenue generator.
“The second phase, which we will launch next year, is to help them to spend money more efficiently using our transaction graph,” he said.
On the other hand, PayPal Ads also has flagship clients like Ulta Beauty, for which it does not generate ad revenue, since Ulta Beauty has a large retail media business of its own. With Ulta, PayPal is helping the marketing team spend their budgets. “But eventually we can also help them to make money,” Grether added.
Ad tech companies that bring only tech to the retail media equation can only work in one direction. They can help a marketer spend money or help a retailer/merchant earn money. Grether knows this full well, having led the Sizmek-Rocket Fuel third-party ad tech stack prior to positions at Amazon and Uber.
“Proprietary data is a true differentiator and really a key in building out a successful advertising business again today,” he said. “It’s really hard,” he added, to build an ad tech business without that owned asset.
“I now would say, in 2025, you need to have that [proprietary data and media] to have a competitive advantage and differentiation,” he said.
