Digital election war: BJP, TMC, DMK digital ad spend revealed - who dominated?

Political campaigning in India has moved well beyond rallies, hoardings, and television ads, with parties increasingly shifting resources to digital platforms over the last decade.

Fresh data from Google's Ads Transparency Centre and Meta's Ad Library shows the scale of spending by major parties during elections in West Bengal, Tamil  Nadu, Kerala, and Assam between January 25 and April 24.

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The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) emerged as the biggest spender by a wide margin. According to the data, the BJP spent more than Rs 40 crore on digital advertisements across the four states during the period. The party placed around 50,000 ads on Google and Meta, with most of its focus on West Bengal, followed by Assam.

The Indian National Congress spent under Rs 5 crore during the same period. Its visible presence was stronger on Meta, particularly in Kerala and Assam, while spending on Google remained limited. The party did not target ads for West Bengal, according to the data.

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Regional parties showed a different pattern, relying largely on Meta rather than Google.

In West Bengal, the Trinamool Congress spent around Rs 1.8 crore only on Meta, with no visible spending on Google. In Tamil Nadu, the DMK spent about Rs 0.9 crore on Meta, while the AIADMK spent around Rs 0.7 crore, with almost no presence on Google.

The data also highlights differences in how parties run online campaigns.

The BJP largely placed advertisements through its official party and state pages, keeping a significant share of campaign spending within its own network.

Other parties, including the TMC, DMK, and AIADMK, used official pages but depended more heavily on third-party or supporting pages to widen their reach.

For the TMC, pages linked to party leaders and supporters played a major role. Abhishek Banerjee’s official page and three other pages supporting the party together spent more than Rs 3.5 crore.

The DMK's digital campaign also received support from pages such as "Ellorum Nammudan" and "Orae Thalaivan", with combined spending of around Rs 2.5 crore.

The growing role of third-party pages has also raised questions around transparency.

Despite the Election Commission provisions requiring disclosure of online campaign expenditure, monitoring remains difficult in practice. According to the Association for Democratic Reforms, there is no standardised system for reporting spending on platforms such as Meta and Google.

That gap becomes more significant when third-party pages spend on campaigns outside official disclosures, potentially making the true scale of digital election spending larger than what is formally reported.

(With inputs from Prateek Sachan)