PayPal Ads’ Mark Grether thinks payments are the future of identity

Two years since launching, PayPal Ads is making a name for itself. Ahead of Possible PayPal’s retail media arm announced Curated Ads, which aims to bring closed-loop attribution to connected TV (CTV). It further introduced its new identity solution, PayPal Ads ID.

Mark Grether, senior vice president and general manager of PayPal Ads, spoke to The Current at Possible about all of this and more.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

You recently announced new partnerships with streamers like Warner Bros. Discovery. Tell us a bit about what this means for the future of the PayPal business.

As these streamers are scaling their CTV efforts, they need to answer the question — the fundamental question — for advertisers: Is their full-funnel marketing working for them? That’s where PayPal comes in. We have transaction data for so many merchants and can provide closed-loop attribution back to the streamers.

We can do so not just from one single merchant perspective, but across all the merchants. So whether you saw a product advertised on a streamer’s CTV environment, and no matter where you make a purchase … we can provide closed-loop attribution better than anyone else. So, we can help the streamers attract dollars not only for awareness campaigns but also for performance campaigns.

How do you see the consumer journey?

With data across 30 million merchants globally, we see more and more of a consistent pattern [as people go] from the LLMs to search to then the retailers. It’s hardly that they go from search back to LLMs and jump around. It’s becoming a relatively linear process.

In this context, does measurement get any easier?

Definitely. As the transaction happens … almost by definition you get transaction data, hence you can provide closed-loop attribution back to the advertiser. It’s much easier to measure ROI, because you overcome the challenges of attribution, of last click, of all of that because you measure it as the transaction happens in that moment in time.

Speaking of measurement and attribution — maybe this is provocative, but could payments be the new cookies?

I wouldn’t say it’s provocative. This is the future. We’ve launched PayPal Ads ID; we have the ID of 400 million consumers. The richness that we have from an identity perspective is much, much better than what you’d find from probabilistic IDs or cookies or whatever. They obviously help with targeting but also with measurement.

How does seeing verified purchases across those multiple merchants change how advertisers should be thinking about campaign reporting?

The first question now with the CFO is to find how much money the CMO is going to spend, and we help them answer the question. Then we help the CFO to understand where to best place the money. Which retailer brings them the best ROAS? With our transaction graph, we can also answer those two most fundamental questions: how much money to spend and where the money should go to.

It sounds like you’re a big proponent of the open internet.

We as consumers need to have the open internet. We don’t want to spend all of our time with a few big players. The richness and diversity of the open internet is key for all of us. We just want to make sure it’s becoming better, and we’re helping the open internet become a space where transactions are happening. We are in a good way to make the open internet more attractive for both consumers but also for advertisers and publishers.