Yesterday PayPal announced PayPal Ads Manager
“PayPal Ads Manager gives tens of millions of small businesses access to high-margin ad revenue while creating valuable new inventory for advertisers of all sizes.”
“Retail media networks have become a multi-billion-dollar industry that generates high-margin revenue by enabling businesses to sell advertising on small business websites and apps”
As the Founder/CEO of Commerce Signals we brought card data to market primarily for measurement (now part of TU). It gave us a view of how advertisers performed and what data was valuable. I went into great detail on the challenges of JPM’s Retail Media network in my June 2025 blog Understanding How Payments Data Plays in Advertising (2025), and more generically in my 2021 blog Data Games.
Back in 2017 I took a look at PayPal’s data for Dan and told him it wasn’t worth the effort. While the Braintree side had interesting data it faced 2 hurdles #1 it was owned and controlled by the merchants and #2 eCommerce data is prolific (not unique) “everyone” has insight into eCom as the universe of specialists from Shopify, to fraud, to payment and customer support.
Retail Media Networks of the LARGEST retailers (Target, Walmart and Amazon), combined with agency data graphs (Merkle M1) have taken out data specialists like Datalogix/Oracle in Grocery. These RMNs have locked in customers with Unique Data for CPGs (ex P&G) and Manufacturers (ex Samsung) to activate campaigns. No such ability exists for card data holders. For example, JPM does not see SKU and is only 10% of GMV (ie eCom and POS sales). PayPal is less than 10% of the eCommerce alone. You can’t target (or measure) with an audience that is only 10%. The big buyers want big sources.. They don’t want to target using 10 specialists.. They may use 3.. But these 3 cover 80% of spend (ex Amazon, WMT, Target).
There is undoubtedly an opportunity for retailers to put advertising on the PayPal branded checkout page, but they could do this without PayPal through Google Adsense (see link). If merchants are going to place advertising they want controls over what is advertised and the largest possible audience of advertisers looking to place ads. What network does PayPal provide? Demand side? No way.. This is why Card Issuers worked to make Card Linked Offers work (as opposed to advertising). PayPal also tried this.
My head of product at Commerce Signals was a brilliant young man Chris Hammer, he went on to run product for Honey / PayPal (no longer there). My recommendation is for PayPal to take a look back on Honey and Chris’ advice, and your history in offers. The large PayPal/Braintree merchants have seen your story before and just laugh. There may be a few long tail retailers that turn this on, but there is no way it can work.
PayPal would be better off making Ads Manager a reseller of Google AdSense.