Punished by French justice, Lidl abandons the campaigns for which it paid hundreds of millions of euros: “This situation is quite difficult to understand”

Lidl, France's second-largest ad buyer, will pull out of French television ads because of too-strict rules, half a year after it was ordered by a court to pay tens of billions of euros in damages, according to AFP.

“We will no longer invest in traditional television as long as the regulatory risks are too high, as is the case now,” said Jassine Ouali, executive director of customer relations at Lidl France, in an interview with Stratégies magazine.

In July, supermarket chain Lidl, often criticized by the competition for its advertising campaigns, was ordered by the Paris Court of Appeal to pay 43 million euros in damages to retail chain Intermarché for inappropriate television ads, a decision it will appeal to the Court of Cassation.

The criticized spots – it is 374 advertisements broadcast between 2017 and 2023 for which it paid 584 million euros – presented product promotions Lidl stores as required by law, according to the appeal court, which found “deceptive trade practices” and “unfair competition”.

“This situation is quite difficult to understand”

“For me, having worked at Lidl in Germany and the UK, this situation is quite difficult to understand,” Ouali said, adding that the “legacy of regulations from the 90s” aimed at protecting the advertising income of other mass media, particularly the regional daily press, “raises real questions”.

A decree from 1992 prohibits companies from presenting time-limited commercial promotional operations on TV, the availability and prices of the promoted products having to be guaranteed for 15 weeks, a period specified by the Professional Advertising Regulatory Authority (ARPP).

“It is enough to calculate the share of Lidl in television to understand that if communication in the French media is abandoned in favor of actors such as Google, Meta, Netflix or Amazon, this will pose a problem of financing the media,” warned Ouali.

Classic television represented 22% of Lidl France's total media investment last year, and for 2026 it has forecast “zero” euros, a spokeswoman for the retailer told France Presse.

Lidl is France's sixth-largest food supermarket in terms of market share, but Hexagon's second-largest ad buyer across all advertising media.