Here is a problem no amount of creative work will solve. A competition brand briefs a designer, gets a strong set of ad assets, uploads them to Meta, and every single one is rejected. New copy, new visuals, same result. Eventually the ad account is restricted, and at that point the design work is irrelevant.
The cause is a permission, not a policy the creative violated. Meta treats real money gaming as a restricted category, and advertisers in it need written approval before anything runs. Most people call this getting an RMG licence.
Worth clearing up the terminology first, because the name misleads a lot of people. A UK prize competition structured correctly does not need a Remote Gambling licence from the Gambling Commission at all. Under Section 14 of the Gambling Act 2005 a skill-based competition is lawful without one, and under Section 339 a free draw is too. What Meta actually wants, alongside its own approval, is a legal opinion letter from a UK gambling solicitor confirming your specific mechanic does not constitute regulated gambling. Nera Marketing’s explainer on the prize competition RMG licence sets out the distinction and what banks, payment providers and Meta each require, which is worth reading before you commission anything.
Whichever name you use, the process is the same and it takes six to eight weeks end to end. Here are seven routes through it, ranked by how much of the work the provider takes off you.
1. Nera Marketing
Top of the list because they treat the approval as a build dependency rather than a separate errand, which is the thing that actually shortens the timeline.
Legal opinion support is offered from £1,195, and the site is constructed to pass Meta’s landing page review before the application is submitted rather than corrected afterwards. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Meta reviewers open your site, and so does the specialist payment provider assessing your merchant account. Both are checking the same things: a genuine skill question inside the entry flow, a free postal entry route at equal visual prominence to the paid option, competition-specific terms, published draw dates, an 18+ restriction and a clear privacy policy.
Because they build the platform too, the application runs in parallel with development instead of queuing behind it. Around fifty UK competition sites delivered, bespoke builds from £2,995, roughly 21 days from deposit to live.
Trade-off: the parallel sequencing advantage only exists if they are also building the site. If your platform is already live elsewhere, you get the legal opinion support without the timeline benefit, and other options on this list may suit you better.
2. Zap Competitions
The most established dedicated option, and they will manage the entire RMG application on your behalf.
Zap have submitted this application repeatedly and publish clear guidance on what Meta asks for: confirmation the competition is legal, an explanation of how you prevent underage entry and entry from restricted territories, the domain hosting your competitions, and a legal opinion from a qualified UK solicitor. They can introduce a specialist solicitor for the letter and for terms and conditions if you do not have one.
Trade-off: historically the application service has been included for their own platform clients and charged separately for everyone else. Confirm current pricing directly, since published figures on this are some years old.
3. RaffleX
The builder route. RMG application support is bundled into their higher tier alongside the full site build, payment gateway integration help and solicitor liaison for terms and conditions.
Advertised at £1,999 up front, then a monthly fee plus a per-order charge. For an operator launching their first competition site who wants the compliance and advertising paperwork handled in the same package as the build, that is a coherent proposition and a low barrier to entry.
Trade-off: you are renting the platform indefinitely, and the per-order fee scales with your success. Model it against realistic ticket volumes before committing.
4. Design Hero
A Scottish agency running competition work as a focused service line, with compliance support and streamlined payment gateway approval as part of an end-to-end offer that also covers branding, social ad management and growth strategy.
The relevant strength here is that they think about the approval in the context of the advertising it unlocks. Getting the permission is only useful if the campaigns behind it are built properly, and they handle both. Over seventy five-star Google reviews.
Trade-off: broader remit than a pure compliance service, so you are buying a relationship rather than a discrete task. Good value if you want the marketing too, less efficient if you only need the letter.
5. Reffle
Custom competition platform with professional legal documentation and compliance support included in their end-to-end delivery, and a visible client base across the UK and Northern Ireland.
A reasonable option if you are building or rebuilding with them anyway, since the compliance work is part of the same engagement rather than a separate procurement.
Trade-off: as with the other platform providers, the compliance support is packaged with the build. Less useful as a standalone service.
6. A specialist gambling solicitor, direct
Listed because it is a legitimate route and nobody selling you a package will mention it.
The legal opinion letter has to come from a qualified solicitor regardless of who arranges it. You can commission one yourself, typically for around £1,000 to £1,500 in the UK, and submit the Meta application through Business Manager without an intermediary. If your site is already compliant and you are comfortable with the paperwork, this is the cheapest correct path.
The letter is also reusable. Specialist payment providers commonly request it during merchant onboarding, and Apple and Google both want it if you later launch a competition app, so it is not a single-use document.
Trade-off: nobody is checking your site against Meta’s expectations before you submit. Most rejections are landing page problems rather than documentation problems, so this route works best if you are confident the build is already right.
7. Doing the whole thing yourself
Included for completeness, and it is viable, but only in a specific order.
Fix the website first. Commission the legal opinion second. Submit through Business Manager third, naming every ad account you intend to use, because adding accounts later means going back through review. Then wait two to four weeks and do not run ads in the meantime.
That last point is where most self-managed applications go wrong. Running restricted-category ads without permission is what triggers the restrictions in the first place, and an account carrying a history of policy violations is a materially worse candidate for approval than a clean one.
Trade-off: the timeline is unforgiving of mistakes. Each round of Meta follow-up questions adds days, and a rejection means starting the review again with a worse account history.
What designers and marketers should take from this
Three things, if you work on the creative side of a brand in a restricted category.
The approval sits upstream of your work. No brief, no concept and no amount of iteration produces a compliant ad in a category where the advertiser lacks permission. If a client asks for competition creative, ask whether they have RMG approval before you start. It is a five-second question that saves a wasted project.
The landing page is part of the review. A reviewer opens the destination, which means the site design carries approval risk, not just conversion risk. Compliance elements like the free entry route cannot be visually demoted to tidy up a layout, because equal prominence is a legal requirement and a demoted version reads as evasive to reviewers and users alike.
Creative rules continue after approval. Permission is conditional. Age targeting must exclude under-18s, geography is limited to approved territories, and the standard restrictions still apply: no implying entry solves financial problems, no misrepresenting odds, no urgency that is not real. The ASA has acted on countdown timers that reset and ticket counters that do not update, and platform policy teams read those rulings.
Six to eight weeks, working backwards from launch. The design work is the fast part.
