You know you're not trapped. There's more than enough money to be made in that field if it's what you love.

If you read the comments on my post (which reached all the way to #3 on HN!!!!!!) you will see why I left it. The job can suck you in trying to find little 1-2% optimizations here an there that are a little more black hat than you might want, but all playing on human psychology in a way that is exciting until you take a step back and reevaluate what you have been doing, then you feel sick to your stomach. At least, I did. It didn't help being in the SEO/SEM/IM/EM/AM space, so every customer was receiving nearly 0 value because they were too lazy to do the work and just wanted to get rich quick.

I now work directly with our marketing team, but they hire out to vendors for the email marketing bits, the retargeting and ad spends. I just provide my 2 cents every now and then and go back to developing in house products.

So the stuff is happening anyway, you're supporting company ordering it, and feel better because you're not doing it directly? Sounds legit. :P

You might be about staying away from that sort of thing on principle but there's another angle. Being the one making those decisions, you have the ability to reduce the short- and long-term harm they make by picking good strategies. Schemes in marketing and driving profit up are inevitable. What's not inevitable in general is inaccurate information, highly-biased profiling, products that don't work (or do harm), customers getting fewer products than they want, technological lock-in, and so on.

Consider getting with the right companies pushing a collection of useful products or less harmful services vs other garbage on the market. Then all your schemes and optimizations would be benefiting people since the right companies would be benefiting. Companies you can vouch for. Best if they've been in business over a decade with good practices and/or are a non-profit with sustainable revenues. Just a thought.

My point was that you could work for yourself. You don't have to work for a company to do good work in the field, and you can stick to your own ethical guidelines when you take jobs.