Last month it was Netflix ads, now PayPal advertising looks like becoming the next big thing.
The online payments system is the 143rd largest Fortune 500 corporation by revenue and has a (self-)reported 200 million users. Those factors alone have made it well placed to join the ranks of the big advertising platforms belonging to the likes of Facebook and Google.
Two new senior appointments Mark Grether and John Anderson confirm the promise is becoming a reality.
Grether joins with the title of “SVP, General Manager, PayPal Ads” while Anderson is named “SVP, General Manager, Consumer Group.”
In the advertising business for 20 years Grether has been poached from Uber. There he was General Manager of Uber Advertising. There he turned the department into a $1 billion business with more than 500,000 advertisers globally. Can he do the same at PayPal? They’ll be hoping he can.
Anderson, who PayPal have recruited from adjacent fintech company Plaid, will head up PayPal’s consumer offering. Previously he spent a decade at Meta in a number of different payment, consumer and product-related roles. That experience, says, PayPal’s Diego Scotti, to whom both men will report, will “drive relevance of our brands, fuel our innovation pipeline, and give more reasons for consumers and merchants to choose PayPal.”
The goal of PayPal advertising, the company said in a statement, is to build:
an advertising business that will help make merchants smarter to sell more products and services effectively, as well as enable consumers to discover more of what they love. The advertising business, which will include PayPal advanced offers platform, will use customer insights to build a dynamic, truly personalized platform that will drive better advertising spend performance for merchants while delighting consumers with compelling offers.
Lofty ambitions indeed. What that means for those of us on the client and agency side remains to be seen. Expect the calls and emails to come in before to look to asking if you’d considered moving some of your budget to PayPal. Just a bit of it.