The North Face issued an apology for uploading photos of athletes wearing its gear to Wikipedia pages about famous locations—all in an attempt for the brand to place higher on Google search results.
The controversy, first reported in AdAge, began when the Brazilian office of The North Face touted a “Top of Images” marketing campaign with advertising agency Leo Burnett Tailor Made to strategically place photos of athletes wearing TNF branded apparel on Wikipedia pages.
As Wikipedia editors and users began complaining about the apparent violation of Wikipedia’s terms of service, the site removed the images and called out the brand and its agency on Twitter.
Here are Wikipedia’s tweets:
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“Every day Wikipedia volunteers fight to protect what you read from bias and misinformation. That’s how they’ve earned your trust.
“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.”
The North Face posted on Twitter: “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.”
Wikipedia has since updated its “Controversies” section with a passage that reads, “In May 2019, The North Face’s advertising agency Leo Burnett Tailor Made used Wikipedia to try to promote their products in Google search results as part of an advertisement campaign. Their actions violated Wikipedia’s term of use on undisclosed paid editing.”
The North Face is one of the largest brands in VF Corp.’s portfolio.
Photo courtesy The North Face
