A Data Booklet · Vishal Singh · NYU Stern
The Political Ad Ledger
What Google's public data reveals about political advertising in India — the money, the machinery, and the government behind it. 2019–2026.
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ad creatives
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advertisers
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est. spend, 2024
Google publishes a machine-readable record of the political ads it runs. For India it holds 397,522 of them, each with what was spent, when, where, and in what format. This booklet reads that record — carefully, and with its limits in view — one chapter at a time. The first four chapters work entirely from the structured data; a fifth, on what the ads actually say, is in progress.
Contents
1What's in the LedgerRead →
The dataset, its four tables, its scale, the five ecosystems hiding inside "political advertiser," how spend and reach are recorded — and what the data cannot tell us.
2The Election CalendarRead →
A machine that wakes only for elections: spend tracked against the polling calendar, the image-vs-video economics, one party's industrial scale, and where the money lands.
3The Shadow CampaignRead →
The consultancy layer behind the parties — and how you can read which strategist firm ran which campaign from nothing but where, and when, the ads were aimed.
4Public MoneyRead →
The single largest political advertiser after the ruling party isn't a party — it's the government itself, and its spending surges as elections approach.
5What the Ads SayRead →
The ledger has no creative content — so we watched the ads. A close reading of 75 top videos: who builds a campaign around a leader, who attacks, and a government that puts the Prime Minister in most of its ads.