How much does the German government spend on advertising?

The federal government has disclosed that its spending on advertisements and also on influencers on YouTube has increased more than five times in recent years. The government does not want to say which media benefited from this.

Instead of "advertising", retail chains often talk about "consumer information". The Federal Government holds the same view. In response to a request from AfD MP Martin Renner, it says: "The Federal Government does not operate "advertising" in the general language sense of the word. It uses social media to fulfill its constitutional information mandate. ”In younger years, this so-called information mandate, which would have been called advertising or propaganda in the past, has increased very rapidly.

The governmental response via which the portal reitschuster.de reports, reveals that the "advertising costs" for advertisements by the federal government alone (excluding the fees for agencies involved and for those who created the advertisements) increased more than five times from 2013 to 2019, namely by exactly 13,660,075.84 euros to 69,055,001.07 euros. In 2020, 64,470,645.98 euros were spent. The number appears to relate only to ads served in the first half of the year or until the response. It is therefore expected that the number for the year as a whole will exceed the figure for the 2019 European elections. It is particularly striking that the big leap from around 18 to over 60 million euros for government advertising took place in 2015 - the year of “We can do it”.

In a further answer to an inquiry by AfD MP Anton Friesen, it says literally: "The Federal Government spent EUR 65,585,006.57 until June 30, 2020 for the placement of advertisements". By the way, a large part of these latest circuits has been provided by the Federal Ministry of Health since March this year (32,922,259.96 euros). There is no breakdown by department for the past few years.

What is striking is a discrepancy between the figures that the Federal Government quoted when asked by Martin Renner and those she quoted when asked by the impartial MP Mario Mieruch. As Reitschuster.de writes, the figures differ from each other by several million euros.

The Federal Government does not distinguish which specific media companies were given advertisements. It relies on “exclusively media planning criteria” from the “media agencies” and claims to have “no overview”. Don't the federal government agencies need to be accountable?

The Federal Government does, however, provide such an overview of its rapidly increasing expenditure for so-called “influencers” on the moving image platform Youtube. Even the term influencer, which the federal government itself uses, suggests that this is not purely information.

Source: Tichys Einblick