PayPal has announced new managerial appointments to develop a PayPal Ads solution. This PayPal Ads will be a new advertising platform to strengthen the company's consumer value proposition. 

Specifically, as reported by the company in a statement, Mark Grether has been named senior vice president and general manager of PayPal Ads; and John Anderson, as senior vice president and general manager of the Consumer Group. Grether and Anderson will report to Diego Scotti, executive vice president, general manager of the Consumer Group and Global Marketing and Communications.

PayPal has highlighted long-standing relationships with millions of consumers and merchants that make the company “uniquely positioned to create an advertising platform rooted in commerce.” Grether will join the company to build an advertising business that will help merchants get smarter to sell more products and services effectively while allowing consumers to discover more of what they like.

PayPal Ads will use customer data to create a dynamic, personalized platform that will drive a better return on ad spend for marketers while delighting consumers with compelling offers.

PayPal recruits the head of Uber Advertising 

Grether joins PayPal from Uber, where he served as vice president and general manager of Uber Advertising. Under his leadership, Uber Advertising grew to a $1 billion business with more than 500,000 advertisers worldwide. He successfully led the acceleration of the company's global advertising business, helping marketers, brands and other advertisers reach Uber's highly engaged user base in its Mobility and Delivery divisions

Prior to Uber, Grether led product strategy for Amazon's advertising business and was CEO of Sizmek, one of the world's largest independent advertising platforms, which was sold to Amazon in 2019. Previously, Mark was co-founder and global COO of WPP's Xaxis.

“Commerce and advertising are deeply connected, and we believe the advertising platform we're building at PayPal will become a must-have marketing channel for merchants large and small. I'm thrilled to have Mark join our team and lead this important work,” said Scotti.

On his side, Anderson has spent more than 20 years at the intersection of technology platforms and payments. He will be responsible for PayPal's consumer business, including product strategy for PayPal and Venmo globally. Anderson joins PayPal from Plaid, where he was Head of Product and Payments and oversaw significant growth of Plaid's suite of payment products. Prior to Plaid, John spent a decade at Meta in numerous product and leadership roles, including head of product for Oculus, head of Facebook Japan, and head of the payments, commerce and risk product and operations teams.

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Meta has released more details on how it plans to use AI to improve the performance of its ad system. So far, the company announced a possible release of Meta AI Sandbox before the end of 2023, but without a specific date. 

The company has announced Meta's AI Sandbox, which will test AI's generative capabilities for advertisers. 

The company has also announced new features in its 'Meta Advantage' suite of ad automation tools, along with details on its AI infrastructure and modeling investments that underpin it all.

Meta AI Sandbox's main functionalities 

The Meta 'AI Sandbox' is a set of new tools and features to be included in the near future that will use AI and machine learning-based generative ad tools. 

"Our goal is to learn what works for advertisers and make it easier for them to use these features in our ad tools," commented John Hegeman, Meta's vice president of monetization. For starters, Hegeman added, "we're building tools like text variation, background generation and image enhancement to do things like make an ad's text more engaging or creative." Specifically, these features will enable:

Text Variation: Generate multiple versions of the text to highlight important points in the advertiser's copy, giving you the option to test different messages for certain audiences.

Background generator: Creates background images from text entries, allowing advertisers to test multiple backgrounds quickly and diversify their creative resources.

Image Enhancement: Adjusts creative to fit different dimensions on different surfaces, such as Stories or Reels, allowing advertisers to spend less time and resources reusing creative.

The trial period will last until the end of July 

These features are currently in a trial period with select advertisers, and in July, they will begin to expand access to add more tools gradually.

On the other hand, these are not the only products that use AI and machine learning for campaigns and ad personalization. 

Meta has a portfolio of products called 'Meta Advantage', and they also introduced new features, including: one-click switching from manual campaigns to Advantage+ buys, launching performance comparisons, and using video creatives in catalog ads.

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Digital advertising accounts for 46% of total advertising investment in Spain.

Digital advertising is fast becoming the main option for advertising in Spain. In a year on year comparison, digital advertising has experienced an investment increase of 7.3%, obtaining 1,205.5 million euros in the first six months of the year and already accounts for 46.09% of total advertising investment in Spain, according to data provided by Infoadex.

Within this area, the highest performance was in social media, where the volume of advertising investment grew by 9.9%, from 299.2 million euros to 328.8 million euros during the period under analysis. 

Search increased its figure by 7.0% with an investment of €408.1 million compared to the €381.6 million it obtained in the same period of 2021. The website also increased its investment figure by 5.9%, reaching a volume in the first half of the year of 468.6 million euros. 

The second medium by investment would be television, which aggregates an advertising investment of €830.2 million, -5.0% less than the €873.7 million in the same period of 2021. Radio, which ranks third in terms of investment, stands at 208.3 million and a growth of 9.6%, above the fourth medium, newspapers, whose figure in this first half of the year amounted to 147.2 million euros. In the case of outdoor advertising, the figure represents an increase of 33.8% to 145.6 million euros. Magazines obtained an investment figure of 69.3 million euros in the period January-June 2022, which translates into an increase of 6.4%. 

Spanish companies increase advertising investment

According to the data provided by Infoadex, in the first six months of the year, advertising investment has grown by 4.2% compared to the equivalent period of the previous year, reaching 2,615.4 million euros, compared to the 2,509.5 million euros in the period January-June 2021. 

In June, advertising investment grew by 0.2% from 541.8 million euros in 2021 to 543.2 million euros.

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