Viktor Williams — director

I run votepromotion.store from a small office in Minsk. There are four of us. I write this page in first person because pretending a four-person agency has a "leadership team" would be silly, and because most of the decisions you'll disagree with are mine.

This is the long version of my bio. If you wanted the short one, it's on /about.html. Here I'll explain the nine years before this company existed, why I quit Facebook advertising in 2019, and how I ended up specialising in something as narrow as voting contests for Polish and EU entrants.

The first nine years (2013–2022)

I started in performance marketing in 2013, freelancing on Google AdWords campaigns for a furniture importer in Wrocław. I was 22. I billed in złoty. I did not know what I was doing for the first eleven months, and I'll happily admit the first client got a worse ROAS than they would have running their own campaigns on autopilot. I learned on their budget. That sits uncomfortably with me even now.

From 2014 to 2019 I worked at two Polish e-commerce agencies — one mid-sized in Poznań handling fashion brands, one boutique in Warsaw doing B2B SaaS lead-gen. I won't name them; one is still a friend, the other is now an enemy, and naming either would be unfair. Between them I ran roughly 340 active campaigns across Google Ads, Meta, Allegro Ads, and (briefly, regrettably) Criteo. The volume taught me one useful thing: most performance-marketing wins are not clever, they are operational. Tag the conversions correctly. Don't pause a campaign on a Friday. Read the placement report before you blame the creative.

By late 2018 I was a senior media buyer with a small team of three reporting to me. On paper that's a successful career arc. In practice I was miserable, and I was about to do something stupid.

Why I quit Facebook ads in October 2019

This is the part of the bio that recruiters tell me to soften. I won't.

In 2019 I became convinced — and I still am — that the attribution model Facebook (now Meta) used for last-click and view-through conversions systematically over-credited the platform. There were specific weeks where I could prove, by switching off campaigns and watching organic and direct traffic remain flat, that 47% of "Facebook-attributed" purchases for one fashion client were going to happen anyway. The client paid us a percentage of media spend. So when I told them this, I was telling them to pay us less.

I left Facebook advertising as a discipline on 14 October 2019. Not the industry — just that one platform. I kept doing Google Ads, Allegro, and programmatic. I was not brave about it; I waited until I had two months of savings and a new contract lined up. But I stopped pitching Meta campaigns to new clients, and I made the team I managed start including organic-baseline holdouts in their reporting. Two of the three left within four months. Fair enough.

The disillusionment wasn't really about Facebook. It was about an incentive structure where the agency, the platform, and the attribution tool all benefited from over-counting, and only the client lost. Meta has since changed a lot of this — the Aggregated Event Measurement framework that rolled out with iOS 14.5 in April 2021 actually reduced some of the worst over-attribution I'd seen — but my faith didn't recover. If you're curious about how Meta describes their current promotion and advertising rules, they publish them at facebook.com/policies/ads/ and update them more often than most people realise.

How I ended up in the contest niche

From October 2019 to late 2021 I freelanced. I did Google Ads for a Belarusian audiobook startup, an SEO retainer for a Polish home-textiles brand, and one truly forgettable TikTok project I don't talk about. None of it was the work I wanted.

The shift to contests was accidental. In November 2021 a friend's sister entered a "best young entrepreneur" contest run by a regional Polish magazine. The voting was public, the prize was meaningful (a small grant plus media coverage), and she asked if I could help her get the word out without spending money on bots — she'd already turned down two services offering exactly that. I spent a weekend writing her a one-page landing site, set up a tiny Google Ads campaign targeting her actual professional network in Lower Silesia, and helped her draft three LinkedIn posts. She finished third out of 31 candidates. She didn't win. But the campaign generated 312 votes from people who had a genuine reason to support her, and she got two real client leads out of the exposure.

That experience told me three things:

Honest promotion for contest entrants is a real service that almost no one offers, because the niche is too small for big agencies and too technical for general freelancers.
The market is dominated by vote-buying services and bot networks. Most of those will get the entrant disqualified — the larger Polish and EU contests now run basic fraud detection, and platforms like the now-defunct Vyper (which shut down on 12 September 2024) used to publish disqualification stats in the high single digits.
If you do the work properly, the marginal cost per legitimate vote is high. It will never be a high-volume business. That's fine with me. I prefer four clients I can name to forty I can't keep track of.

I incorporated votepromotion.store in March 2022 and have done this and only this since. Our process page describes how we actually run a campaign; our services page lists what we do and don't offer.

What I believe, in case it matters

A few opinions I hold that you should know before hiring us. I'm aware some of them are contrarian for a marketing agency.

Most paid promotion for small contests is a bad investment. If the prize is worth less than €2,000 and you're not already mid-pack on votes, spending €600 on advertising rarely makes the math work. I'll tell you this on the first call. We've turned down somewhere around one in three enquiries on this basis. Our pricing page tries to be honest about when the numbers don't make sense.

"Going viral" is not a strategy, it's a lottery ticket. Anyone who promises virality for your contest entry is selling you a story. We aim for the unsexy thing: reach the people who would plausibly vote for you if they knew the vote existed, and make voting easy for them.

Disclosure beats cleverness. If the contest's terms require disclosure of paid promotion, disclose. The EU's Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (Directive 2005/29/EC, available at eur-lex.europa.eu) is the underlying reason most national consumer-protection authorities can fine undisclosed promotion. I have seen entrants get retroactively disqualified for failing to disclose. I have never seen one get disqualified for disclosing properly.

Google's policies are not optional. Google's Misrepresentation policy, the relevant version of which was updated 24 May 2024 and is at support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6020955, prohibits ad content that misleads users about the entity behind the promotion. We follow it strictly, including on landing pages we build for clients. This sometimes annoys clients who want to obscure that the campaign is paid.

Things I will not do

It's faster to list these than to relitigate them on every call.

I will not log into a contest platform on your behalf. Ever. Even if you give me the password. The risk of disqualification is yours to take, not mine to take for you.
I will not buy votes, recruit "voters" through paid panels, or coordinate fake accounts. There is no version of this that is safe for the entrant.
I will not work on contests where the prize is a political position, a religious appointment, or anything where my involvement would feel like undue influence. I've turned down two of these.
I will not promise a result. The refund page explains what we do promise — effort, deliverables, transparency — and what we don't.
I will not take on more than five active client campaigns at once, because I cannot personally oversee more than that, and pretending otherwise would just mean hiring strangers to do the work badly.

A specific example

One of our clients in mid-2023 — a 34-year-old veterinarian in Kraków competing in a regional "small business of the year" contest run by a chamber of commerce — came to us at vote 184 out of an eventual 2,041 cast. She had a budget of €480 and three weeks until voting closed. We declined to take a fixed fee, charged €310 for the work, and told her the realistic ceiling was probably top-five, not first. We built her a one-page site explaining her clinic's actual story (she'd taken over from a retiring vet who had served the neighbourhood for 31 years), ran a small geo-targeted Google Ads campaign in three postcodes around her clinic, and helped her write a single email to her existing client list of about 600 people. She finished fourth. The chamber's prize was a discounted membership year, which she calculated saved her roughly €840. She referred us to two other clients, only one of which we could honestly help.

I'm telling you this not as a brag — fourth place is not a brag — but because the case study would be more impressive as a fabrication, and I'd rather you knew what realistic looks like.

Personal, briefly

I'm 35. I read more nonfiction than is healthy. I cycle in summer and complain about Minsk traffic in winter. I speak Russian (native), Polish (fluent, with a Belarusian accent that locals find charming or irritating depending), and English (competent, occasionally clumsy in writing, hence the editor who reviews these pages). My LinkedIn exists but I update it once a year. If you want to confirm I'm a real person before paying us, the easiest thing is to book a 15-minute call via /contact.html and put a face to the bio.

The FAQ covers most of the practical questions clients ask before signing — billing currency (EUR or PLN, your choice), how we handle data (we don't store contest platform logins, ever; the privacy page details the rest), and what happens if a campaign starts going badly.

I'd rather you hire us with realistic expectations than excited ones. The excited ones leave bad reviews.

— Viktor