We obtained the files behind Hungary’s HUF 125 billion government advertising gold mine

After a lengthy freedom-of-information lawsuit, Átlátszó obtained more than a thousand documents detailing media purchases under two government communication framework agreements worth a combined HUF 125 billion. Our analysis shows that the system overwhelmingly benefited pro-government media companies and intermediaries, while the effectiveness of the campaigns was often barely measured at all.

For years, Hungary’s government communication machinery channelled enormous amounts of public money into advertising campaigns coordinated by the National Communications Office and the Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister, formerly headed by Antal Rogán. Two framework agreements signed in 2019 and 2022 with companies belonging to advertising businessman Gyula Balásy had maximum values of HUF 50 billion and HUF 75 billion respectively.

In 2024, we requested the individual contracts, media plans, media purchases, monitoring reports and effectiveness studies related to these agreements. The authorities refused to release them, so we went to court. We won at several levels, including before Hungary’s Supreme Court, but the documents were only finally handed over after this year’s change of government.

They arrived on five USB drives containing more than a thousand PDF files. Many of the original spreadsheets had been printed, scanned and even rotated before being handed over, making systematic analysis extremely difficult. Nevertheless, we converted more than 13,000 rows of information into a searchable database with the help of AI-assisted data processing.

The resulting dataset covers roughly HUF 88 billion in advertising purchases – more than 70 percent of the combined HUF 125 billion framework.

Mediaworks was the biggest beneficiary

By far the largest recipient identified in the documents was Mediaworks, the publishing company at the heart of Hungary’s pro-Fidesz media conglomerate KESMA. Between 2020 and 2024, Mediaworks received nearly HUF 30 billion in government advertising through the contracts we analysed.

The company owns or publishes a vast part of Hungary’s pro-government media landscape, including national newspapers, tabloids, sports media and virtually the entire network of regional daily newspapers. Government spending was distributed across almost the whole Mediaworks portfolio.

The scale is striking: the nearly HUF 30 billion directed to Mediaworks over five years is equivalent to more than half of the company’s total annual revenue in some recent years.

These advertisements promoted some of the Orbán government’s most important political campaigns, including the 2022 “Hungary is moving forward, not backward” campaign, advertisements connected to the so-called child-protection referendum, campaigns blaming “war sanctions” for economic problems, and successive national consultations.

A network of intermediaries also made billions

Media companies were not the only winners.

Digital Minds Kft., which has been linked in Hungarian press reports to the business circle of Antal Rogán’s former wife, Cecília Rogán-Gaál, supplied advertising space worth approximately HUF 14.3 billion.

Outdoor advertising company Publimont, linked to the business empire of billionaire Lőrinc Mészáros, received approximately HUF 12.6 billion.

Balásy’s New Land Media also earned substantial agency fees. In the contracts we examined in detail, the company charged a 15 percent agency commission. Applied to the HUF 88 billion dataset, this corresponds to roughly HUF 9.6 billion.

Atmedia and its subsidiary Media Services Company handled another HUF 5.3 billion in advertising, much of it connected to television channels including the TV2 group and Hungary’s public broadcaster. TV2 itself received approximately HUF 2.75 billion directly.

Another little-known intermediary, Village Media, handled around HUF 3.3 billion between 2020 and 2024. It distributed state advertising to hundreds of local newspapers, television stations, radio stations and niche websites. The company effectively served as a gateway between centrally designed government campaigns and smaller regional or specialised media outlets.

The documents show how layers of intermediaries could profit from the same advertising system before the money eventually reached the media outlets carrying the advertisements.

Independent outlets were largely left out

The distribution of government advertising closely reflected Hungary’s political media landscape.

Large pro-government media groups received billions of forints, while numerous major independent newsrooms received nothing from the advertising purchases we analysed.

Some commercially important outlets that were not part of the government media ecosystem did receive state advertising, but generally on a much smaller scale. Companies publishing the Blikk tabloid received around HUF 2.1 billion, RTL more than HUF 1.25 billion and the publisher of the opposition-leaning daily Népszava around HUF 732 million.

The pattern resembles the old Hungarian communist-era cultural classification of “banned, tolerated and supported”: favoured media organisations received enormous amounts, some commercially unavoidable outlets were tolerated and given smaller shares, while others were effectively excluded.

A HUF 1.2 billion recruitment campaign with no audience target

One campaign illustrates particularly clearly how the system operated.

In September 2022, the Orbán government wanted to boost recruitment for Hungary’s newly revived “border hunter” police units. New Land Media proposed broadcasting a one-minute recruitment advertisement more than 600 times on several commercial television channels, including TV2 group channels, Hír TV and ATV.

The media plan cost roughly HUF 850 million net. After New Land Media’s 15 percent agency fee and VAT, the total gross price reached approximately HUF 1.24 billion.

Yet the documents we obtained contain no audience or Gross Rating Point (GRP) requirements for the campaign. In commercial advertising, such indicators are normally used to measure how much of the intended target audience an advertisement actually reaches.

In other words, the government paid primarily for the number of broadcasts rather than for demonstrable audience reach.

There were also significant deviations from the approved plan. Some advertisements were shown in different time slots, while others were not broadcast at the agreed times. New Land Media attributed these differences to “technical reasons” and the “professional characteristics of advertising publication”. The final invoice was reduced by only around HUF 8 million.

By October 10, after the television campaign ended, another 311 applicants had passed the necessary tests and taken the oath as border hunters, in addition to the roughly 500 who had already done so before the campaign. Dividing the campaign’s cost by these additional recruits produces a figure of around HUF 4 million per person – roughly equivalent to ten months of a border hunter’s net salary.

A system designed to move public money

The border-hunter campaign was not an isolated case.

Across the documents we examined, New Land Media generally bought advertising based on appearances rather than measurable audience performance, even where television, radio and online audience measurement would have been readily available.

Campaign reports repeatedly refer to advertisements being moved, replaced or omitted for “technical reasons”. We found little evidence of meaningful financial penalties when media suppliers failed to follow the original plans.

The result was a remarkably favourable system for the companies selected to participate: government agencies spent public money, intermediaries collected commissions, and favoured media companies received billions in advertising revenue – often without having to meet meaningful audience-performance requirements.

Our analysis of HUF 88 billion in spending provides the clearest picture yet of how government advertising money was distributed across the Hungarian media market during the final years of the Orbán government.

We have also made the documents we obtained public and shared them with other independent Hungarian newsrooms so that the spending can be investigated further.

Written by Márton Sarkadi Nagy, Hanna Solti and Csaba Segesvári, translated using artificial intelligence. The original Hungarian version of the story is here.