North Face criticised for replacing Wikipedia pics with branded shots

Clothing firm The North Face has been accused of digital vandalism after an ad agency surreptitiously inserted the company’s products into Wikipedia articles about Brazilian mountains.

In April, the ad agency Leo Burnett Tailor Made, filled Wikipedia entries of Brazilian landmarks with professional shots featuring the brand, with the intention of causing Google to display the same images in the top few search results.

The photos uploaded by the agency prominently featured models wearing North Face gear in the foreground of the shot. The substitution was only noticed when the agency proudly revealed what it had done in a lavishly produced video shared by industry publication AdAge.

“Our mission is to expand our frontiers so that our consumers can overcome their limits,” North Face Brazil’s CEO said in a statement. “With the ‘Top of Images’ project, we achieved our positioning and placed our products in a fully contextualised manner as items that go hand in hand with these destinations.”

But the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that runs Wikipedia, criticised The North Face for its actions. “What they did was akin to defacing public property,” the foundation said in a statement, “which is a surprising direction from The North Face. Their stated mission, ‘unchanged since 1966’, is to ‘support the preservation of the outdoors’ — a public good held in trust for all of us.”

“When The North Face exploits the trust you have in Wikipedia to sell you more clothes, you should be angry. Adding content that is solely for commercial promotion goes directly against the policies, purpose and mission of Wikipedia to provide neutral, fact-based knowledge to the world.”

But some good has come of the campaign. In order to upload images to Wikipedia, users must allow their work to be edited and reused so that the free nature of the encyclopedia can be preserved. That means that savvy editors have been hard at work cropping The North Face logo out of otherwise perfectly usable landscape shots, leaving them available to use on the free encyclopaedia forever – without offering free advertising to a clothing company.