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Based on interviews and fieldwork in the advertising industry, this article depicts pro bono advertising for nonprofits as a complex terrain of gift exchanges. Doubling as a gift to distant others and an immediate gift to the nonprofit, advertising professionals performing receive what may be termed the countergift of unalienated labor. Whereas in their corporate work, advertising professionals are often frustrated by clients’ demands that they experience as inimical to their creative ideas, the deference extended to them by nonprofits means that they can both craft work that they see as existentially compelling, and follow the labor process so that the advertising campaign they craft is felt to be theirs in a way that is rare in the industry. We then show how gifts and counter-gifts stretch in time – and what the gift entails in terms of the tenor of the relationships between the parties, and as a particular form of practical action that these relationships afford.