The North Face, in a campaign with advertising agency Leo Burnett Tailor Made, hatched a scheme to get its products to the top of Google Images by replacing Wikipedia photos with its own product placement shots.

In the promotional video, the company notes how all trips begin with an initial Google search, and often the first image that shows up is from a Wikipedia article about the destination. The company took advantage of this fact by trekking to popular tourist destinations like Guarita State Park in Brazil and Huayna Picchu in Peru to take photos prominently featuring its products. It then swapped out the original Wikipedia photos for its own or, in some cases, outright Photoshopped a North Face product into an existing photo.

The video brags about how North Face cleverly hacked the results to get its products to the top of Google search, “paying absolutely nothing just by collaborating with Wikipedia.” Only, it wasn’t a collaboration at all; it was a violation of Wikipedia’s terms of service for paid advocacy. Once the campaign hit Ad Age, Wikipedia’s volunteer editors removed all of the product shots almost immediately and reported the user accounts for breaching the terms.

"The biggest obstacle of the campaign was to update the photos without attracting attention of Wikipedia moderators." Volunteers quickly found and took down all 12 photos, or, amusingly, let them stay but cropped out the North Face logo. pic.twitter.com/sRKljYI4GK — Mike Dickison (@adzebill) May 28, 2019

Ad Age suggests that, based on the original statement from Leo Burnett Tailor Made, the company may have anticipated the negative public reaction to its exploitative campaign. Maybe this article itself falls into the “all publicity is good publicity” trap that North Face was expecting, but it’s not really clear how taking advantage of an educational platform for free advertising does anything other than paint your own brand as greedy and disingenuous.