What Does Ethical Digital Marketing Actually Mean in Practice?

Ethical Digital Marketing is one of those phrases that can make you feel like you need a sustainability consultant, a complete rebrand, and a very long to-do list before you’re even allowed to use it, but when you strip it back, it’s really just digital marketing with values. The values your business already has, showing up in the way you actually work.

It looks different for every business and every team, and that’s kind of the point. There’s no universal playbook for it, no checklist you download and tick off. What there is, though, is a shared direction: doing good work, growing honestly, and making decisions you can genuinely stand behind when someone asks you about them.

One of the things that shapes how we think about Ethical Digital Marketing at Climbing Trees is a value we’d describe as curiosity. Not curiosity as a buzzword, but the kind that means you’re always asking questions about how things work, whether the way you’re doing something is still the right way to do it, and what your responsibilities are when something new and powerful comes along. When AI started moving fast and reshaping what was possible in marketing, that curiosity didn’t let us just adopt it and figure out the ethics later.

It helps to actually talk about it

For a small agency like ours, these conversations are pretty straightforward, in the best way. We’re a team of fewer than 30 people based in Essex, and when something like AI responsibility or sustainability practices comes up, we get together and talk about it. Not because we have all the answers, but because we think it matters that everyone understands what we’re doing and why, and has a real voice in it.

We’re not here to tell anyone we’ve got it figured out. We’re just a team doing our bit, trying to make sure that the values we talk about are actually showing up in the way we work, and that nobody in the business is left wondering why we do things the way we do.

Transparency that goes both ways

One of the things we do regularly is something we call Ask Me Anything. The whole team gets together and anyone can put a question to Alex, our founder and MD, about anything going on in the business. How we’re doing, where we’re heading, decisions that have been made and why. Nothing is really off limits.

It sounds simple, and it is, but that simplicity is part of what genuine transparency looks like in practice. Because ethical marketing doesn’t just live in the work you put out into the world. It lives in the culture behind it, in whether the people doing the work feel informed, heard, and aligned with what the business stands for. For any business, whatever that looks like internally, that connection matters.

As Alex put it:

“For me, ethical digital marketing is about being able to look your team, your clients and yourself in the eye and say, ‘we’re growing in a way we’re comfortable standing behind.”

Ethical digital marketing looks different for every business, and that’s genuinely okay. It doesn’t have to mean becoming a B Corp or overhauling everything overnight. It can start with a conversation you’ve been putting off, or a question you haven’t asked your team yet, or just a decision to be a bit more honest in how you talk about what’s working and what isn’t.

The businesses we admire most aren’t necessarily the ones that have it all figured out. They’re the ones that are genuinely trying, that bring their people with them, and that care enough to keep asking the right questions even when the answers take a while to arrive.

That’s what we’re doing at Climbing Trees, in our own small way, from our corner of Essex. And if any of this has got you thinking about what it might look like for you, we’d love to talk about it.

If you’d like to learn even more about how Climbing Tress operates, Our MD Alex Holliman joined Oliver Zenglein of The Boutique Agency on the SUPO That Moment podcast to get into exactly that: the clients we turn down, the sectors we won’t touch, and why a genuine ethical filter doesn’t make decisions easier. It makes them clearer.

Full episode on the SUPO website.