The North Face, an outdoor clothing and recreation brand, wanted to direct attention to its products. On its own, this isn’t an unreasonable pursuit. It’s part of the very definition of marketing. But The North Face deviated from a conventional approach.
The brand and its agency, Leo Burnett Tailor Made, realized that the top images in Google search results often come directly from Wikipedia. In order to align The North Face’s outdoor brand with high-traffic travel destinations, they decided to photograph different products on-location. Then, they swapped out existing Wikipedia images with photographs containing those product placements. Then, they released a video explaining the strategy, with the declaration that they had “hacked the results to reach one of the most difficult places: the top of the world’s largest search engine.” The video framed the effort as a collaboration with Wikipedia.
But that perspective wasn’t shared by the purported collaborator. Wikipedia says that the outdoor recreation company and its ad agency essentially committed digital vandalism as part of their marketing efforts. In a series of tweets, Wikipedia suggested that these deliberate actions violated the communal spirit of its online encyclopedia for the sake of a short-lived consumer stunt. And they urged consumers to respond with the same level of outrage. “When companies like The North Face take advantage of the trust you have in Wikipedia just to sell you clothes, you should be angry,” one tweet stated.
The North Face apologized in a tweet about six hours later. But the social media verdict was in. Wikipedia’s initial tweet garnered 3.4K retweets and 4.8K likes. The North Face’s mea culpa tweet attracted 67 retweets and 219 likes (at the time of this writing).
When DMN proposed an interview with The North Face to shed further light on the brand’s perspective, goals, products, and intentions moving forward, the company responded with the following official comment:
“We believe deeply in Wikipedia’s mission and integrity – and apologize for engaging in activity inconsistent with those principles. Effective immediately, we have ended the campaign and moving forward, we’ll strive to do better and commit to ensuring that our teams and vendors are better trained on Wikipedia’s site policies.”
In many respects, the alleged digital vandalism seems to contradict The North Face’s brand, which could be reasonably characterized as environmentally-conscious and wholesome. Some industry observers might be inclined to wonder who primarily hatched the scheme, the brand or the agency, and who should rightly take responsibility.
Some of the underlying issues here transcend both apparel and Wikipedia. As mentioned, brands want to attract notice. And the internet can enable a wide array of clever, creative, or even devious marketing approaches. Guerrilla marketers regularly chase publicity through relatively inexpensive but conversation-worthy stunts. Where should we draw the lines? And who has the right to draw them? And what are the consequences of crossing them?
When asked to weigh in with her perspective, Cheryl Cheng, a general partner at a venture capital firm and a well-established marketing expert, said that it was a bold move. But she noted that these things happen all the time and they happen on a spectrum. On the far end of the spectrum, marketers mislead consumers with unsubstantiated and illegal claims.
“Brands, big and small, sometimes run a little fast and loose,” she said.
New technologies allow companies to actively measure and refine their efforts, oftentimes increasing revenue, as indicated by recent Bain & Company analysis. But that opportunity comes with risks and complications. Some people try to game the system.
“The ability to measure created the backside of that coin,” said Cheng.
She emphasized that the potential for misconduct exists both in the online and offline worlds. But social media does change things somewhat.
“In social, with the advent of the like or the follow, you have a social validation to content that is being put out there. And consumers use that social validation like, oh, how many people follow this influencer, or how many likes did this post get, as a proxy for truth,” she explained.
This is dangerous territory. The conflation of popularity and truth is fundamentally incorrect. With that being the case, bots can be used to inflate credibility and influence, producing broad social effects.
Cheng said, “You can juice up how many people like it and the like count is true, but it’s misleading because they’re not real people. Whereas in the offline world, that would be very difficult to do. And at the same time, it’s also difficult to measure.”
For example, a consumer might notice a movie poster and have a reaction, but those impressions can’t be easily measured (at least, absent surreptitious computer vision and sensor technology).
Of course, different companies will take different marketing approaches that reflect their resources, strategies, corporate cultures, and philosophies.
Early stage startups have more limited resources and often pursue organic growth.
“When I look at consumer startups, particularly consumer startups more so than B2B enterprise, you’re looking for 70 to 80 percent organic growth,” said Cheryl Cheng. “Most of the money is spent on performance marketing, some email campaigns that come from the brand themselves, and then a lot of investment in social media and that’s kind of the one area where I think people could get a little aggressive.”
To complicate the ethics even further, Wikipedia has not always proven itself to be a neutral place. Some public figures appear to have free rein over their own pages, or engender themselves to active contributors, whereas others have their lives broken down into detailed controversies and criticisms. In some instances, Wikipedia has also contributed to the spread of misinformation.
“You’ve got to take the good with the bad when you have an open-source platform,” said Cheryl Cheng. “But I don’t know that Wikipedia is as cleanly policed as they would like it to be all the time. And in this case, this was a brand that took advantage of the platform or an opening to do so.”
Striking a positive, constructive note, Cheng suggested that future issues could be prevented through improved workflows that route ethical and legal issues through appropriate departments and approval processes. Technological solutions can help companies to dot their I’s, cross their T’s, and comply with their legal and social responsibilities.
