While people and businesses are always trying to take advantage of Wikipedia’s open-to-all approach to information, not many openly brag about it.

But that’s exactly what The North Face and Brazilian agency Leo Burnett Tailor Made did this week in announcing a campaign called “Top of Images,” which aimed to put branded North Face photography atop Google search results by adding them to location pages on Wikipedia. The case study claimed the effort was made by “collaborating with Wikipedia,” which the site later claimed was not true.

The stunt—a clear violation of Wikipedia’s rules against advertising, marketing, PR and self-promotion—quickly backfired for the brand and agency when they were called out by the online encyclopedia in a Twitter thread that eviscerated the ploy.

Last night, The North Face apologized in a response to Wikipedia’s Twitter thread and pledged to immediately end the campaign.

Here’s a look back at the campaign case study, followed by Wikipedia’s rebuke:

Yesterday, we were disappointed to learn that @thenorthface and @LeoBurnett unethically manipulated Wikipedia. They have risked your trust in our mission for a short-lived consumer stunt. 1/ https://t.co/aIl5XEkS3z — Wikipedia (@Wikipedia) May 29, 2019

In a video about the campaign, Leo Burnett and The North Face boasted that they “did what no one has done before … we switched the Wikipedia photos for ours” and “[paid] absolutely nothing just by collaborating with Wikipedia.” 2/ — Wikipedia (@Wikipedia) May 29, 2019

The video was later published by @AdAge, which said that the agency's "biggest obstacle" was in manipulating the site "without attracting attention [from] Wikipedia moderators." 3/ https://t.co/YQufk392YT — Wikipedia (@Wikipedia) May 29, 2019

Wikipedia and the @Wikimedia Foundation did not collaborate on this stunt, as The North Face falsely claimed. In fact, what they did was akin to defacing public property. 4/ — Wikipedia (@Wikipedia) May 29, 2019

This is a surprising direction from The North Face, as their stated mission is to "support the preservation of the outdoors"—a public good held in trust for all of us. 5/ — Wikipedia (@Wikipedia) May 29, 2019

For more than 18 years, hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia volunteers have been writing, perfecting, sourcing, and referencing more than 50 million articles that anyone can access for free on the internet. 6/ — Wikipedia (@Wikipedia) May 29, 2019

Every day Wikipedia volunteers fight to protect what you read from bias and misinformation. That’s how they’ve earned your trust. 7/ — Wikipedia (@Wikipedia) May 29, 2019

When companies like The North Face take advantage of the trust you have in Wikipedia just to sell you clothes, you should be angry. Their actions have gone directly against the spirit, purpose, and policies of Wikipedia to provide neutral, fact-based knowledge to the world. 8/ — Wikipedia (@Wikipedia) May 29, 2019

North Face later apologized, pledging to ensure its agencies and other vendors were more mindful of site rules in the future.

We believe deeply in @Wikipedia’s mission and apologize for engaging in activity inconsistent with those principles. Effective immediately, we have ended the campaign and moving forward, we’ll commit to ensuring that our teams and vendors are better trained on the site policies. — The North Face (@thenorthface) May 30, 2019

Leo Burnett has not responded to Adweek’s request for comment on the campaign, its backlash or its abrupt end.

It’s common for brands and agencies to attempt to alter search algorithms in their favor, as illustrated by the enduring popularity of search engine optimization, or SEO, as an online marketing niche. However, SEO professionals typically try to follow the rules laid out by Google and other large internet players such as Wikipedia.

In recent years, some marketers have attempted to push the boundaries of SEO in new ways, such as when Budweiser and Brazilian agency Africa won the Print Grand Prix at the 2018 Cannes Lions for their “Tagwords” campaign that encouraged ad viewers to search online for terms that returned images of celebrities drinking Budweiser—photos the brand would normally have to pay a large amount to license, assuming they were available for marketing at all.

Until now, such approaches have rarely backfired on marketers beyond a mild slap on the wrist, such as when Google disabled its voice-activated Home devices from responding to a 2017 Burger King ad that said, “OK, Google, what is the Whopper burger?”