If you're using ad-tech money to do something actually good, does it matter that the money was made from ad tech?
Think of it like this: what if I tried to argue with you “think of all the good we can do with the profits from the baby-pulping machine!” as an executive of the baby pulping company. Maybe I run a dog adoption agency with the profits, or a soup kitchen. I’m using acts of charity as a way to launder the horrific actions of my company.
Almost everything we do as a consumer or worker in a capitalist market is tied somewhere down the line to a generally-agreed undesirable outcome somehow.
So the really tricky part that involves using your brain and heart is figuring out where that line is.
(And it's sad that in large part our voice in the world's operations is reduced to mostly ineffective "buy or not buy" ... )
But seriously, I think there's a big difference between ad-tech in the strict sense of pre-"social media" ad tech and ad-tech now. When I was doing it, behavioural targeting was just getting started. One of the startups I worked at was trying to get knee deep into it (pretty incompetently, IMHO), but overall it was still "here's a stream of mostly undifferentiated impressions/bid-requests/clicks" and that was that...
Overall, it was hard to make a strong moral judgement at that point. Ads paid for the Internet as we knew it and most publishers could not survive without it.
But after about the Facebook IPO, we're talking about a very different thing, one that gets more much more morally grey-area, and sometimes outright just evil.
If the thing you're working on ends up with pushing even just one teenage girl into an eating disorder... How do you feel now about it now, even if you dumped your earnings into charity?