Ethical promotion: The future is green as adland cleans up its act

Dame Anita Roddick was famously averse to the idea of advertising in the conventional sense, preferring window displays, catalogues and point-of-sale information to in-your-face marketing. Initially her stance was largely pragmatic: when she opened her rickety first shop in Brighton's bohemian North Laine, it was as much as she could do to afford the plastic bottles for her products, let alone spending thousands on costly billboards.

But her "anti-advertising" bent went deeper than this. She held a principled objection to the use of adverts as aspirational tools, which, she felt, too often made prospective customers feel inadequate, rather than good about themselves (a perhaps lofty aim she'd set for her company). In a barbed criticism of her peers in the health-and-beauty sector, she once said: "The cosmetics industry should be promoting health and wellbeing. Instead, it hypes an outdated notion of glamour and sells false hopes and fantasies."

Is there such a thing as "ethical advertising"? Can marketing ever be entirely innocuous and unintrusive – or is the very idea of using images to persuade us to buy a product we'd never before heard of until we stumbled upon a 30ft billboard screaming at us about it inherently ethically dubious?

According to a new generation of enlightened ad agencies, the answer to the first of these questions is "yes". Admen and women have it in their power to "make" their work ethical – and this goes beyond concerns about telling the truth, or banning the use of exploitative words and pictures in the campaigns they devise. By thoroughly vetting potential clients, they argue, it's possible to make sure they only take on companies and causes whose moral, social and/or environmental values they share.

Among those attempting to convince us of the value of the right-on advertising culture is Ethical Junction, an online network of businesses that are "positively screened" to ensure they meet strict standards relating to diversity, employment practices and environmental sustainability. Last month, it launched Ethical Ads, a new service enabling any of its 1,200 subscribers to advertise for a flat fee across the websites of fellow members – giving them access to a growing pool of ethically minded consumers beyond their existing customer bases.

Each advertiser pays £200 for 20,000 page impressions, which are randomly generated on sites across the network by its server. While this means a bigger firm such as the Co-operative Bank is charged the same as, say, a family-run organic guesthouse in the New Forest, the latter will arguably gain new custom by having its ad juxtaposed with the former's.

Simon Bottrell, Ethical Junction's branding and communications manager, justifies its move into ads thus: "When it's selling things to people they don't want or need, advertising is wrong, but people need to buy food and energy. Advertising is fine if it promotes ethical providers."

Yet even his own members don't always see eye-to-eye when it comes to defining what is – and isn't – "ethical".

"We have to be careful," he concedes. "Say a vegan organisation wanted to publish ads. We'd have to talk to it about screening out certain members – it wouldn't want an organic meat ad appearing on its site."

Even when there is agreement about criteria used, are ethical adverts exclusively placed on the sites of like-minded companies really doing any more than preaching to the converted?

"That's a weakness, but hopefully business generally is going to start behaving more ethically, so we can place ads on sites more accessible to mainstream consumers," says Bottrell.

Phil Soulsby is managing director of not one but two online eco-friendly "superstores", luxury goods supplier Mondomundi and the more utilitarian Get Ethical. He says that advertising on other members' sites will put him in touch with people who shop ethically elsewhere but haven't yet "found" him.

In response to objections by ethical purists to advertising per se, he says: "Yes, there's a growing school of people who are self-educated about ethical products and don't need to be advertised to, but any business has to communicate to the wider public to let them know they exist. In order to do the amount of good we want to do in the world, we can't just sit on our thumbs and hope people stumble upon our website."

Another organisation spearheading a touchy-feely agenda is Do Good Advertising, a Glasgow-based agency launched less than a year ago.

Co-founder Stephen Simpson says: "We started out by contacting people we'd like to work with, sending emails to charities and NGOs who shared our values. Since then it's been word of mouth."

Like Ethical Junction, the company is governed by its own policies on everything from the nature of the business it solicits, to how it runs its office (by sharing with another firm to minimise its carbon footprint) and the way its directors travel to work of a morning (by bicycle).

Most of its commissions so far have involved promoting charities such as Christian Aid Scotland, rather than corporate clients. Simpson sees such work as ethical justification in itself for the existence of advertising.

"Advertising is about communicating messages to the public," he says. "Some people will try to sell you the message that it's good to buy Ford cars. Our message tends to be that it's good to give to an aid charity."

A recent convert to the cause of ethical advertising is Chris Arnold, former integrated creative director for Saatchi and Saatchi, who set up London agency Feel in 2002 after becoming increasingly disillusioned by the behaviour of some of his clients.

"I increasingly had ethical issues with certain brands I was working with, and the way they sought to exploit people," he recalls. "Exploiting African women to sell make-up – is that ethical? I don't think so."

With whom will Arnold no longer work? Top of his banned list are tobacco producers. He also has a "real problem" with petrol companies.

He sees ethical advertising as a lucrative growth industry, but has no time for "greenwash" – and recently rejected two approaches from major brands whose eco-friendly "conversions" he disputed. "If people are genuine about doing things differently, we'll help. If they're trying to spin things, we won't."

In this age of mass marketing, in all its viral, subliminal and not-so-subtle guises, do any businesses still choose not to advertise at all? Former lawyers Helen and Simon Pattinson, co-founders of Montezuma's Chocolates, an organic fair trade confectioner in Chichester, West Sussex, have built a successful high street brand without buying a single ad. Each year they use the £10,000 they might otherwise have spent on marketing to run fundraising events for local charities.

The couple's decision not to set aside an advertising budget was initially motivated by a pragmatic need to strip out unnecessary start-up costs. But Helen Pattinson says they had little desire to engage with the advertising world anyway. "It wouldn't sit very well with our sales technique. I'd never push anyone to buy anything – we hope they like our chocolate enough when they sample it in our shops to buy it anyway. There's a huge argument for the idea that good products speak for themselves."