Together with colleagues from News Media Europe, NewsBrands Ireland CEO Ann Marie Lenihan recently met with the unit in the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers (DG JUST) responsible for political advertising. The meeting focused on discussing news publishers’ experiences so far in applying the new Political Advertising Regulation, which entered into force on October 10th

Since the regulation came into place, the following rules apply:

• Paid and/or targeted political advertisements must be labelled as such and provide some key information about them, including their sponsor, the election or referendum to which they are linked, the amounts paid, and any use of targeting techniques.
• Targeting of political advertisements online will respect stricter conditions. Data collected from a person can be used only after they have given explicit and separate consent for its use for political advertising. Special categories of personal data, such as data revealing political opinions, racial or ethnic origin cannot be used for profiling.
• To prevent foreign interference, ads paid for by third country sponsors will not be possible in the three months before an election or referendum in an EU country.

The new rules do not apply to any views expressed in a personal capacity and editorial content.  The Regulation does not regulate the content of political ads.

Concerns from news publishers

The lack of awareness of the Regulation was highlighted, with publishers having to educate those placing political advertising about the new rules. Publishers are also incurring legal costs associated with interpreting the legislation and applying it.

Publisher representatives conveyed the pressing and practical challenges that publishers who use Google Ad Manager are facing as Google’s current policy restricts most forms of political ads from being delivered through their systems. There are also emerging threats from platforms to block publishers own ads and their accounts on social media.

It was also raised that explicit consent is required for targeting political advertising within the EU, but the existing consent management frameworks don’t fully support political ad consent.

The Commission confirmed that it intends to set up an expert group on political advertising to support the Commission in monitoring application of the Regulation and is working towards establishing an EU advertising repository in April next year.

More details are available here