Coca-Cola, L’Oréal, other big brands told by MEPs to stop ads fueling Russian disinformation in Balkans

Global companies get heat for financing pro-Kremlin media in Serbia and Bulgaria with their advertising budgets.

Big brands such Lidl, Coca-Cola and L’Oréal must stop advertising on pro-Kremlin media outlets in the Balkans, European Parliament lawmakers told the companies in a letter seen by POLITICO.

The 15 brands should “rigorously review [their] advertising policies to ensure that your expenditures do not, even unintentionally, fund outlets known for disseminating harmful disinformation,” said the letter sent Thursday by Bulgarian conservative MEP Andrey Kovatchev and 15 other lawmakers from the center right, liberals, socialists and the Greens.

The targeted companies are Lidl, Delhaize Group, Procter & Gambler, Coca-Cola, A1, Yettel, Ferrero, Heineken, Mars, Mondelez, L’Oréal, GlaxoSmithKlein (GSK), Bosch, Samsung and Amazon.

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The Balkan Free Media Initiative — the Brussels-based NGO behind the move — reported in 2023 that global brands, through agencies and adtech firms, were spending hundreds of millions of euros on Serbian and Bulgarian media that spread government propaganda and Kremlin-backed narratives linked to the invasion of Ukraine.

TV Pink and TV Happy — two of the most popular stations in Serbia, which rely heavily on advertising revenue from international companies — have relayed false claims that Russia had been “under aggression for a long time” itself and “was forced” into conducting a “special military operation” in Ukraine, the euphemism coined by Moscow to refer to its full-scale invasion of the country.