Reading contest rules: the 9 clauses that decide your campaign

Most clients who write to us have already entered. They send a screenshot of the contest page, a vote count, and a deadline. Then we ask for the rules PDF. Half the time, they have not read it. The other half read the prize section and skipped the rest.

We get it. Rules documents are written by lawyers for other lawyers, and the interesting part is the prize. But the rules are where your campaign lives or dies. Below are the nine clauses we read first, in this order, before we quote anything.

Why we read rules before we read your brief

A short story. In March 2025 a Warsaw-based photographer asked us to run a paid traffic push for a European photo contest. Prize was 4,200 EUR plus a Sony body. We opened the rules. Clause 8.3 said any image submitted became the property of the organising magazine for 36 months, royalty-free, worldwide. Our client had not noticed. We asked her if she was okay with that. She withdrew the entry the next day. No campaign, no invoice. We have done this enough times now to treat the rules as the brief.

Here is what we check, in the order we check it.

1. Eligibility geography

This is the cheapest disqualification to avoid and the one we see most. The rules will name countries where the contest is open. Sometimes it says "EU residents". Sometimes "residents of Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary". Sometimes "open globally except Quebec, Italy, and Belgium" — the four jurisdictions that regularly require additional sweepstakes registration.

Why this matters for a vote campaign: if we run Meta ads, we have to set a geo. If the contest is Poland-only but votes can come from anywhere, we still need to advertise inside Poland for any "share to your network" mechanic to be legitimate. We will not run ads targeted at countries where the entrant cannot legally win. That is the first thing we check.

2. One-entry-per-X enforcement

Read this clause twice. It will say one of: one entry per person, one per email, one per household IP, one per device fingerprint, one per phone number. Each of those means a different thing.

"One per person" is a legal statement and rarely enforced technically. "One per IP" is enforced by the platform and will silently reject duplicate votes from the same network — including, sometimes, an entire office. "One per device fingerprint" is the strictest and means a single phone cannot vote for the entrant and a friend on the same day.

We had a client in late 2024 whose family of seven all voted from one home router. Six votes were silently discarded. The contest platform never told her. She was 11 votes behind the leader at the deadline. We now ask, on every project intake, what the entry-cap mechanism is and explain it to the entrant before we sell anything.

What this means for your campaign

If the platform enforces one-per-IP, then paid ads driving traffic to "vote for me" pages have a hard ceiling per network. We adjust the budget down, not up. This is the opposite of what an aggressive agency would do, and it is why we sometimes quote a smaller package than a client expects.

3. Referral mechanics

Some contests give you bonus points for bringing in new participants, not just new votes. Others penalise it. A surprising number of rules now contain a clause that says "encouraging non-organic engagement, including paid referral traffic, is grounds for disqualification". That clause is the one that ended a campaign we were three days into running in October 2024.

The honest read: if the rules say "share with friends", paid social ads pointing at the entry page are usually fine. If the rules say "share organically" or "no paid promotion of your entry", they are not. We will read this clause aloud to you on a call before we start. If we disagree on interpretation, we ask the organiser in writing — and we wait for the reply.

4. Sponsored content disclosure rules

This is where most agencies get sloppy and clients get fined. Two layers matter.

Layer one is the platform. Meta's Branded Content and Promotion Guidelines, last revised on 14 February 2025, require disclosure when a post is part of a paid promotion. The official text lives at facebook.com/policies_center/pages_groups_events/promotions and we recommend you read it once, even if you hire us.

Layer two is EU consumer law. The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (2005/29/EC) — full text at eur-lex.europa.eu — requires that commercial communication be identifiable as such. In Poland, the implementing law has been enforced against influencers since 2022, with UOKiK issuing fines in the 40,000 to 100,000 PLN range for undisclosed paid posts.

What we do: every ad we run for a vote campaign carries a "Sponsored" label (the platform adds this automatically) and we never instruct the entrant or their friends to post about the contest without #ad or #wspolpracareklamowa where the law requires it. Boring? Yes. Necessary? Also yes.

5. Disqualification triggers

This is the clause that lists the things that will end your contest entry instantly. Read every bullet. We have seen the following trigger disqualification in real contests over the last 18 months:

• more than 17% of votes coming from a single referring domain
• vote velocity above a platform-defined threshold (often around 50 votes per hour for small contests)
• a single IP voting for more than one entrant
• use of any URL shortener that masks the destination
• a Facebook page age below 90 days driving traffic
• "any indication of coordinated inauthentic behavior" — a phrase taken almost verbatim from Meta's policy and copy-pasted into more than a few contest rules

We will not run a campaign that pushes the vote velocity into the disqualification zone. If a client asks us to do that, we decline. See our refund policy for what happens when we walk away from a brief we have started but find out later the rules forbid the tactic.

6. Prize substitution language

Find the phrase "prize substitution" or "prize equivalent". It usually says the organiser reserves the right to substitute the prize with one of equal or greater value, at their sole discretion. This is normal. What is not normal: clauses that allow substitution with a voucher when the prize was a physical object, or with a different brand when the prize was branded.

We had a client in 2023 win a cycling holiday and receive a 1,800 EUR Decathlon voucher instead. The rules allowed it. She was furious. We could not have changed the outcome, but we could have warned her — and now we do. Before we take a campaign brief, we tell the entrant what the prize is actually likely to look like if they win, based on the substitution clause.

7. Jurisdiction and governing law

The last paragraph of every rules document names a country whose courts have jurisdiction over disputes. If you are in Krakow and the contest is governed by the law of Ireland, that is a long, expensive complaint to file. If the governing law is Belarusian and you are in the EU, you have effectively no recourse.

Our rule of thumb: if the contest prize is worth more than 3,000 EUR and the governing law is outside the EU/EEA, we tell the client to consider whether it is worth the time investment regardless of the outcome. We are not lawyers, and we say so. But we will read this paragraph with you.

8. Image rights transfer

The clause that ended the Warsaw photographer's campaign in the story above. Read carefully for these phrases:

1. "perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free licence" — the organiser can use your image forever, anywhere, without paying you. Common in amateur contests, less common in professional ones.
2. "transfer of copyright" — you no longer own the image. This is rare but legal under Polish copyright law when stated explicitly in writing. If you see this and you are a working photographer, walk away.
3. "moral rights waiver" — the organiser can edit, crop, or modify your work and present it without your name attached. Under Article 16 of the Polish Copyright Act, moral rights cannot be transferred but can be waived, and contests increasingly ask for that waiver.
4. "sublicensing rights" — the organiser can pass your image to a third party, often a sponsor brand. This is the one that ends up in supermarket flyers.

We will not run a campaign for a contest whose image rights clause we believe the client does not understand. If you are not sure, we will explain it. If you are sure and accept it, we move on. Our intake process includes a rights-clause walkthrough as a separate step.

9. Tax responsibility

The least romantic clause and the one that determines what you actually take home. In Poland, contest winnings above 2,000 PLN are subject to a flat 10% tax (Article 30 ust. 1 pkt 2 of the Personal Income Tax Act). Some organisers withhold this and pay you the net. Others give you the gross and a tax form, leaving you to file. A few make you sign a declaration that you will handle it yourself.

If the prize is in kind — a trip, a camera, a car — the tax is calculated on the declared value, which is sometimes inflated for marketing purposes. We have seen a "5,000 EUR holiday" that the winner had to declare at 5,000 EUR and pay 500 EUR in tax for, when the actual market value of the trip was closer to 3,200 EUR.

This is not a clause we can change for you. But we will read it with you and tell you what the net prize is likely to be, so the campaign budget makes sense in proportion.

The one clause we still get wrong sometimes

Honest admission: clause 3, referral mechanics, is the one our team has misread twice in the last year. The language is often ambiguous and the organisers do not always answer email. We now require written confirmation from the organiser before running any referral-based tactic, and we wait up to five business days for that confirmation. If the contest closes before the answer comes, we do not run that specific tactic. This has cost us work. It has also kept clients from being disqualified.

What this means for the quote we send you

When you ask us for a price, our first reply is usually a request for the rules PDF and a 20-minute call. We are not stalling. We genuinely cannot tell you what is possible or sensible until we have read the document with you. If you want to skip that step, we are probably not the right agency. Try someone bigger.

If you have read this far and have a contest entry you want help with, the contact page has a form that asks for the rules link first. That order is deliberate. The services page explains what we actually do once the rules check is clear, and the FAQ covers the questions we hear most often after the first call.

We are five people in Minsk. We read every rules document end to end. We charge for the time it takes. We sleep better.