PayPal is expanding its advertising ambitions, and with it, deepening its reliance on the purchasing behavior of hundreds of millions of users. The financial tech giant is now selling targeted ads across the open web, using transaction data from its customers as the fuel.
This new phase for PayPal Ads, just six months old, was announced by Mark Grether, the division’s senior vice president and general manager, during the Possible marketing event hosted by ADWEEK. Until now, PayPal limited its ad placements to its own platforms. The expansion into programmatic advertising brings a significant change: using personal purchase data from PayPal, Venmo, and Honey to deliver ads on third-party websites.
While PayPal is not alone in this model, the practice raises ongoing concerns about the boundaries of consumer consent and the monetization of financial data. The company aggregates insights from over 30 million merchants and 400 million users, constructing detailed consumer profiles that it can now deploy beyond its own ecosystem.
Grether acknowledged a key motivation: PayPal wants to compete with the likes of Facebook and Google in the advertising space but lacks the sheer volume of in-app user activity to do so. “Programmatic is a big opportunity for us,” he told ADWEEK. “My biggest challenge is that I don’t have enough eyeballs on the PayPal apps to compete with large social networks.”
To solve that problem, PayPal is extending its reach to external platforms. That means more consumer data, originally collected during financial transactions, is now being used to influence behavior elsewhere on the web, often without users fully understanding how their information is being repurposed.
Publicis Media is the first agency to test these offsite ads, which signal a broader shift in the retail and commerce media landscape. While EMARKETER projects that about 80% of retail media spending will remain focused on onsite ads this year, companies are increasingly eyeing offsite opportunities as a new frontier for ad revenue. Total spending in the space is expected to reach $60 billion.
All of this, however, highlights the underlying concern: the increasing normalization of using sensitive financial activity for surveillance-style advertising. What was once a private transaction is now an opportunity for behavioral profiling. And as financial platforms pivot toward ad-based monetization, the lines between service providers and data brokers continue to blur.
