• by Danielle Oster , September 19, 2024

Venmo is one of the leading P2P (peer-to-peer) payment apps, but PayPal wants audiences to know that the financial services brand’s offerings don’t begin and end with that service.

So it launched a campaign asking “What’s Your Venmo?” to highlight the various ways people engage with the brand, and its range of services beyond social P2P payments, which it claims is its “most ambitious” ad campaign to date. 

The brand told Marketing Daily that the campaign aims to reach “a high concentration of affluent Gen Z digital natives” – the demographic most likely to be Venmo users – with creative marking its first partnership with agency 72andSunny LA.

The campaign highlights Venmo’s evolving suite of products, services and experiences that “expand the ways they can use Venmo in their daily lives.” That includes both new features for its flagship P2P service, such as Split and Groups, as well as products including Venmo’s debit card, direct deposit, and business profiles.

“What’s Your Venmo?” launched across streaming/CTV, digital video, audio, social media, influencer marketing activations, and OOH ads in Dallas, Los Angeles, and New York.

The campaign’s anthem ad opens on a young Venmo user named Maddie using the payment method at a local nail salon and mobile dog grooming service, before moving on to showcase Groups being used for a birthday celebration, a group of friends using Splits to divide the check when out for dinner, and concluding with a patron earning cash back with their debit card at Maddie’s Frostie Pops cart – bringing things full circle to the first character at the opening of the ad.

A second ad follows Maddie on a “Me Day Spree” (reminiscent of the “Treat Yo’Self Day” invented by “Parks & Rec” characters Donna Meagle and Tom Haverford), while keeping its focus on the potential to earn cash back with the Venmo debit card.

Venmo is experiencing momentum. In its most recent earnings report, PayPal noted that monthly active users for both the Venmo debit card and Pay with Venmo grew by around 30%.

Speaking during an earnings call with investors, PayPal CEO Alex Chriss attributed Venmo’s 8% growth year-over-year for Q2 to both its “strong base” of P2P users, and growing adoption of its product ecosystem beyond that service.

“In the second quarter, we launched push provisioning of the Venmo debit card to Apple and Google Wallets and continued to enable Pay with Venmo with more merchants and partners, including eBay and StubHub, which we expect will continue to fuel this growth,” Chriss said during the call. “Our recently launched Venmo Teen Accounts is showing encouraging early traction, expanding our addressable market, and helping us build lifelong relationships with customers from an early age.”

“The first half of the year, we needed to invest in innovation and invest in the customer experiences and put to market experiences on both PayPal and Venmo from a consumer standpoint that we could be proud of,” Chriss added in response to a question from an analyst about marketing spending.

“We started to create real onboarding ramps for our [Venmo] debit card, and we're seeing the improvement there. So we’re feeling really good about the experiences on both of the apps, and it's time to tell the world about it,” he added, noting the company would be ramping up marketing spending on the brands in “exciting and engaging ways” in the latter half of the year.