EU marketing tenders in October. Polish buyers signed 17 of 32 deals made without bids

EU marketing tenders in October had one clear outlier. Public buyers in Poland signed more contracts without a tender than buyers in the rest of the European Union combined. Across the EU, 32 marketing contracts were awarded with no call for bids. Seventeen of them came from Poland, and the largest went to a volleyball club.

We counted the notices ourselves. We pulled every notice published in October 2026 on TED, the EU database of public tenders. We kept only those whose main subject is advertising, marketing, market research, events or websites. That left 613 notices, up from 558 in September.

Spain, France and Poland each published more than 80 notices

Spain led with 84 notices. France had 82 and Poland 81. Germany followed with 62 and Czechia with 34. In September Poland had been first, with 86.

A contract award notice tells the public that a deal has been signed. The EU had 272 of them in this sector in October. Most came after an open tender, where any company can bid.

In 32 cases the buyer picked one supplier and negotiated with it directly.

Outside Poland, those direct awards were small and scattered. Austria had four. Germany, Spain and Bulgaria had two each. Czechia, which made 13 direct awards in September, made one in October.

The largest of them was German. BGHW, the German statutory accident insurer for trade and logistics, paid €2.07m to staff and transport its touring “Showtruck”. Cyprus’s Deputy Ministry of Tourism spent €714,000 without a tender, and Andalusia’s tourism company paid €508,000 to take part in the IGLTA Global Convention. Malta’s Office of the Deputy Prime Minister bought a “brand transformation” for €180,000 the same way.

Toulouse Métropole put €20m of media buying out to tender

The biggest contracts of the month all went through competition. None was a direct award.

Toulouse Métropole, the city authority of Toulouse, awarded a media advice and ad buying contract worth €20m (notice 727462-2026).

Kamer van Koophandel, the Dutch Chamber of Commerce, signed an event design and production deal worth €18.9m.

Keva, the Finnish public pension fund, bought communication and marketing services for €6.6m. Veikkaus, Finland’s state gambling company, spent €5.7m on marketing production.

NASK, a Polish state research institute for internet security, hired Mastermind Media to plan and buy its media. The contract is worth 35 million zloty. Six companies bid.

Poland’s family ministry had the most interest. Ten agencies bid for its national information campaign, and MUFU won it for 4.3 million zloty.

PGE’s coal unit paid 23.3m zloty to a volleyball club without a tender

Every direct award notice must state a reason. We read all 17 Polish ones. Nine cited “technical reasons”, a ground the EU directive on public procurement allows. Those nine deals add up to 30 million zloty, almost three quarters of the money Poland spent without a tender.

Most of that went to sport. PGE Górnictwo i Energetyka Konwencjonalna, the coal and power unit of state-owned PGE, will pay Skra Bełchatów 23.3 million zloty to promote the company. Its notice calls the club the “only contractor” able to provide the service for technical reasons.

The city of Gdańsk signed a 5.69 million zloty deal with the football club Lechia Gdańsk. The region of Silesia will pay the Polish handball federation 650,000 zloty. PGE’s parent company also signed sponsorship deals with the Polish basketball league and federation without naming a price. We covered an IPA study in which six in ten sports sponsors doubt deals pay off.

Other direct awards repeat earlier tenders. Warsaw city hall made four extra orders worth 3.66 million zloty with Screen Network, which sells ad time on digital screens. Telewizja Polska, the public broadcaster now in liquidation, also skipped a tender. It bought two months of TV audience data from AGB Nielsen Media Research for 4.23 million zloty. We have written about how fast digital outdoor ads grow in Poland.

The EU directive limits technical exclusivity to cases with no alternative

Article 32 of Directive 2014/24/EU allows a contract without a call for bids when only one company can do the job. The reasons can be art, technical limits or exclusive rights. The technical ground applies only when “no reasonable alternative or substitute exists”. The lack of competition also must not come from an “artificial narrowing down” of the contract.

The directive’s opening recitals add that this route should be used “only in very exceptional circumstances”. Big private sponsors also review their deals, as McDonald’s did with the FIFA World Cup.

Brussels counts one bidder in 56% of Polish contracts

The European Commission tracks this in its Single Market Scoreboard. For 2024, it shows that 56% of Polish contracts had just one bidder. A typical EU country had 28%. The Commission marks anything above 20% red.

Contracts with no call for bids made up 7% in Poland and 5% in a typical EU country. The Commission colours results up to 5% green and from 10% red.

October shows the same gap in marketing. Six of 22 Polish open tenders closed that month drew a single bid. Polish Airports took one offer for promoting flights from Radom to Larnaca. Wizz Air won it for 5 million zloty. Private brands pick agencies through reviews too, as Aldi is doing in its global creative review.

In October, Polish buyers spent 40.6 million zloty on 17 contracts with no competition. In the same month, 22 contracts went through open tenders. They were worth 72.9 million zloty.