Wikipedia and Wikimedia have a heavy preference for landscape photos without people in them. Not that they're totally against it, but it still runs against the norm.
imagine a medical supply company took an objectively much better photo but had its logo in tiny letters somewhere on the tape measure or a beaker or something. seems to me a fair trade, it's pretty hard to take stunning photos and there are lots of subjects that don't have it. as long as it's just a few pixels and passes a normal human filter (it's better than what it replaced) I am just not seeing the huge harm. if the after picture was worse, it should get shown in this outrage article.
Companies could also just provide good photos under open licenses above board. Sure, no guarantee your pictures will get taken, and the marketing agency doesn't get to talk how cleverly they avoided getting caught by Wikipedia editors, but that's the kind of thing that makes people unhappy about your contributions.
The photos were uploaded as CC BY-SA, which I think is probably a silver lining, even though the deletion nominations often talk about blurring or removing the trademarked logo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:The_North_Face_W...