PayPal readies first TV brand campaign

PayPal is launching its first television brand campaign in the UK to grow its user base and revive interest among lapsed users or those that use it only for buying and selling on ebay.

PayPal ad
Paypal’s first UK TV ad highlights how you can use it to pay in retailers such as Mothercare.

The campaign, the payment brand’s biggest marketing investment to date, will highlight the breadth of services it offers – from money transfers to the partnerships it has with on and offline retailers such as Mothercare, TopShop, JohnLewis.com and Asos that accept its payments.

Activity will also push products such as its Paypal mobile app, launched earlier this year, and its claim to be a more secure alternative to entering card details on individual retailer’s sites.

PayPal claims to have about 18 million users in the UK that use it on average 25 times a year. UK marketing director Alison Sagar told Marketing Week the company wants to increase the volumes of transactions made using Paypal by demonstrating how its products are easy to use and how they make shopping simpler.

[We want to show people] we are not just about the first experience you have have with us on ebay. There are many things that you can use PayPal for now that you couldn’t a couple of years ago.”

Meanwhile, PayPal is one month into a trial of a FourSquare-style app for use in local, independent shops that allows users to check-in when entering or approaching a store.

It is being sold to retailers as a data capture opportunity that allows them to tailor loyalty offers to customers and to shoppers as a more convenient and modern alternative to the loyalty card.

The app is being trialled in Richmond, South West London, with plans to roll it out nationally later this year.

The campaign comes as a British Retail Consortium report shows use of “alternative payment methods” such as Paypal and contactless more than doubled year on year in 2012 and now account for almost 5 per cent of all transactions.

Increased use could have come at the expense of credit and charge card use, down 3.4 per cent as a percentage of transactions. Debit card transactions, however, increased 3.2 per cent, the report says.

The decline in the use of cash continued with customers spending 10 per cent less using cash than in 2011. Although cash was still used in more than half (54.4 per cent) of all transactions, this was a drop of 6.7 percentage points on 2011.

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