If you run communications for a Punjab department, authority or statutory body, you cannot simply hire an agency and buy ads. The Punjab Government (Revised) Advertisement Policy 2025 places every publicity campaign, print, electronic and digital, under the Directorate General Public Relations (DGPR) and its pre-qualified agencies. Knowing the route in advance is the difference between a campaign that launches on time and one that spends two months in resubmission.
Who decides what
The client department states the budget and the target. DGPR selects the agency from its pre-qualified list, its Content Committee approves the strategy and the creative, and DGPR issues the campaign a unique ID and a Client Release Order. For digital campaigns, the Punjab Information Technology Board verifies delivered impressions against the approved plan before DGPR pays the agency in full.
What the digital media plan must contain
Section 11 of the policy sets a template, and a plan written to it from day one avoids a round trip. It asks for:
- Each platform, its budget share and the committed impressions, views, clicks and number of accounts
- Geofencing specifications where targeting is geographic
- Duration, with a time frame for each component
- Google Display or Search budget, placement and targeting strategy
- For international platforms, the geo-targeting details
- Digital publishers used and the impressions each promises
- Influencers, if any, with channels, booked views and duration
- Value-added and free-of-charge items
- A clear strategy for any innovative placement
Three rules that shape the plan
Publishers must qualify. Local digital publishers need 200,000 or more monthly visits from Pakistan, must be reachable without a VPN, must be on the federal Digital Media List and active on three or more social platforms. In practice this confines programmatic placements to the major news sites.
Reallocation needs approval. If a platform blocks or limits the content, the budget may move only with prior approval. Name a fallback platform for every line in the plan so the approval is a formality.
Rates follow the market. Digital rates are the platforms' real-time market rates in rupees, as fixed by the federal rate committee, and the agency bears currency risk.
Timing
From submission to Client Release Order, allow four to six weeks. Use the wait: run the baseline survey if the campaign is about awareness, seed the content on the department's own channels, and get platform authorisations started, since Meta treats government-programme advertising as social-issue content and requires an authorised advertiser and a "paid for by" disclaimer.
What an outside team can do
The buying must go through DGPR's agency, but the thinking does not have to. Audience definition, the media plan in the policy's own format, creative direction and the measurement design can all be prepared by a specialist team and handed to the pre-qualified agency for execution. That is the arrangement we recommend to departments, and the one we have planned for.