PayPals Mark Grether Unveils Ambitious Offsite Ads Strategy, Touting Transaction Graph as Future Beet.TV [Video]

MIAMI – PayPal is positioning itself as a new heavyweight in the digital advertising space, unveiling a bold vision for its ads business centered on what it calls the “transaction graph”—a data-driven foundation built on the behavior of its 400 million users and 30 million global merchants.

Speaking this week, Mark Grether, senior vice president and general manager of PayPal Ads, said the company’s latest product, Offsite Ads, opens the door for merchants and advertisers to activate campaigns far beyond PayPal’s own platforms.

“We have access to transaction data from 30 million merchants globally with 400 million users on our platform,” Grether said in this interview at the Possible marketing conference. “When Facebook has a social graph, or TikTok has the interest graph, we have the transaction graph.”

This transaction graph, Grether said, gives PayPal an unmatched horizontal view across all merchants, allowing advertisers to understand consumer behavior at a granular level and to target …