The North face and Leo Burnett Tailor Made, defaces Wikipedia to promote The North Farce (intentional) gear.

Advertising field is a crazy busy and expensive one. Every company wants to get the best for their advertising dollar and sometimes even look for free advertising, in various manner. The North Face seemed to have found a clever but unethical way to go about it.

It and the advertising partner went and edited the Wikipedia. Using the central principle of Wikipedia, communal editing. It uploaded photos of own products to famous outdoor destinations on the Wikipedia. Why you may ask? to push the brand into the top of Google image results, according to a video by North Face itself.

“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”).

As one would expect in a sneaky try like this campaign, which was carried out by the company’s team in Brazil and reported by Ad Age, quickly backfired this week.

Yesterday, the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit entity that hosts and takes care of Wikipedia, denied collaborating on the project and blasted the North Face and its advertising partner, Leo Burnett Tailor Made, for “unethically” manipulating the site. In other words, defacing a public property. In no time, fans of Wikipedia were calling on the retailer to make a donation to the nonprofit to make up for its mistake. And by Wednesday night, the North Face had publicly offered an apology.

“We believe deeply in @Wikipedia’s mission and apologize for engaging in activity inconsistent with those principles,” the North Face said on Twitter. “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.”