Polmai
Political advertising transparency for publishers. The paperwork Regulation (EU) 2024/900 requires, generated as you sell the advertisement rather than chased afterwards.
What the Regulation asks of a publisher
Regulation (EU) 2024/900 has applied since 10 October 2025. A newspaper that carries political advertising acts as both publisher and provider, which is the heaviest set of obligations in the Regulation. In outline:
- a label on every political advertisement (Art 11);
- a transparency notice carrying who paid and what was spent, reachable for seven years after the advertisement last ran (Art 12(4));
- records kept for the same period, machine-readable (Art 9);
- a notification mechanism letting anyone report an advertisement they believe does not comply, free of charge and reachable from the notice itself (Art 15);
- answers to requests from competent authorities and from researchers, journalists and observers (Arts 16 and 17).
Most newspaper advertising is not political, and the obligations fire only for the advertisements that are. Telling the two apart is the system's first job.
What Polmai does
Records the advertisement and who is paying
Sales enters the advertisement and the sponsor. A Finnish company is filled in from its Business ID through the trade register; other European companies through the European equivalents, best effort. No national identity number is ever collected: no lawful free lookup exists for one, and storing it would be collecting more than the job needs.
Asks the sponsor to confirm
The sponsor receives a single-use link and confirms, corrects or denies the assessment, which is what Art 7 requires of them. Every step is recorded. A lost link can be reissued; the old one stops working and the reissue is logged.
Refuses to publish an incomplete record
Nothing is issued until the record is complete, the sponsor is eligible, and the declaration is resolved. Inside the three months before an election, ineligible sponsors are blocked (Art 5(2)). That single gate is where the compliance actually happens.
Generates the label and the notice
A high-contrast label for the printed page, carrying a QR code, and a hosted transparency notice in both human-readable and machine-readable form, following the format the Commission's implementing regulation specifies.
Keeps them reachable, and answers for them
The notice stays up for the full seven years, so a QR code printed today still resolves in 2033. Reports arrive through a mechanism reachable from the notice. Authority and researcher requests produce a signed export.
Where the data lives
Four deployment models, from multi-tenant hosting by us to you running the whole thing yourself. They differ in one respect that matters more than the others: who carries the seven-year duty to keep the notices reachable. We will tell you plainly which model puts that on you.
Interested?
Polmai is in use and taking its next customers. Write to mikko.koivunalho@iki.fi and say what you publish and roughly how much political advertising you carry in an election year.
Nothing on this site is legal advice. Where a claim rests on Regulation (EU) 2024/900, the article is cited so you can read it yourself.