Geoff Seeley joined PayPal as chief marketing officer in February 2024 and has been in a roll ever since. Tasked with rebranding the iconic PayPal brand and expanding Venmo’s brand, he is leaning hard on tapping into the cultural zeitgeist.
“It is very rare in a career that you get to take the helm of a brand that has had such an impact on society,” says Seeley. “PayPal has become woven into our daily lives. Very rarely do you get to steward and shepherd a brand that has this impact.”
PayPal just went through a major rebrand as the company looks to shift perception from just being an online payment tool for eBay to one you can use in stores at the point-of-purchase, as well as on ecommerce sites. The brand’s largest US ad campaign ever kicked off in September 2024 and continues to run with new iterations. The effort stars Will Ferrell in different shopping situations singing “You Can Pay Your Own Way,” to the tune of Fleetwood Mac’s “You Can Go Your Own Way.”
“We are a massively highly penetrated brand, it was important to work with someone who has broad appeal at scale who people trust,” says Seeley. “You know if you go see a Will movie, you know it is going to deliver, you are going to laugh. He is a great ambassador for us because he has such wide appeal whether it is in the UK or Germany or the US.”
As Venmo expands from just being the app to send money to family and friends by offering Venmo checkout and a Venmo debit card with rewards, the company tapped Aimee Lou Wood and Patrick Schwarzenegger – new stars from this season of the HBO show The White Lotus – to star in the ad.
Prior to joining PayPal, Seeley held senior marketing roles at Cash App, Afterpay and Airbnb.
Brand Innovators caught up with Seeley from his office in the San Francisco Bay area to discuss these new campaigns, showing up in cultural moments and what creativity looks like in 2025. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You are the CMO of two very well-known payment brands. How are you thinking about growing these brands?
We have PayPal and Venmo, two brands with two different footprints. PayPal is one of the most trusted and widely distributed payment brands in the world. We operate in 200 markets. We are the OG of digital shopping. The shepherding there is to how do we evolve PayPal and bring that pioneering spirit we have had from the get go, how do we introduce the next generation of payment tools. That means being deeply ingrained in our consumer whether they are in Germany or Australia or Italy or the UK and understanding the behaviors that are going on with commerce at a local level. But also looking at how crypto is having an impact on our category as innovation takes hold and investing in the brand to drive conversion in checkout.
Venmo has been a phenomenal success and built a huge customer base with users daily, weekly or monthly, coming to the app for sending money or asking for money from a friend or a small business. Increasingly we see people want to use their Venmo balance for more than just paying a babysitter or splitting a pizza. The thing we are shepherding now is how Venmo becomes known as a major player in commerce rather than just a peer-to-peer business. The work we just put out is to position Venmo to give the tools they need to use Venmo.
Can you talk about how you are showing up in cultural moments?
Showing up in cultural moments is central to any good media plan these days and that is not just in media buys but in how we orchestrate the work we do with merchant partners, as well as paid media investments as well. The work we have done with Venmo – casting Aimee Lee Wood and Patrick Schwarzenegger – we couldn’t be more integrated in what is the zeitgeist of right now.
The Venmo ad is “The White Lotus” ending that everyone dreamed of. As a marketer, you have to understand and to live within culture. It has to be authentic. Patrick and Aimee are great friends, and use Venmo with people who are in their lives, so it works. We turned the whole thing around in 8-9 weeks which was pretty epic for a campaign of that scale. We work fast and surround ourselves with people who can work fast as well. If you want to be a brand that contributes to how culture is evolving, you have to act quickly. Our instincts as marketers took over and then you go execute.
What does creativity look like in 2025?
Creative needs to drive business outcomes. If I wanted to create art, I would have become an artist. We do what we do, we use creativity to get the outcomes we want to see. We work with people who can express the narrative we want to share whether that is television production or short form or influencer in the creator economy. Creativity is a broad church. Our job as marketers is to share the creativity against the ambition we have for growing these.
How do you see your role as CMO?
The role of CMO is a pretty board these days. Either it is conversation about agentic commerce or looking at creative or looking at MMM models. My job is to bring the right capabilities into the organization, set clarity of what matters and orchestrate those capabilities to get those outcomes. Marketing is a significant driver or overall business performance to hold myself and my team accountability through the levers.
Everything we do is about bringing new views to the consumer. Critical for us is our ability to innovate on our existing product and share the news with our existing consumer and to get the brand in front of new consumers we want to bring on to our platform.
You mentioned the creator economy. How do you decide which influencers to work with?
You have got to work with people who love your brand. The first job is to find people who really get what it is that you are doing and have an affinity with you and your brand. It is about being smart with the message you are trying to convey. For instance, we are trying to push a commerce message with PayPal, so it makes sense to work with someone who is doing shopping.
Can you talk about how working at brands like Afterpay and Airbnb help shape your perspective in this role?
I have been very fortunate to work with some amazing brands. You learn something from everywhere you have been either that is definition and commitment to the craft. When I was at Airbnb, I learned through the work that I did at Afterpay, which was so related in our building relationships with the merchants we work with, which I use here.
The common thread in my career is operating in two different marketplaces. Airbnb is a host and guest environment and PayPal is a consumer and merchants environment. It is about the recognition of how you spin the wheel. If I am a merchant, I need to understand the value of the product and if I am a consumer, I need to understand the value of the service. It is a case of building out value propositions for each constituent of our flywheel and making sure you are honest with how you are providing your value proposition. It all has to be how you want the brand to come across. Deeply understanding the value you can offer to both sides of the marketplace, and executing with consistency.
What big trends do CMOs need to know about right now?
There is an evolution going on in marketing right now. What is interesting as we talk about the advent of AI and how we are focused on AI in creativity, for so long we focused on the tech of AI and saw it as the plumbing of the industry. Now we are looking at essentially the ramifications of how creative gets made and created and shipped out into the world. We are using AI across the entire function of marketing and beyond whether it is for deep dives research, untapping insights and opportunity, automation of some more development and production purposes. There is not an element of how we use AI to improve outcomes.
