Latvia lifted its eight-year ban on consumer-credit ads. Here is how lending radio moved

On 16 June, a Saeima committee backed repealing a rule that had stood since 2018: the ban on advertising consumer credit, including credit cards, to private individuals. Lending companies were already on the radio, because advertising credit to businesses was always allowed, but they could not pitch the loan itself to a consumer. The repeal, paired with a strict new rulebook, changes what they can say on air. We pulled the consumer lending category off the broadcast for the weeks since, and the shape of the change is already visible: more ads but shorter, a leaderboard that turns over week to week, new brands arriving, and a large sponsorship layer that the standard spend report blends into a single number.

The rule that changed

Under a 2018 law, in force that November, advertising consumer credit to private individuals was prohibited in Latvia. Only credit aimed at businesses could be promoted. The stated aim at the time was to curb irresponsible borrowing, and in the years since the number of licensed lenders fell by roughly a third. On 16 June 2026 the Saeima's economic committee backed, in final reading, replacing the ban with rules rather than silence: any ad offering consumer credit must carry the warning "Bridinam! Aiznemsanas maksa naudu" across at least a tenth of the ad, and credit agreements can be concluded only between 08:00 and 21:00. Some provisions tied to the EU credit directive apply from 20 November. The change is not settled politics; several factions have asked the consumer protection centre to spell out how it intends to police the new rules.

More ads, and shorter ones

The category was busy before the vote and grew busier after it. Consumer-lending radio ran about 7,400 ads in the month to mid-June and about 12,200 in the month after, a rise of roughly two thirds, the heaviest month in our window. But the average ad got shorter, from 18 seconds to 13, and the number of distinct creatives climbed from 159 to 197. More brands, saying more things, in less time each.

No brand held the lead for long

Read week by week on produced spots, the real ads a listener hears as advertising, the front of the field kept changing hands. In the first full week after the vote, Banknote and Incredit set the pace at 286 and 263 spots. Through early July, Banknote pushed out front with 337 then 332, while West Kredit arrived from nowhere as a brand-new lender, running 257 then 222. In the latest week Ferratum appeared on radio for the first time and took the top produced-spot slot at 292, with Banknote just behind at 276 and West Kredit pulling almost all the way back to 19. Over the full month Banknote ran the most produced spots, but the story is the churn. Three different brands led on real ads across five weeks, while several names that were loud in the spring went quiet, Cityfinances falling from 985 ads to 190, with Bill.me, Altero and Aizdevums dropping out of the top tier.

The number Kantar reports as one, and we split in two

Here is the fact that reorders everything. Most of this category's radio presence is not produced advertising. Of the roughly 12,200 placements in the month, only about 5,000 were produced spots. The other 59 percent are sponsorships: weather, traffic and segment tags read around the programming. Kantar AdEx does count those sponsorships, but it reports them in one combined total with regular spots, so it cannot tell you which placements are real ads and which are tags. That single number hides the difference. Split a brand's week and it can look like a different company. Ferratum's 688 placements are 292 produced spots plus 396 sponsorship tags. Incredit's 296 are just 57 produced spots and 239 tags. DECTA's 493 are 152 and 341. Meanwhile a lender like Banknote ran 276 produced spots and no sponsorship at all. Read the combined total and Incredit looks busier than Banknote. Separate the types and Banknote ran nearly five times as many real ads. Same data, opposite conclusion, depending on whether anyone splits it.

Kantar gives you one number. It adds the weather tags to the real ads, so a brand can look busy on sponsorship alone, and you would never know from the total.

Where the audience really is

The same blending shows up in share of voice. Ferratum's audience delivery for the week looks huge on paper, a GRP near 695, but much of it comes from repeating a single weather sponsorship on Radio Skonto 307 times. Those repeats sit inside the same undifferentiated total, so a report that does not separate the types reads them as pure advertising weight. Split them out and the field is far tighter, with a lender like Banknote, on 276 produced spots reaching 221,000 people, much closer to the top than the blended number suggests.

The new rules are already in the creative

The content rules are starting to shape the ads themselves. Credit24 runs a spot built around "sensible decisions" that parodies impulse buying, which fits neatly inside a rulebook that forbids encouraging careless borrowing. Several lenders run the same message in Latvian and Russian on audience-matched stations. And weather sponsorship remains a favourite way onto the air, which matters here because, folded into the same total as a produced ad, it quietly inflates how big some brands look.

The method

This reads the Consumer Lending category off monitored Latvian broadcasts, comparing the month before the 16 June repeal to the month after, and the five weeks since week by week. Produced spots and sponsorship tags are separated from the monitored ad library; GRP and reach come from audience data; spend is a directional ratecard estimate, not billed. In the earliest weeks Ferratum and West Kredit sat below the top of the table and are shown as near zero. Spotwise monitors actual broadcasts rather than station-reported logs.

What it means if you sell lending, or plan it

An eight-year ban came off, and within weeks the category was louder, faster and more crowded, with the lead passing between brands and more than half of the activity sitting in sponsorship tags that a blended report cannot tell apart from real ads. If your read on this market came from a single combined total, you would mistake sponsorship weight for advertising weight and misjudge who is really being heard. The point is not which brand is up this week. It is that the picture depends entirely on whether the sponsorships are separated out or counted as one with everything else.

See the whole category with produced spots and sponsorships kept separate, by brand, language, format and station, read off the broadcast rather than a self-reported log. Advertisers track it in Spotwise self-serve. Agencies track it for every client at once. This whole breakdown took one prompt. spotwise.ai