Case: food blogger, supermarket national recipe contest

This one stuck with us. Not because the result was spectacular, but because we almost lost the client mid-campaign over an argument about ethics. She wanted us to buy votes. We refused. She went finalist anyway.

What follows is the full anonymized walkthrough. We have changed the blogger's name, blurred the exact recipe, and rounded the dates to the nearest week. Everything else is real, including the moment we nearly resigned the engagement on day 11.

The setup

"Marta" runs a small Polish-language cooking blog focused on regional comfort food from Podlasie. About 8,400 monthly readers when she contacted us. A national supermarket chain (Biedronka-style, we will not name which one because the NDA is still active) ran a recipe contest with public voting plus a jury round. 1,200 entrants. Top 50 advanced to jury review. Top 10 became finalists with a prize package and editorial feature.

Voting window: three weeks. Her contest entry was a kopytka variant with smoked tvarog. Strong recipe, good photography, decent existing audience. The contest mechanic was one vote per email per day, with a Google reCAPTCHA gate. Budget: EUR 420 for everything including our fee.

She found us through a Reddit thread where someone mentioned we had refused a vote-buying brief the month before. That, apparently, was the reason she trusted us.

What we agreed to do

Before we touch any campaign, we write down the things we will not do. For this one, the list was short and direct:

• We will not vote on the contest platform ourselves.
• We will not create accounts, ask freelancers to vote, or use any bot network.
• We will not run paid ads that promise readers any benefit for voting (Meta's Promotions policy prohibits making the brand a co-sponsor of an incentive without authorization, and we honor it).
• We will not buy email lists or do any outreach that violates the GDPR consent basis under Regulation 2016/679.

What we agreed to do was simpler. Help Marta reach more humans who already cook this kind of food, give them an honest reason to read her recipe, and let them decide whether to vote. That framing matters. We expand on it in our process page if you want the long version.

The EUR 420 split

Here is exactly how the budget broke down. We do not hide our math; pricing transparency is on our pricing page in more detail.

1. Agency fee (us): EUR 180 fixed. Roughly 9 hours of work spread across 22 days.
2. Reddit AMA prep and a small subreddit-rules-compliant promotion: EUR 0 platform spend, EUR 40 for a food stylist friend of Marta's who reshot two photos at the right resolution.
3. Niche Polish food forum participation (the forum bans paid promotion, so this was time, not money): EUR 0 platform, EUR 60 of our hours folded into the agency fee but earmarked here for tracking.
4. Email reactivation campaign through her existing Mailchimp list: EUR 14 in plan upgrade for the month.
5. Two micro-collabs with adjacent Polish food creators (one Instagram, one YouTube short): EUR 120 total, paid as honest creator fees, no requirement that they ask anyone to vote.
6. Reserve: EUR 66 untouched, returned at end of engagement minus 6 EUR currency conversion loss.

That is the entire spend. We did not run a single paid social ad. We considered it and decided the audience was too generic; Meta's contest-related ad approvals had been getting slow that month (a known issue around the Meta ad standards updates rolled out mid-February 2025), and the reCAPTCHA on the contest page meant we could not even cleanly attribute votes from ad clicks.

Week 1: the AMA and the forum

Day 1 to 7 was all earned attention. We helped Marta draft a Reddit AMA pitch for r/AskCulinary and r/Cooking. The AskCulinary moderators are strict; they declined the pitch because contests are not really their thing. r/Cooking accepted a scheduled post but not an AMA — they suggested a recipe share with story in the comments. Fine. We adjusted.

The post went up on a Tuesday at 14:00 UTC, which is reliably a strong window for English-language food subs. It got 412 upvotes and 89 comments over 48 hours. Marta answered everything herself in her own English (slightly rough, very charming, we did not polish it). She mentioned the contest exactly once, in a single comment, when someone asked what she was working on. We told her to do it that way. People hate being pitched. They like being told.

That single comment drove 247 clicks to her blog, where she had a clearly labeled "I'm in this contest, here is the link if you want to vote, here is why I think this matters" banner. Of those 247 clicks, the platform reported 184 votes initiated and we estimate around 140 actually completed (the reCAPTCHA always eats some).

The Polish forum was harder. It is a 14-year-old community with a strict no-promotion rule. We did not promote. Marta participated for nine days, answering questions about pierogi dough, sharing a non-contest recipe, and only mentioned the contest in her signature line, which the rules explicitly allow. By day 7 she had 31 forum members ask her directly for the contest link via DM. That is, again, people deciding for themselves.

Day 11: the argument

Marta was sitting at roughly rank 340 on day 10. We told her this was good. Top 50 advances; she had two weeks left and momentum building. She called us on day 11, upset. A friend of hers had told her about a "vote-boost service" advertised on a Telegram channel — EUR 0.18 per vote, allegedly real accounts in Poland, allegedly safe.

We said no. She pushed. She said her budget had room. We said the budget had room because we deliberately kept reserve, and we would still not run it. We explained that the contest platform's terms (we had read them on day 0) reserved the right to disqualify entries for "suspicious voting patterns," and that beyond the disqualification risk, this was the kind of service that occasionally turns out to be running through compromised accounts.

If you want to do this, you can do it without us, and we will refund unused budget per our refund policy. But we will not run it for you, and we will not stay on the project if it runs in parallel.

That is roughly what we told her. She was quiet for a long time. Then she said okay. We mention this because it is the actual hard part of this work — not strategy, not copy, not channel selection. The hard part is the conversation on day 11.

For more on where this comes from, our about page explains why we operate this way. Short version: we are a four-person operation in Minsk and our reputation is the only asset we cannot rebuild.

Week 2: email reactivation

Marta's Mailchimp list had 2,140 subscribers. Open rate over the previous six months was a flat 23%. Her last newsletter had gone out on 4 January 2026, which is roughly four months of silence. We told her this was actually good. Quiet lists, when reactivated honestly, often outperform active ones.

We drafted three emails together:

1. A "where I have been" note. No contest mention. Just an update with a new recipe. Sent day 9.
2. A recipe-development story explaining the kopytka entry, what she learned testing it, and at the end, a single paragraph about the contest with a link. Sent day 13.
3. A "final week" honest ask, sent day 19, four days before voting closed.

The open rates were 41%, 38%, and 47% respectively. The third email — the one that asked most directly — actually had the highest open rate, which surprised us a little. We had assumed the recipe-led email would win. We were wrong. People wanted to be asked, as long as they had been treated like humans first.

Email-attributed votes (we used UTM parameters that survived the contest platform's redirect): roughly 380 across all three sends. That was the single biggest channel for the campaign.

Week 3: collabs and the final push

The two creator collabs went live in week 3. One was a Polish food Instagrammer with about 11,000 followers who did a story walkthrough cooking Marta's kopytka recipe. The other was a young YouTuber who runs a Polish-food-for-students channel; he made a 47-second short featuring the recipe.

Both creators disclosed the paid relationship clearly. Neither said "please vote for Marta." Both said "this recipe is from a creator I like who is in a contest, link in bio if you are curious." That distinction matters legally and ethically and, in our experience, also performance-wise. People can smell pressure.

The Instagram story drove 119 clicks to her blog over 24 hours. The YouTube short performed worse on click-through (it had fewer ways to click) but reached more people; 8,400 views in the first week. Attribution gets fuzzy here. We estimate 90 to 130 votes between the two.

The result

Final standing: rank 7 of 1,200. She advanced to top 10 finalist round on day 22 and won a jury-decided category prize on the editorial round, which paid out roughly two months later. We were not involved in the jury submission, which is as it should be — that part is the creator's craft.

Total votes we can reasonably attribute to the campaign: roughly 1,150. Total votes she received: roughly 2,800. The rest came from her existing audience, organic shares, and a single mention by a larger Polish food account that we did not pay for and did not pitch (she had been friendly with that account for years).

What we would do differently

Three things, in order of importance.

First, we underestimated how much of her existing audience was just dormant. We should have started the email reactivation in week 1, not week 2. The Reddit work was good but not as efficient as the email work, and we burned attention budget on it that could have gone elsewhere.

Second, we should have proposed the EUR 420 budget split differently up front. We held EUR 66 in reserve. We did not need to. That money would have been better spent on one more creator collab or on hiring a translator to help Marta participate in a German-language Polish-diaspora forum we identified late and did not have time to engage with.

Third, the day-11 conversation should have happened on day 1. We mention vote-buying refusal in our intake call but only briefly. After this case, we made it a written part of the engagement letter. If a client signs, they have read that paragraph. It has not lost us a client yet, and it would have made day 11 a much shorter call.

What this case is not

It is not a template. Marta had a real audience, a real recipe, and a personality that translated well across channels. If you are entering a contest with no audience and no prior content, the same EUR 420 will not produce the same result. We will tell you that on the intake call. We would rather decline a project than take money for something we do not believe will work; our FAQ covers what we typically decline and why.

It is also not a guarantee of top-10. We have had clients run honest, well-executed campaigns and finish in the middle of the pack. Contests have juries, randomness, regional voting patterns, and competitor surges in the last 48 hours. Anyone who promises you a finalist slot is either lying or planning to cheat.

If you have a contest coming up and want to talk about whether your situation looks more like Marta's or less, our contact page has the direct line. We answer most emails within a working day. We say no to roughly 30% of incoming briefs, usually because the contest mechanics or the timing make honest work unlikely to move the needle enough to justify our fee.

And if anyone, ever, offers you votes at EUR 0.18 each — please close the tab.