What Ethical Media Buying Actually Looks Like

Most media plans are built around one question: how can we reach the most people with our budget? Businesses that prioritize ethical media buying are asking a better one: what are we funding to get that audience?

Our clients include many purpose-driven organizations, and we know this is something they grapple with. While we’re not directly involved in media and advertising services, they are connected to the work we do, and we wanted to understand what ethical media buying actually looks like in practice.

So we sat down with Chris Marine of Campfire Consulting, a fellow Certified B Corp and 1% for the Planet member, who told us straight away that ethical media buying is something that isn’t really talked about enough.

How do you define ethical media buying? What changes when you’re buying media this way?

To me, ethical media buying really starts with recognizing that a media dollar is doing two things. Yes, it’s reaching an audience, but it’s also funding the ecosystem that delivered that audience in the first place.

When we’re buying media ethically, we’re asking a different question. Not just, can we reach the right audience efficiently? But what are we helping grow by putting money there?
That means looking at that ecosystem the same way you’d look at any other part of your supply chain. Media is often left out of that thinking, even though it’s frequently one of the largest pieces of a marketing budget. Who’s the publisher? What content are we supporting? Are we funding quality journalism and creators, or are we advertising on Made for Advertising sites with no real content behind them? Those choices can result in a wasteful supply chain, with real consequences for your business and for the environment.

None of this means abandoning performance. It means expanding the traditional definition of performance.

Are there tradeoffs between cost, reach, and brand values?

Yes, there are real tradeoffs. But it’s never about compromising results.

Most people think of media cost as cost per mille (CPM), the price of reaching a thousand impressions. Go into Meta or any ad exchange, the marketplaces where advertising space gets bought and sold, and it’ll tell you exactly what the CPM is. But the cheapest impression is never the whole story, because it only tells you what you paid, not what you actually got back.

Open exchanges are one kind of ad exchange, where publishers put their content up to be bought and sold on the open market, similar to a stock exchange. You can get inventory there at very low CPMs. But a low price doesn’t guarantee a good result. It doesn’t mean people are paying attention, that the environment is trusted, or that your dollar even made it to the publisher. Often, only pennies on the dollar actually reach them.

Working directly with a publisher instead of buying through an exchange, can cost more on paper. But if the audience is more engaged, the environment is more trusted, and more of the investment is actually funding the organization creating the content, that’s usually the better investment. Not just for the brand, but for the publisher and the community around it.

Our job is to make those tradeoffs visible to clients, so they can make an intentional decision instead of letting an algorithm chase the cheapest outcome by default.

How do you evaluate whether a platform, publisher, tactic, or placement aligns with a client’s values? Where do you see the biggest gap between what a brand says and what it does?

When we evaluate alignment, we’re looking at the content environment itself: brand safety and suitability, how transparent the supply chain is, the quality and attention of the audience, sustainability, and increasingly, who actually benefits economically from the investment.

The biggest gap I see is brands spending years defining their values internally, then treating media procurement like a completely separate exercise. Companies will talk about supporting local communities or sustainability, then put millions of dollars into a platform like Meta, optimized entirely for efficiency, without examining where that money actually goes. If you’re funding that way, you’re not supporting your local communities, because it takes real people to produce the information and entertainment that makes a community whole.

We often hear people talk about needing to get their house in order before they can think about their media investment. But media should be thought of as part of the house. If your media plan is part of your impact strategy and your brand strategy from the start, that’s where the real opportunity is, whether brands realize it or not.

How can smaller organizations make thoughtful media decisions without a big budget or an internal media team?

The smaller the budget, the harder media dollars need to work. The biggest thing we see with smaller organizations, which is also true for many of the regional and national brands we work with, is the pressure to be everywhere.

You don’t need 15 platforms. Smaller organizations, and honestly larger ones too, are usually better off doing fewer things well. Start with who you actually need to reach, where they spend meaningful time, and what environments already have credibility with them. Then think outside the obvious platforms: local newspapers, public radio, niche newsletters, community events, local creators.

One of the most undervalued channels we see across almost every client we work with, from retail to quick service restaurants, is broadcast radio. People assume it’s outdated, but the returns are consistently strong, and the budgets people put toward it are usually too small.

For every line in a media plan, we ask one question: why is this here? If the answer is real, like there’s trust in that community, there’s an opportunity beyond the paid media itself, that’s a good reason. If it’s just because a competitor is doing it, that’s not.

What does good measurement look like for purpose-led campaigns, beyond clicks and conversions?

We do a lot of work with media mix modeling and attribution, tying media investment back to business goals. But the industry has become obsessed with finding one metric that proves everything, and human behavior doesn’t work that way.

We like to triangulate measurement instead. That means looking at traditional numbers like conversions, sales, and site activity, alongside brand metrics like awareness, consideration, and search behavior, and a third layer that’s often overlooked entirely: participation. Did people participate? Did they volunteer? Did they donate? Did a community organization benefit? Did the campaign build a real relationship between the brand and the people it serves?

Not everything valuable shows up on a dashboard right away. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be measured. It means we need a broader idea of what counts as a result.

What’s a tactic or decision that shows this approach to media buying action?

One of the most common examples is simply choosing not to default all of a budget into a national platform when a brand is trying to build familiarity with a specific community.
Familiarity matters more than attention alone. You can reach the same person through a big national platform or through local media, connected television, radio, outdoor, community partnerships. The national option usually looks easier, one platform, one report, one CPM. But that platform is also grading its own performance. If I asked my kid to grade his own homework, the result might be generous. The same logic applies here.

A local strategy lets a brand borrow some of the trust a publisher or network has already built with its community, while putting money directly into the people creating that content. That’s the full picture of thinking about the media supply chain: where can you borrow trust, and where can you bring value instead of just extracting it?
We’ve seen this play out directly. We worked with Big Brothers Big Sisters on a campaign to recruit more diverse volunteer “Bigs,” matching the backgrounds of the kids waiting to be paired with one. That’s not a traditional sales metric, but it’s a real, measurable result, and it’s exactly the kind of outcome that gets missed when measurement only looks at clicks and conversions.

What advice would you give to brands who are new to paid media and want to be ethical about it?

Don’t put pressure on yourself to build a perfect ethical media plan on day one. This is still new territory for a lot of brands, so choosing to think this way already puts you ahead.
The place to start isn’t a perfect plan, it’s a few key questions. Ask your agency or partners where the money is going, and what percentage of it actually reaches the publisher. Look at whether your media strategy reflects the same values you talk about everywhere else in your business.

The media supply chain deserves the same attention as any other part of your supply chain. And don’t assume ethical media means sacrificing performance, because it doesn’t. Investing in good publishers and good companies, the same way you’d think about a sound investment anywhere else, tends to produce better results.

Responsible media isn’t philanthropy. It’s still advertising. It’s about making that same dollar work harder, while being intentional about what it supports along the way. Where you invest influences what grows, and that doesn’t just mean your business growing. It means everything that dollar supports behind it.

Where Mangrove fits in

Websites play an important role in marketing and communications. They’re a final destination in many campaigns, and often how you tell if your campaigns and tactics are working. Bringing these ideas forward, and helping clients connect with partners like Chris and the team at Campfire Consulting, is one way we can help people think differently about this part of their business, and see that ethics and advertising don’t have to be separate conversations.

If you’re thinking through how your website fits into the rest of your marketing, we’re always happy to connect.