How PayPal is using Venmo, Honey transactions to win over marketers to its ads business
It’s no secret that retail media networks are seeing a boon in business and viewed as a bright spot in advertising. Financial institutions are chasing those dollars now, too, from the likes of Chase and Revolut.
PayPal, which has offered advertising since October 2024, is going live with a new tool for onsite and offsite advertisers, dubbed Transaction Graph, that segments audiences based on their purchases across its properties Honey, PayPal and Venmo.
PayPal argues that the tool stands out by harnessing data from 30 million merchants, 400 million global consumers and accounting for about 25% of global commerce.
“We have a much better understanding [over competitors] of consumer purchase, behavior, what they buy, when they buy it, where they buy, what do they buy first,” Mark Grether, svp of PayPal Ads, told Digiday. “From an advertiser’s perspective, we can answer many [more] questions than a single retailer can answer.”
PayPal, which operates in 200 markets around the world, is touting its understanding of its varying consumers that use its respective services, including as an example the “young, urban, social” user sending transactions on Venmo, Grether said. PayPal Ads launched in the U.S., and expanded to the U.K. and Germany earlier this year.
By sitting across transactions from all merchants, PayPal argues that it can calculate market share and determine how brands could increase their own based on spend. “We can help [brands] with incrementality from a single merchant, but across all merchants as well,” Grether said.
The Transaction Graph has been in beta for about eight months and has already been used by advertisers that include Target, Best Buy and Verizon. The team did not share specific findings of success from those campaigns. PayPal said it was working with nearly a dozen full-funnel measurement providers including Lucid and InMarket.
“Transactions are the new cookie,” Grether said. “That gives us a next kind of level of confidence, of security, of trust as we’re building out this advertising business.”
According to eMarketer forecasts, retail media is expected to absorb more than $1 for every $5 spent on digital media by 2029. Expect more, new announcements from retailers and financial institutions regarding their media networks this week and next.
This year at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Nectar360 is hosting what it’s calling a retail media summit from The Carlton. And Albertsons Media Collective will have a pop up grocery store at MediaLink beach.
Similar to generative AI use cases, the retail and financial media network race is due for tangible use cases and creativity at this year’s festival, said Tim Ringel, Global CEO of Meet the People, which just acquired Yeoman Technology Group to bolster its retail media capabilities.
“The hype cycle is over and the reality cycle is kicking in,” Ringel noted.
More in Marketing
AI screenings, budget cuts, and burnout: What’s really behind advertising’s hiring disconnect
The job market has never been easy to navigate. But between tightened marketing budgets, agency consolidation and economic headwinds, the job market is as convoluted as ever.
Cannes Briefing: A guide to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2025
Here’s what we can tell you about Cannes Lions 2025 so far.
‘I feel disposable’: Confessions of a transgender Target employee after DEI pullback
Modern Retail spoke with a transgender Target employee who lives in Texas and has worked for the company for about 10 years.