The ad you actually want to finish
Somewhere in the endless scroll of pre-roll and pop-up, Good-Loop found a strange idea: what if people wanted to watch the ad? Not because it was clever or loud, but because finishing it did something useful. Founded in Edinburgh in 2016 by Amy Williams and Daniel Winterstein, the company builds "view-to-donate" ad formats - interactive wrappers that sit around a brand's video or display creative and let the viewer unlock a free charitable donation simply by choosing to watch.
The mechanic is disarmingly simple. A viewer opts in, watches, and at the end selects a cause. The advertiser - not the viewer - funds the gift, with roughly half of the media spend flowing to a charity such as Save the Children, WaterAid or WWF. The brand, in exchange, gets something the modern web rarely offers: attention that was given, not grabbed. Good-Loop reports ad recall as high as 4.5 times the industry standard for these consented formats.
It is, in the company's own blunt phrasing, a plain proposition: "They're ads, except they're good." That refusal to over-promise is part of the appeal. Good-Loop does not claim to have abolished advertising's interruptions; it claims to have made the interruption worth the trade.
Over nearly a decade, that trade has moved more than $6 million to charities around the world - one unlocked donation at a time.
Two broken bargains in digital advertising
Good-Loop grew out of two frustrations with the way online advertising works. The first is a trust problem. For years the industry's default has been to take attention - autoplay, retargeting, data hoovered up in the background - and give little back. Ad-blocking rates and consumer resentment are the receipts. Good-Loop's answer is to make the value exchange explicit and consensual: you give your time and attention, and something good visibly happens.
The second is a problem almost no one outside the industry sees: carbon. Every ad impression moves data across networks, spins up servers and burns energy. Multiplied across billions of impressions, digital advertising carries a real and largely unmeasured emissions footprint. Good-Loop set out to measure it - and then to cut it.
At the heart of our industry is an inherent value exchange between advertiser and consumer, and I'm on a mission to harness that value as a significant force for good.
Two engines: good attention, and clean media
The company organises its work around two complementary offers - one that redirects ad money toward causes, and one that measures and reduces the environmental cost of running the campaign in the first place.
View-to-Donate Formats
Interactive ad wrappers across video, display and connected TV that let a viewer unlock a free, brand-funded donation by choosing to watch. Around half of the media spend goes to a cause the viewer selects.
Good Engagement Platform
The system behind the formats, designed to let consumers "do good with every brand interaction" - driving higher engagement, brand trust and recall reported at up to 4.5x the norm.
Good Measures & the Green Ad Tag
Carbon-measurement technology that quantifies the emissions of digital campaigns down to the impression, aligned to the Global Media Sustainability Framework.
Carbon Filtering Tool
Reduces campaign emissions by filtering out carbon-intensive publishers. One SSP partner cut emissions by roughly 18% after adjusting just 10 domains.
Where the attention goes
A rough illustration of the Good-Loop pitch. The headline figure - recall lift on consented, view-to-donate formats - is the number the company leans on most; the split shows how a campaign budget is designed to work.
Figures are company-reported and illustrative; recall multiples vary by campaign and format.
Global brands on one side, charities on the other
Good-Loop's customers are brands and their media agencies, who buy its formats and measurement across programmatic, video and CTV. On the other side of every campaign sit the charity partners that receive the donations viewers unlock. The reported client roster spans consumer giants and household brands.
Why it isn't just another ad vendor
Plenty of adtech companies chase attention; a growing number now measure carbon. Good-Loop's distinctive position is that it does both, and ties them to a certified mission. It is described as adtech's first carbon-neutral B Corporation, and it operates as net carbon-negative - a structural commitment, not a campaign.
The company competes with sustainability-focused measurement players such as Scope3 and green-media offerings from firms like Sharethrough, as well as with conventional programmatic vendors fighting for the same budgets. Its edge is the combination: a performance story (opt-in attention, high recall) welded to a values story (donations, measured emissions) that few rivals carry under one roof. Rather than treat "purpose" as a bolt-on, Good-Loop makes it the product.
In a sea of sameness, you stand out by standing for something.
How the money moves
Good-Loop is a B2B business. Brands and agencies pay to run its purpose-powered formats across their media buys, and roughly half of that media budget is routed to the viewer's chosen charity. The company earns from the media flowing through its ad wrapper and from its sustainability products. Notably, some of its measurement technology is distributed free through partners - IAS integrated the Green Media tech to offer emissions metrics to advertisers - a land-and-expand approach that seeds adoption across the ecosystem.
That model is not without turbulence. As the company matured it wrestled with what to be first: a donation platform, an engagement platform, or a carbon-measurement company. The answer, increasingly, is that the green-media tools and the view-to-donate formats are two expressions of the same idea - advertising that accounts for its impact.
Backed to make good pay
Good-Loop has raised across seed, crowdfunding and venture rounds, with a $6.1M Series A in early 2022 as its defining raise - capital earmarked for expansion into the United States, where it opened a New York base.
| Round | Amount | Date | Notable investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed / Crowdfunding | ~$2M cum. | 2017-2021 | Seedrs, Scottish Enterprise, angels |
| Series A | $6.1M | Feb 2022 | Quaestus Capital Management (lead), Scottish Enterprise, SIS Ventures, First Party Capital, Seedrs |
| Series B (reported) | $1M tranche | Aug 2025 | Not disclosed |
Funding details are drawn from public reporting and company records; totals and later rounds are approximate.
From soup kitchen to Series A
Good-Loop is founded
Amy Williams - fresh from a stint at Ogilvy and volunteering at a soup kitchen in Argentina - and Daniel Winterstein launch the company in Edinburgh.
View-to-donate goes live
The first formats let viewers unlock brand-funded charity donations by choosing to watch.
US launch
Good-Loop expands into the United States, pitching brands a way to spend media dollars and do good at once.
$6.1M Series A & green partnerships
Raises its Series A and partners with Scope3 and IAS to measure and cut ad emissions; launches a purpose-powered CTV format.
A hard year, then a reset
After what The Drum called an "identity crisis" and its toughest trading year, the company refocuses and brings in former IAS founder Will Luttrell as interim CTO.
Toward sustainable growth
Reported to have added further funding as it pushes toward profitability.
The people and the know-how
The company's expertise sits at the intersection of three hard disciplines: high-performance ad formats, programmatic media plumbing, and carbon accounting. CEO Amy Williams brings an agency pedigree and has become one of the more visible voices for ethical advertising, featuring in industry "digital hero" and changemaker profiles. Co-founder and CTO Daniel Winterstein leads the technical side. In 2024 the team deepened its adtech bench, adding former IAS founder Will Luttrell as interim CTO and industry veteran Peter Land as an adviser.
Amy Williams
Left Ogilvy, volunteered abroad, and built Good-Loop around a single question: what if the value exchange in every ad pointed at something good?
Daniel Winterstein
Technical co-founder responsible for the engagement platform and the Green Ad Tag carbon-measurement stack.
Where it fits
Good-Loop occupies a corner of adtech where two big currents meet: the "attention economy" reckoning that has brands rethinking how they earn consumer time, and the fast-rising demand for sustainable, measurable media. It is small - around 36 people - and sells into a market dominated by giants. But its positioning is deliberately narrow and defensible: it is the purpose-and-planet specialist that global advertisers call when they want a campaign to do more than reach eyeballs.
Whether the category it helped define ultimately rewards specialists or gets absorbed by larger platforms is an open question. For now, Good-Loop is betting that as measurement standards tighten and consumers grow warier, advertising that can prove it did some good - for a cause and for the climate - becomes less of a novelty and more of a requirement.
See it in action
Interviews and product explainers where Good-Loop and Amy Williams make the case in their own words.
Links open YouTube search and podcast pages - Good-Loop does not publish a single official channel URL.
Questions people ask
What does Good-Loop do?
It builds ethical ad formats where viewers unlock a free, brand-funded charity donation by choosing to watch, plus "green media" tools that measure and reduce the carbon footprint of digital advertising.
How does the view-to-donate model work?
A viewer opts to watch an ad and, at the end, unlocks a donation to a charity they choose. The advertiser funds it - roughly half the media spend goes to the cause - and the brand gets high-recall, consented attention.
Who founded Good-Loop and when?
Amy Williams (CEO) and Daniel Winterstein (CTO) founded it in Edinburgh in 2016.
Which brands and charities work with Good-Loop?
Reported brand clients include Unilever, Nestle, Levi's, Asics and Quaker Oats, while charity partners include Save the Children, WaterAid, WWF and Feeding America.
Is Good-Loop a sustainable company?
Yes - it is a certified B Corporation and describes itself as net carbon-negative, and it sells carbon-measurement tools like the Green Ad Tag to help advertisers cut emissions.