The Spanish government has already tendered advertising contracts worth €100 million this year, three times more than in 2021.

The General State Administration has tendered advertising campaigns worth 100 million euros so far this year, including VAT. To put this in context, the largest private advertiser last year was L’Oreal, which spent 71 million euros on media buying in Spain.

Spending on media buying by the central state this year is almost three times higher than in the same period in 2021, when contracts with agencies worth 36 million euros were tendered. These awards come under the umbrella of the General State Administration’s advertising framework agreement. To get the full picture, to the 100 million euros allocated this year to media buying should be added the cost of the creativity of the campaigns and also the investment of public companies, which this year is expected to reach 128 million.

The Executive has processed 44 institutional campaigns so far this year.

The Institutional Communication and Publicity Plan foresees a central government advertising budget of 158 million euros this year (excluding public companies). The government usually falls far short of its own forecasts, but this year, 2022, it does seem that it will be much closer to its budget. For example, in 2021 it estimated spending on advertising at 123 million and then executed just 42 million. A deviation that occurs year after year, but which could be an exception in 2022.

At the moment, the most expensive tendered campaign of the year is the Cybersecurity awareness campaign, awarded to UM for 22 million euros. This was followed by the DGT campaign, with an associated amount of €8.5 million managed by Media Sapiens. This agency also won the third most expensive campaign of the year, which is so far the Energy Transition campaign, with a media buying budget of 6.8 million euros. All these amounts include VAT.

By agencies, the government’s favourite is precisely Media Sapiens, which this year has been awarded twenty public campaigns, all of them valued at 52 million euros. In other words, it will manage half of the budget tendered so far by the government during 2022.

In second place is UM, with only one campaign awarded but valued at 22 million euros. Third is Equmedia, which will manage 11 million euros worth of public campaigns tendered by the government so far this year.

Recently, several university professors have called for a review of the law on institutional advertising so that it does not serve to favour media outlets that support the government of the day.