The Shadow Campaign

A private company called Populus Empowerment Network has spent about ₹53 crore on Google political ads. Every one of its largest ads is targeted to Tamil Nadu, and they cluster in two windows: the 2024 general election and the run-up to the 2026 state assembly vote. You would not need a press release to guess its client. Populus was founded in November 2022 by M.K. Stalin's son-in-law; it is the DMK's digital machine. A second firm, Indian PAC — the consultancy Prashant Kishor built — shows the same tell in a different state: its ads pool in West Bengal and spike in 2021, the year its client, the Trinamool Congress, swept the state.

This is the quiet fact buried in Google's transparency data: the list of "political advertisers" is not a list of parties. It is a list of everyone a party's money flows through. And because Google records where each ad was aimed and when it ran, the intermediaries can't fully hide. A consultancy's ad account is a fingerprint — concentrated on its client's turf, timed to its client's election. Follow those two coordinates and the shadow campaign resolves into view.

1  Five ecosystems, not one

Start by breaking the "political advertiser" universe into what it actually contains. Parties are the largest block, but only about 45% of the spend. The rest is government departments advertising with public money, a dense layer of campaign consultancies and ad-tech vendors, news-media companies, and a long tail of commercial brands the classifier swept in by mistake. Four of these five groups are not parties at all.

The consultancy block is the interesting one. It is 135 companies and roughly ₹140 crore — real money, routed not through party accounts but through vendors. Some are famous strategy shops; many are boutique creative or analytics firms that exist to run one state's campaign and then go quiet.

2  The roster

Here are the fifteen largest by spend. Two dominate — Populus and I-PAC — and for those two the client is a matter of public record. For the rest, the ad account gives a strong hint (its home state) even where the client isn't independently confirmed; we mark those unverified rather than guess a name.

3  The fingerprint

Now the reveal. Lay the top vendors out as a grid of firm against year, shading each cell by how much that firm spent. Two things jump out. First, almost every firm is dark in most years and blazing in one or two — the years of its client's election. Second, read the state label on the left and the pattern is unmistakable: each firm lives in a single state. A consultancy's ad history is a campaign calendar with the client's name rubbed off but the date and the place left on.

4  Two firms, two states, side by side

The two clearest cases deserve a direct look — and one of them is subtler than "one firm, one state." I-PAC, Prashant Kishor's firm, actually runs two fronts, both visible in the geography: ₹25.5 cr in West Bengal (its Trinamool Congress work, surging in 2021 and 2024) and a second ₹7.3 cr in Andhra Pradesh for the YSRCP — the client the next chapter later catches on camera ("Nuvve Jagan," you are our trust, Jagan). Populus, by contrast, is a pure single-state operation: essentially all of its ₹53 cr is Tamil Nadu (the DMK), from 2024 into the 2026 assembly cycle. A geographically-focused shop and a two-client one — and the ledger draws both without naming anyone.

5  The consultancies take over

Watch the live 2026 cycle and the shadow layer steps into the light. So far this year, consultancies have outspent the parties themselves — roughly ₹65 crore to ₹35 crore — and the single largest political advertiser of 2026 is not a party or the government but Populus, the DMK's firm, at ₹34.8 crore for the Tamil Nadu race. I-PAC sits fourth. The intermediaries are no longer behind the campaign; on this platform, in this cycle, they are the campaign's biggest buyers.

The point is not that consultancies are secret — I-PAC and Populus are well known. It is that the structure of an entire industry is legible from the advertising exhaust alone. For firms nobody has written about, the same coordinates still apply: a home state and a set of election years, waiting to be matched to whoever was on the ballot. Transparency data about ads turns out to be transparency data about the people who buy them.