Where does the political ad money go?

How we worked out who paid

A notice belongs to the party, candidate or organisation it promotes. That is not always the name in the sponsor field, so every row in the notice list shows how it was attributed.

The rules, in order

• Filed by the party. The advertiser or sponsor is a party or one of its branches, however it is spelled, including short forms such as SF, DF, LA and Soc.dem. and the youth wings. Local branches count under the national party.
• Paid by someone else. Older notices name the payer as sponsor, so a union or business club that paid for a party's advertisement counts under the party, and the payer is shown in the notice list.
• Candidates. A candidate is matched to a party only from what their own notices say: the campaign name, the ad text, a ballot letter such as (V), or another notice filed from their own account. When their notices disagree, or say nothing, the candidate stays under Org.
• Everyone else is an organisation or a public body. The ad text never ties an organisation to a party, because an organisation naming a party is not that party's advertisement. A campaign plainly named for a party can.

Read the numbers with care

• Amounts are what advertisers declared on the notice, not audited spending. Cash and the value of in-kind support are both part of the declared total.
• Coverage is the publishers and advertisers that use PolAds.eu, not the whole Danish advertising market.
• Org. gathers everything that is not one of the fifteen parties: organisations and companies, candidates whose party could not be identified, local lists, small parties, joint advertisements by several parties, European Parliament groups and public bodies. The notice list keeps them apart.
• Amounts are never converted between currencies. Every notice shown here was declared in DKK.
• Publisher logos are the ones the publishers uploaded to PolAds.eu. Four publishers had none on file, and theirs were taken from their own websites.
• Each dot stands for a fixed sum. Every route with money on it gets at least one dot, so the smallest flows are slightly exaggerated.

Left out of the chart

20 notices that are plainly tests were left out. 4 notices placed outside Denmark, or for foreign parties, were left out.