From checkout to click: How PayPal Ads is reshaping digital commerce

Miles Brickley, Growth Lead at Kettle and Mark Grether, SVP & General Manager at PayPal Ads, sat down in the Sport Beach Content Studio at Cannes Lions 2026 to have a conversation about how PayPal Ads is redefining digital advertising with transaction data, AI, and measurable outcomes for brands.

--

Miles: Hello from Sport Beach 2026. I'm Miles Brickley. I'm the senior director of growth at Kettle. We're a digital creative agency that's reinventing the way that people meet brands online.And I'm delighted to be sitting here with Mark Gruther from PayPal Ads.

Mark: Thanks so much for having me.

Miles: Tell us a little bit more about PayPal Ads and the way that it allows brands to actually show up and connect with audiences differently compared to the competitive set of the current moment.

Mark: Yeah. So we launched paypal ads about two years ago, so it's now a second Cannes, great to be here. And yeah, when we go to our advertisers, we basically allow them to tap into what we call our transaction graph, meaning we have data from 30 million merchants, 400 million consumers globally. And so unlike anyone else, we have the transaction data across so many merchants, which means we have a much, much deeper insight into what consumers actually purchase online. And we enable our advertisers to tap into that, enabling them to reach truly users who actually are in the moment to buy something. And that's really kind of unique and differentiated. We do so in the US, the UK and Germany.We reach our audiences on our own properties aka, PayPal as well as Venmo and Honey, but we also have collaborations with other inventory sources, which means we are kind of really broad in terms of where we can reach our audiences, so in where we can enable our advertisers to tap into our transaction graph.

Miles: That's fantastic. And so what impact have you seen when working with advertisers on how much more valuable that transaction data is to actually understanding what message, what placement in that interaction will be even more valuable because of it?

Mark: Yeah. You know, there are two different components. The first one is targeting in itself. Who are we actually reaching, right? And in addition to just having the data from PayPal, we also have data from Venmo, So you might have had a late night pizza here, right?

Miles: Guilty

Mark: And you might share it with your friends, right. And, we know this from Venmo. Or you have honey browser data which allows us to see what people are actually doing from a browsing perspective. And the key point here is that we don't just target the odds of measurement. And with measurement to your point, we can then show to our advertisers how actually the campaign is performing, not just from a single retailer perspective, but as I mentioned across all the merchants. And that leads to a proof point such as that we had campaigns with Adorama where on the one hand we saw significantly higher return on advertising spent 7, 8X, but also we were able to leverage our transaction data to provide incremental buyers to them.

Another case study which we shared here in Cannes was with Best Buy which has a similar situation if you tap into true transaction data as opposed to just online behaviour or cookie based targeting, right, a similar situation, significantly higher robust, in this case it was about 8X.And that really kind of shows you the power of the transaction data, the fact that we truly, truly know what people are buying, have this kind of perspective across so many merchants.And again, we're leveraging that to kind of, yeah, make the money for our advertisers work harder.

Miles: Exactly. Cutting through the noise, allowing those advertisers, allowing those brands to create much more meaningful connections based on the understanding of the audience.

And you spoke a lot about the measurement and the impact so far. And has that been kind of the theme you're seeing around Cannes this year is that it's about the proof. It's not just about the new launches of the new features, about proving that it actually works?

Mark: Exactly. And I mean, every conversation here is about AI, right? But the big difference compared to last year is that last year it was more about what we potentially could do.

Maybe we had an alpha or beta. This year, at least from our perspective, it's less about the next new shiny object that we might have forgotten in four, 6-8 weeks when we're all back stateside.

But it's really about demonstrating what we actually do have actually performs, right? And so for us it was about how we launched in the last 18 months things like our identity graph so that we can actually identify who you are right across all 4 million consumers based on our payment infrastructure. As I mentioned, we launched our transaction graph, we launched offsite ads, we launched collaborations with CTV providers to provide close to attribution. We launched shoppable ads, right, we launched so many things. And so this year was really about how we can prove that what we have launched actually does perform on our behalf, on the behalf of our advertiser, hence the case studies with Best Buy Adorama, with Etsy as another client of ours. And so it was really about making sure to show it does perform.

We're not just here to market ourselves, but we actually have the proof points and that was kind of for us, really the key element why we went to Cannes and spoke to advertisers about how it does actually work.

Miles: It's providing that clarity that so many marketers, so many advertisers would be reaching for when they're making those key investment decisions about where they need to show up and how. It sounds like you're really enabling that and giving them that visibility.

Mark: Yeah, exactly. I mean, making a claim is easy, right? We have what data, we have better inventory, we have a better ad, we have a better AI, right. Claiming is easy, but proving that you can actually do it is much, much harder. And that's what we focus on this year here in Cannes.

Miles: That's fantastic. Well, thank you so much for sitting down with me.

Mark: Thanks so much for having me.