The news: PayPal unveiled Curated Ads, connecting audiences and closed-loop attribution to premium connected TV (CTV) and open web advertising.

This lets brands explicitly connect purchase attribution numbers to the success of the ad, backed by PayPal’s own transaction data.

Why this matters: Marketers have struggled to quantify proof of purchase impact. With most professionals measuring purchase intent based on clicks or lookalike models, the resulting data still remains an estimate, leading to programmatic ad waste. The ANA calculated a 34% increase in this waste, with less than half of marketing spend reaching the correct audiences, per its Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study.

PayPal’s Curated Ads solve the attribution gap by linking an ad to a verified transaction through PayPal’s network, confirming both a purchase and the correct audience reach. This gives PayPal’s financial media network an edge over rival retail media networks that can only track data within their own brand ecosystem: It can supply marketers with cross-merchant data, cross-category data, and purchase data verified at the moment of payment. 

Zooming out: Connected TV ad spending is estimated to hit $37.19 billion this year, per our forecasts. For PayPal’s fledgling FMN, tapping into CTV could give its ad revenues a serious lift: More than half of advertisers are interested in advertising on non-retail media networks, per Skai and Path to Purchase Institute. 

Implications for FMNs: Establishing a presence in new ad formats like shoppable CTV can be a fast way to ramp up FMN growth. 

Cutting-edge ad forms, like AI-powered lead generation, may allow FIs and payment providers to maintain even more control over the shopping journey—especially when fintechs like PayPal have already made significant investments into agentic infrastructure.