To say it up front: From the perspective of a media agency, the state governments’ reform plans for public broadcasting will not have any direct impact on the broadcasting of advertising for the time being. This will not be changed.

However, if you take a closer look, there may be significant changes in some areas in the future. Roland Köster, Managing Director JOM Group, therefore highlights three areas in which the broadcasting reform would mean cuts for advertisers:

At its core, the reform envisages strengthening the mandate of public service broadcasting in terms of quality but also limiting it in terms of quantity. Part of the reform is therefore the merging of special-interest channels and a significant reduction in radio programs. In principle, there is little to be said against this, as these are not relevant to advertising. However, as it primarily affects cultural and scientific offerings, there may also be programming changes in the advertising channels, as nothing can be changed in terms of the mandate to provide a basic service.
Restricting sports coverage by capping license costs for sports rights will mean that major events of considerable social importance, as stated in the State Treaty, will increasingly be broadcast on free-access private television and sports with less “mass appeal” will lose attention. This indirect promotion of sport through broadcasting licenses will be restricted. Public discussion about the mediocre performance of German athletes at major international events, such as the recent Olympic Games, will then presumably become more frequent.
The intention that only “broadcast-accompanying texts” should be permitted in digital reporting must be viewed critically. In practice, this means that tagesschau.de, for example, will only be allowed to report on a world event if a corresponding report has previously been broadcast on TV. The Federal Constitutional Court’s guarantee of the existence and development of public service broadcasting is thus jeopardized and runs fundamentally counter to the development of media usage behaviour among large sections of the population. The suspicion arises that this idea is a reaction to populist pressure, particularly from private publishers (namely the state aid complaint to the EU), who now want to compensate for their attempts at digital transformation, some of which have been failing for years, as they hardly play a role as digital opinion formers for the majority of the population. The basic mandate of public broadcasters to be balanced, impartial, objective and to comply with journalistic due diligence is being undermined here in the digital sphere and shows little vision of where public broadcasters should develop in the future.
The federal states hope that the reforms will lead to savings. In principle, this is a justified hope. However, it is difficult to understand why politicians repeatedly ignore the fact that the level of broadcasting funding is not a political decision, but a technical calculation by the Commission for the Determination of the Financial Requirements of Public Broadcasters (KEF), to which the public broadcasters are entitled under Article 5 (1) sentence 2 of the Basic Law.

Savings can be made by reducing the mandate. This could influence policy, but here too there are strict constitutional limits. Fortunately. Also for us media agencies.