When we launched Reform Political Advertising, we were the first campaign to propose the idea of an independent, public repository for political ads. We made this case to the UK Parliament’s Disinformation & “Fake News” Committee and we were very pleased when our recommendation was included verbatim in their final report:
“Political advertising items should be publicly accessible in a searchable repository – who is paying for the ads, which organisations are sponsoring the ad, who is being targeted by the ads—so that members of the public can understand the behaviour of individual advertisers. It should be run independently of the advertising industry and of political parties.”
Due to recent EU regulation we are seeing that vision come to life across Europe.
From March 2026, the EU will launch a centralised repository for political ads, with metadata, targeting info, API access, and authentication protocols. It’s a significant step forward in solving the problem of “dark advertising” – a tactic that came into the spotlight during the Brexit referendum and continues to challenge transparency in online campaigning.
The momentum to increase the transparency around election advertising is also starting to show some promise in the UK:
- Wales is developing theWelsh Elections Information Platform, a promising transparency tool we’ll be engaging with as it evolves
- This comes on the heels of another win for our campaign around updating the rules for ad imprints (the labelling that seeks to make transparent who is behind an ad) that we’ve been advocating over the last few years. See the link in the comments for more about that in our latest blog.
A significant gap in the marketing and advertising industry’s efforts to enhance trust in advertising has been unregulated elections ads.
We’re proud of the role we’ve played in pushing for change and there’s more to come which we’ll update you on in the coming months.
