Every company dreams of free advertising, and the North Face seemed to have found a clever way to get it.

All it had to do was edit Wikipedia.

In a video ad, the North Face described how it took photos of its clothing and equipment at famous outdoor destinations and uploaded the pictures to the Wikipedia pages for those locations. The strategy relied on a central principle of Wikipedia — communal editing — to push the brand into the top of Google image results, according to the video.

“We hacked the results to reach one of the most difficult places: the top of the world’s largest search engine,” the North Face said in the video, which paired footage of a climber reaching a mountain top with the company’s “Top of Images” campaign. The video touted the campaign as innovative (“We did what no one has done before”) and free (the video claimed that the company collaborated with Wikipedia and paid “absolutely nothing”).

But the campaign, which was carried out by the company’s team in Brazil and reported by Ad Age, a marketing and media news site, quickly backfired this week.