PayPal Open Commerce with Dr. Mark Grether: Retail Media, Agentic Commerce at Marketecture Live

Dr. Mark Grether, SVP & General Manager, PayPal, unpacks how PayPal is reshaping commerce media by leveraging its transaction graph across 30 million merchants and 400 million consumers at Marketecture Live. From democratizing retail media for SMBs to monetizing Venmo’s social feed and enabling agentic commerce with trusted payments, this conversation explores why PayPal sits at the center of advertising, AI, and the future of buying online.

Takeaways

• PayPal’s transaction graph spans 30 million merchants and 400 million consumers, giving it a horizontal view that powers audience targeting, market share insights, and closed-loop measurement.
• The new SMB Ads Manager unifies demand and supply so smaller merchants can both buy previously unreachable audiences and monetize their own site traffic.
• Venmo’s social feed and Gen Z heavy user base create high demand, upper funnel ad inventory tied to real spending behavior and cultural signals like emoji usage.
• Honey contributes large-scale intent and catalog visibility, letting PayPal connect discovery to checkout and measure impact even for off-site channels like CTV.
• In agentic commerce, PayPal aims to be the trust and payments layer that reduces friction while humans still make emotional final decisions.

Chapters

00:00 PayPal Today: Scale, Brands, and the Transaction Graph

01:09 Retail Media Fragmentation and the SMB Challenge

01:53 PayPal Ads: On-Site, Off-Site, and Storefront Ads

03:57 Ads Manager: Unifying Demand and Monetizing SMB Eyeballs

06:37 Open Commerce: Relevance and Brand Safety at Scale

08:24 Venmo Ads: Social, Gen Z, and Upper-Funnel Moments

10:36 Honey: Intent Signals, Catalog Data, and Targeting

12:15 Closed-Loop Measurement and CTV Attribution

16:14 Agentic Commerce: Trust, Payments, and In-Flow Checkout

24:04 Five-Year Outlook: What Changes and What Doesn’t

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