CANNES — It’s not just a marker of Cannes Lions’ expansion that a payments company like PayPal was a key fixture at this year’s event. It’s also a symptom of PayPal’s own emergence into the advertising business.
PayPal unveiled its own PayPal Ads platform in October 2024, adding Offsite Ads this April.
Mark Grether, SVP and general manager of PayPal Ads, this broadening of the ecosystem is an encouraging sign of health and innovation.
Cannes evolves beyond the platforms
“Yes you still have the creative agencies, you have the media agencies, you have new players like ourselves on the beach,” Grether said. “And that actually is really kind of motivating, exciting, to see so many new things in our industry and that really makes me really kind of excited about coming back next year.”
This year, however, he was struck by the diversity of companies present, signaling another industry transformation. The emergence of financial media networks (FMNs) underscores this trend.
One eMarketer forecast projecting that FMN ad spend will grow at a compound annual rate of 107.0% between 2024 and 2026, with PayPal’s ad business poised to be a major player.
PayPal is leveraging what Grether called its “transaction graph,” which he said covers 400 million consumers, 30 million merchants, and sees 25% of all e-commerce. The company’s strategy involves using this extensive purchase data to power its advertising network, allowing brands to target consumers based on actual buying behavior.
Collapsing the path to purchase
The long-held distinction between browsing online content and actively shopping is beginning to dissolve. A new generation of advertising technology aims to collapse the marketing funnel, creating ad units that are also a complete, one-click point of sale, turning any publisher’s page into a potential checkout counter.
This move is designed to challenge the dominance of walled gardens by creating what Grether terms “open commerce.” The goal is to make any part of the open internet a potential retail space for merchants, leveraging a brand’s trust built over decades in online payments to facilitate transactions in new environments, from publisher apps to AI-driven interfaces.
PayPal recently launched its Storefront Ads platform. The new ad unit is designed to bring a one-click transaction experience directly to consumers on any publisher site or app.
Building trust in an AI-driven world
PayPal’s Grether believes users are “getting stuck in AI environments,” like those offered by Google and OpenAI, where they will eventually make purchases. In these unfamiliar digital spaces, he believes consumers will seek out familiar, trusted brands to handle their transactions.
“As PayPal 25 years ago enabled consumers to shop online and build a trusted brand in doing so, PayPal now is enabling consumers to make purchases in an AI environment with the trust that PayPal brings to these transactions,” he said. “So that’s kind of one element of enabling trust in this kind of new environment, especially when it comes to payments.”
This provides an “open commerce opportunity” for merchants outside the major tech platforms, he added. As merchants risk losing traffic to walled gardens, Grether said the ability to sell directly on the open web offers a vital alternative.
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