Payments giant PayPal has formerly launched its advertising business, PayPal Ads, with the service going live on 10 October in the US. Pitching aggregated transaction data from its 400 million active users, the service is set to shake up the ad and retail media space starting now.
From the launch, PayPal is selling display ads on its own properties and will eventually expand to sell video ads within the next year, the company tells Adweek. All ads will be self-serve.
In addition, PayPal is also set to sell ads on retailer’s own websites, with PayPal selling ads on the payment pages of the millions of merchants that use PayPal for their checkouts and payments and across conformation pages once a transaction has been completed.
PayPal is one of a crop if non-retailers setting up retail media networks and it plans to exploit what it sees as its wider reach than retailer networks to corner the online first-party data ad market.
First mooted in May, PayPal Ads is being run by Mark Grether as SVP, General Manager, PayPal Ads, and John Anderson as SVP, General Manager, Consumer Group. Grether and Anderson will report to Diego Scotti, EVP, General Manager, Consumer Group and Global Marketing & Communications.
PayPal already runs PayPal advanced offers platform, but this newly created advertising arm adds to this brand and merchant advertising that can be more personally targeted based on the company’s vast lake of consumer data.
“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,” says Scotti.