North Face boasts of defacing Wikipedia with ads

AdAge reports that North Face successfully placed advertising into articles at Wikipedia, without other editors of the publicly-editable encyclopedia noticing. This effectively allowed North Face to co-opt the site's enormous influence in Google search results.

According to the agency, the biggest obstacle of the campaign was updating the photos without attracting attention of Wikipedia moderators to sustain the brands presence for as long as possible, as site editors could change them at any time.

The "hack" worked, at least for a while, evident in a quick Google search of some of the places mentioned in the campaign's case study video.

Soon after the North Face campaign was featured on AdAge, Wikipedias volunteer editors were quick to remove North Faces photos, noting that the effort breached the sites user terms for paid advocacy.

North Face claimed to have "worked with" the Wikimedia Foundation, which immediately denied it and issued a damning statement of its own: Lets talk about The North Face defacing Wikipedia.

Yesterday, we were disappointed to learn that The North Face, an outdoor recreation product company, and Leo Burnett Tailor Made, an ad agency retained by The North Face, unethically manipulated Wikipedia. They have risked your trust in our mission for a short-lived marketing 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 agencys 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 claims.