New Delhi: Since 2017, the Union government’s advertising spending has steadily moved away from legacy publications – both print and broadcast – and towards social media and its own publicity arm, The Morning Context has reported. Advertisements from the government form a large section of the revenue stream for these publications, so the decline has created trouble.
This does not mean that the government is not spending on advertising – just that the recipients of those funds have changed dramatically. “Major newspapers and broadcasters, the data shows, had a golden run between 2014 and 2016. But starting 2017, the Modi government began cutting down its media ad expenditure significantly. The earliest manifestation of this appeared in the ranks of India’s premier broadcasters, who witnessed a dramatic dip in 2017-18. …The print space saw a similar but more gradual fall,” the report states.
Some state governments, like Uttar Pradesh, have also shown similar changes in spending trends.
In its first four years after coming to power in 2014, the Narendra Modi government spent a lot on advertising in legacy media, The Morning Context report says. But that changed quickly – “In 2018, as the Hindu BusinessLine reported, the Modi government’s ad spend was slashed by 14%. In 2019, it went down by a further 35%. The next year saw a 40% cut, followed by another 23% reduction in 2021.”
This, according to bureaucrats The Morning Context spoke to, was because the government used those four years to get the word out and frame public opinion. After that, it no longer needed to advertise – most legacy media were “quick to give them [the government] favourable coverage” anyway, as one official put it.
So where is the money going? Social media, according to The Morning Context:
“According to the ad expenditure breakup tabled in the Lok Sabha, the Modi government’s earliest brush with advertising on Google was in 2017-18, when it spent nearly Rs 1 crore on the service. This grew to Rs 2.5 crore in 2020-21 and came in at Rs 1.6 crore in 2021-22. For context, this spend on Google ads between 2020 and 2022 was more than the government’s ad expenditure on the TV Today group, which operates Aaj Tak, one of India’s oldest and most popular Hindi news channels.
So, between 2017 and 2020, when the central government’s appetite for ads on legacy media shrank, its appetite for online publicity was growing. The grants to MyGov, the government’s digital publicity arm under the Digital Corporation of India, ballooned in this period.
The annual reports of the Digital Corporation of India, a not-for-profit set up under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, show that in 2016-17, the Modi government’s grant to MyGov was Rs 18.8 crore. In 2017-18, this shot up to Rs 58.2 crore, followed by Rs 58.5 crore in 2018-19 and Rs 84.88 crore in 2019-20.”