By Patrick Coffee

Digital payment platform PayPal went live in 1999, eventually spawning its own category of businesses and minting a group of influential billionaires, including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.

Nearly three decades later, the online-payment business is feeling a bit cramped. Consumers have options ranging from Square and Apple Pay to buy-now, pay-later entrants such as Affirm and Klarna. PayPal increased its presence in the market by acquiring Venmo in 2013, but now it has to work harder than ever to stand out from the crowd.

One of its responses to the competition has been a pair of lighthearted marketing campaigns encouraging consumers to use PayPal and its Venmo service for their flexibility and rewards.

Late last year, PayPal introduced an ad campaign starring actor Will Ferrell, who belts out Fleetwood Mac lyrics while telling people waiting in line at a store, sitting on a plane and riding the subway that PayPal isn't just for online impulse buying.

An ad launched this month promoting Venmo features actors Patrick Schwarzenegger and Aimee Lou Wood, fresh off their star turns in HBO's "The White Lotus," showcasing the Venmo debit card in a spot set to the 1991 hip-hop classic "The Choice Is Yours" by Black Sheep.

The company also launched a debit card last year to go along with its own credit card. And in May it announced a partnership that enables shoppers to pay instantly with PayPal or Venmo for products or services they purchase while using Perplexity's AI chat interface in so-called agentic commerce, where an AI agent helps users find and buy things.

PayPal's top business objective, according to company leadership, is to expand consumers' use of so-called branded checkouts -- meaning online or in-store checkouts showing "Pay with PayPal" or "Pay with Venmo" buttons.

In an interview, PayPal's chief marketing officer, Geoff Seeley, explains how the company plans to raise the profile of its two brands. Here are edited excerpts.

PayPal vs. Venmo

WSJ: What is the business problem that you've been tasked with solving at PayPal?

GEOFF SEELEY: The challenge is to make the brand relevant for consumers. Why is the consumer going to choose PayPal when they are faced with a plethora of choices?

WSJ: So why would consumers choose PayPal?

SEELEY: PayPal effectively is the one-stop shop for whatever you want. However you choose to pay, we have that. You don't need to go and have, like, 17 different apps on your phone, because every way that you may want to choose to pay, we have that available for you. And increasingly, we are layering on a rewards element that means whichever way you choose to pay with PayPal, you'll be rewarded for that.

WSJ: How are the PayPal and Venmo brands different?

SEELEY: We position PayPal very much to the sort of 30- to 40-year-old young families just beginning to settle down and looking for that sense of stability and confidence that you need to know where every dollar is going because you've got responsibilities now.

Venmo is very much for a mobile-first, younger, potentially slightly more affluent audience. That was another reason to cast Amy and Patrick -- and that they have such a palpable sort of friendship and chemistry that is highly representative of the people who you will Venmo every day. Everything we're doing right now is really predicated on letting you know that you can now spend with Venmo for everything.

WSJ: So you're pitching what are now very similar products to different demographics.

SEELEY: That's pretty much right.

Will Ferrell sings Fleetwood Mac

WSJ: Whom were you trying to reach when you picked Will Ferrell and Fleetwood Mac to advertise PayPal?

SEELEY: Will Ferrell spans all demographics -- everyone from teenagers through to older people. Fleetwood Mac are hot. They are hot for a Gen-Z audience. My 16-year old thinks that Stevie Nicks is one of the greatest artists that ever lived. So Fleetwood Mac, again, transcends generations.

How do we find talent and music that is accessible to everybody and doesn't alienate anybody? That was the active choice around it, other than the fact that, obviously, the song "Go Your Own Way" fits what we were trying to communicate.

WSJ: What do you want Venmo to be that it is not at this time? How do you want to change perceptions of that brand?

SEELEY: It's seeing it not just as the means by which you pay someone back the $10 that you borrowed from them last night, but as something that you can build more of your financial life around. Our stated mission is to become the go-to money-movement app for the next generation.

What we're doing now is is really responding to the behavior that we already see on the platform and giving people ways in which they can spend their Venmo balance on other things that they want to do. The first way is with the "Pay with Venmo" button that is increasingly being integrated on merchant platforms. The other part of that is the Venmo debit card.

WSJ: On the most recent earnings call, leadership said PayPal is moving from being a payment company to a commerce platform. What does that mean?

SEELEY: We are no longer just a button that you click to pay. We don't serve just consumers. Our business was built on integration with merchants, and the payment solutions that we build are in service of driving merchants' business.

Also, I'm sure you've seen the shifting behaviors of how people are leveraging Perplexity and ChatGPT and other AI platforms to search for products. We just announced a partnership with Perplexity. We believe wholeheartedly that we are best-placed to support our merchants as consumer behavior shifts more towards agentic commerce.

WSJ: Have the ad campaigns been successful so far? Can you tie them to business results?

SEELEY: We saw great results on the first iteration of the "PayPal Everywhere" campaign from last year. We've seen, like, 50% growth in total payment volume on "Pay with Venmo" in Q1, and we've seen nearly 40% growth in Venmo debit monthly active users.

Patrick Coffee is a Wall Street Journal reporter in New York. Email him at patrick.coffee@wsj.com.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 15, 2025 10:00 ET (14:00 GMT)

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