Google Is Leaving Political Ads in the EU: What’s it all mean?

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On Friday, Google decided to pull out of the EU political ads market. Over the weekend, we’ve had the chance to check in with stakeholders and want to give a brief state-of-play and offer some clarity and assurances to our EU clients. To sum it up in one line; we’re sorry to say goodbye to one of our favorite advertising tools (🪦 RIP to YouTube bumpers), but there are lots of other options when it comes to getting your message in front of voters across the EU, including Electica’s own Advocate platform.

What Happened?

Google dropped a stunner this past Friday, announcing via blog post that it would no longer allow political advertisements on its platforms in the European Union. The tech giant made this decision apparently after weighing the pros and cons of complying with the EU’s Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertisements (TTPA), part of the EU’s wide-ranging Digital Services Act (DSA) that’s set to go into force in October 2025.

Two immediate questions were left unanswered by Google’s post:

  1. When will the ban happen?

    We have no additional information at this time. The blog post only says the company “will share more information on the exact timing of our policy change in 2025.” Since TTPA will not come into force until next October, political ads could continue running for up to another 11 months. A safer bet is that users should anticipate a ban could come into effect far sooner.
  2. Which of Google advertising properties will be impacted?

    The blog post mentioned no carve-outs, so we should assume that all of the company’s advertising platforms – Google Ads, YouTube, Search, and DV360 – will be shut out of politics in Europe.

The move is hardly surprising, as Google has stopped political ads in other countries with similar legislation, like Canada, Brazil, and France. Of note, the blog post says, “we continue evaluating this decision in the future,” suggesting that they could revise the change if the EU is willing to negotiate.

Why Did Google Make This Choice?

Google can be a black box when it comes to explaining their decisions, but they did give some hints. Here’s the key passage from their blog post:

TTPA unfortunately introduces significant new operational challenges and legal uncertainties for political advertisers and platforms. For example, the TTPA defines political advertising so broadly that it could cover ads related to an extremely wide range of issues that would be difficult to reliably identify at scale. There is also a lack of reliable local election data permitting consistent and accurate identification of all ads related to any local, regional or national election across any of 27 EU Member States.

In other words, “compliance is a lot of work, and risky at that.” Because anyone can open a Google Ads account with the click of a button (with zero due diligence by Google on who’s running political ads), thousands upon thousands of political or quasi-political entities can run political content. To comply with EU regulations, Google would need to hire an army of moderators to track down advertisers that may not be complying with TTPA. As a “very large online platform” (VLOP, that’s an EU term!), Google faces additional “legal uncertainties” (read: massive fines) if it misses anything.


On top of all this, take into account two more data points:

  1. Google made just ~€18M from EU-based political ads in 2024 (its biggest year ever but just peanuts compared to the ~$800+M (€755+M) in political ads in the US this year);
  2. The EU loves suing Google. The company had to expend time, energy, and lots of resources to fend off a €1.49B Euro anti-trust lawsuit.

So – huge administrative burden, potential lawsuits, and all for less money than a competitive US Senate race? It’s not that surprising that Google thought the risks far outweighed the benefits.

Recommendations for Political Advertisers in Europe

If you help manage the digital program for a political entity in Europe, it’s time to take stock of where things stand. Running an effective outreach campaign in 2025 was always going to mean thinking “omnichannel,” but we all know that for 80% of organizations “omnichannel” has really meant “Meta + YouTube + Search.” With two out of three of those platforms now out of reach, it’s time for folks to lean into new platforms and embrace open-network programmatic.

As a first step, we recommend parties audit where they’re running ads. If it’s on any of Google’s platforms, these campaigns will end sometime soon. If you were planning to run an end-of-year acquisition campaign on Google Search, or a direct-to-donate campaign on Display, you’ll want to make a backup plan for that. Also, it’s important to understand your obligations as an advertiser under TTPA.

Second, talk to us. We’ll help you work through which ads will work on non-Google platforms, and which ones will need to end. We’ll help you understand how to meet TTPA’s thresholds and continue running.

Advocate is Staying.

Electica’s demand side platform Advocate is here to stay in Europe: Our core technology – programmatic advertising – isn’t reliant on Google’s products and services.

Advocate provides access to ad inventory via a network of apps, websites, publications, streaming TV, and gaming platforms that are both completely independent of Google and very happy to continue to allow EU political inventory. We can – and will – be able to provide GDPR- and TTPA-compliant ads campaigns at scale in Europe.

Programmatic advertising’s advantage generally – and Advocate’s specifically – is our ability to perform due diligence on our user-base: Programmatic platforms carefully screen all users to ensure they are responsible advertisers (responsible progressive advertisers in our case!) that will properly meet all disclosure requirements of TTPA. Where Google has lost control of their users, we have maintained it, ensuring responsibility where Google has failed.

Jim Arkedis

Jim is the President and Co-Founder at Electica, the organization behind Advocate. Based in Washington, DC, he loves working with our partners on campaign strategy and leads the development of our platform. After graduating from Johns Hopkins SAIS and Notre Dame, he got his start in politics knocking on doors for Barack Obama in his native Ohio.
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