The 8 reasons we will decline your engagement

We turn down roughly 31% of inbound requests. That is not a humblebrag. It is the cost of running an ethical contest-promotion shop out of Minsk, and we would rather lose a deposit than ship a campaign that gets a client disqualified or gets us blacklisted by an ad platform we depend on.

This page exists because most agencies hide their refusal criteria behind vague "we reserve the right" language. We don't. Below are the eight specific situations where we will say no, in plain English, with the reasoning behind each. If you read this and recognise your project in two or more of these, please save us both the email exchange and look elsewhere.

Before the list: a quick note on who we are

We are a small team. Four people. We promote entries in legitimate online contests — photo, video, brand-vote, short-essay competitions run by EU consumer brands, festivals, and platforms with published rules. We buy traffic on Meta, Google, and a short list of niche networks, and we write the creative ourselves. That is the whole offering. The services page spells out exactly what we do and do not produce.

Now the list.

1. The contest has no public terms and conditions

If we cannot find a URL where the organiser publishes eligibility, voting mechanics, prize structure, and a complaints procedure, we will not take the brief. Not because we are precious about paperwork. Because Meta's Promotion Guidelines, updated 14 February 2025, require advertisers to comply with the rules of any promotion they reference, and Google's Misrepresentation policy (revision effective 24 May 2024) lets reviewers reject ads that link to contests without verifiable T&Cs. See the policy text at support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6020955.

If there are no rules to comply with, there is no campaign to run. We have had clients send us screenshots of Instagram Stories announcing a prize draw with no link, no date, no organiser entity. We decline those every time. Read our process page for the documentation we ask for at intake.

2. The hosting platform is on our blocklist

We maintain a private list of contest-hosting platforms we will not promote on. The list is not public because it shifts, but it includes platforms with one or more of: a history of mid-contest rule changes, opaque vote-counting, no GDPR-compliant data-handling notice for EU participants, or aggressive vote-trading bazaars in their comment sections.

One notable case: Vyper, a contest platform a number of our prospective clients used, shut down 12 September 2024, mid-campaign for several brands. We had already refused two engagements on that platform earlier that year because of unresolved support tickets clients had shown us. That was luck as much as judgment, but we will continue to refuse platforms where the failure mode is "everyone loses their data on a Thursday".

What we will not do: tell you which platforms are on the list. If you ask about a specific one we can answer that. We will not publish a blacklist that platform operators can litigate against.

3. The engagement window is too short for the budget

If you contact us with under 5 days remaining and a budget over EUR 300, we will decline or aggressively scope down. The math is not complicated.

1. Meta and Google ad accounts need 48 to 72 hours of learning-phase data before bid optimisation is meaningful.
2. Creative review on Meta typically lands within 24 hours but can extend to 48 in contested categories.
3. That leaves roughly one day of optimised spend on a five-day clock, which is not a campaign — it is a donation to the auction.

We have made this mistake. In Q3 2023 we took a EUR 480 brief with 72 hours on the clock because the client was pleasant and persistent. The campaign delivered 1,247 link clicks but the cost-per-conversion was 3.2x our usual range. We refunded part of the fee and added the rule to our intake checklist. The refund page explains how that policy works now.

If you have under 5 days and under EUR 300, we can sometimes do a tight, single-creative push. Ask. The honest answer is often "no", but we will look.

4. You ask for bots, bought votes, or fake accounts

This one is the easiest decline of the eight. We do not run bot traffic, we do not broker vote-buying, we do not create or rent social accounts to inflate engagement, and we will not advise on which "vote services" are less likely to get caught. The answer to all of that is: don't.

Vote-buying violates the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (2005/29/EC) when the contest involves a commercial brand, see eur-lex.europa.eu. It also gets you disqualified by most organisers, who run basic anomaly detection on vote velocity and geographic distribution. We have watched clients lose first place 48 hours before the announcement because a "boost service" they used in parallel to our paid campaign tripped the organiser's anti-fraud check.

The contrarian opinion you can quote us on: a clean, modestly funded paid campaign with a real creative beats a bought-vote push roughly every time, because organisers increasingly publish anti-fraud measures and the punishments scale with the prize. If your contest is worth winning, it is worth winning cleanly.

5. You will not show us proof of entry

We ask every client to send a screenshot or link confirming their entry is live on the contest platform, in their name, before we draft creative. About one in eleven prospective clients balks at this. We decline those engagements.

The reason is not paranoia. It is that we have, twice, been asked to promote an entry that belonged to someone else — once a sibling, once an ex-business-partner the prospective client was no longer on speaking terms with. We are not the right people to adjudicate consent disputes. If the entry is yours, proof takes thirty seconds. The FAQ has the exact format we accept.

6. The contest is political

We do not promote entries in political contests. That includes party-organised competitions, contests tied to election campaigns, contests run by political foundations, and contests where the prize is platform access to a politician or political institution.

This is partly a values position and partly a practical one. Meta's political and social-issue advertising authorisation is required for any ad that "references political figures, parties, elections" — the policy is at the Meta Business Help Center under Special Ad Categories — and the authorisation process is country-specific, slow, and not something we offer. We also do not promote anything connected to the Belarusian political environment, full stop. Our team lives here. We pick our work accordingly.

Cultural, civic, and non-partisan community contests are fine. The line we draw is partisan affiliation or candidate-adjacent material.

7. The entrant is a minor and we have not seen parental consent paperwork

If the contest entrant is under 18, we need a signed parental consent form covering both the contest entry and our promotion of it, including the data-processing basis for any imagery of the minor used in ads. We provide a template. We do not run a single ad before the signed PDF is in our drive.

This is a GDPR Article 8 issue when the minor is under 16 in most EU member states, and it is a child-safeguarding issue at any age. Meta's policy on minors in advertising creative is strict, and rightly so. We are not equipped to work through edge cases here, so we apply a blanket rule: paperwork or no campaign. If the parent is unwilling to sign, that is itself useful information.

One specific example, anonymised: in February 2025 a parent asked us to promote a children's-choir solo competition entry featuring their 11-year-old. The consent form came back within two hours, but the parent had crossed out the clause about ad imagery reuse beyond the campaign window. Good. We adjusted the contract, charged our standard EUR 240 starter fee, and ran a clean two-week push. That is how it should work.

8. You expect a guaranteed win

If the first three messages from a prospective client contain the phrase "guaranteed", "definitely win", or "first place for sure", we end the conversation politely. We cannot guarantee a contest win. Nobody honest can. The variables — number of competing entries, organiser scoring, jury composition, voter behaviour, last-minute rule changes — are outside our control and partly outside the organiser's control.

What we can do is run a competent paid-media campaign with measured outcomes: impressions, clicks, vote-page sessions, and conversion rate from session to recorded vote. We report all four every 48 hours during a live campaign. The pricing page lays out what a realistic engagement looks like, and our about page explains why we structure things this way.

If a guarantee is what you need to feel comfortable, we are the wrong agency. That is fine. There are agencies that will say yes to anything. We are not one of them.

How to tell if we will say yes

Short version: your contest has public rules, runs on a platform we have not blocklisted, gives us at least 5 days for any budget over EUR 300, you own the entry, the contest is not political, the entrant is either an adult or accompanied by signed parental consent, and you are buying paid-media work rather than a promised outcome.

If that matches your situation, the contact page has our intake form and a 24-hour response commitment on weekdays. If it doesn't, thank you for reading this far — we hope it saved you a deposit conversation. And whichever agency you choose, ask them their decline criteria. If they don't have any, that is the answer.