http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z82JYoUFdQg

Above is the URL to the commercial I’ve chosen. Now, this is a commercial from Thailand (I wanted to try and find a commercial no one had seen before), and it is both hilarious (in a racist humor sort of way, I guess you need to have a certain taste for that . . . I do) and really sad at the same time. Just watch it and you’ll know what I mean. It’s really touching up to the part where the black man’s bed is a toothbrush and it turns out that this is a toothpaste commercial. If this commercial was presented in modern America, it would clearly be seen as a mocking racist joke, however, the context of this commercial actually gives it a serious tone that touches base on some contemporary racist issues in Thailand. And so the commercial satisfies two goals:

1) Criticize the popular attitude of racism toward Africans in Thailand by presenting a sad story of a kind-hearted black man who was wrongly judged, in which the phrase “looks can be deceiving” follows.

2) Advertise their toothpaste product which incidentally has a brown color, which might drive some people to not buy it because it visually doesn’t seem like it would make your teeth brighter. Hence the racism analogy is referenced to suggest why perhaps the “look” of their toothpaste “can be deceiving.”

This commercial clearly has an appeal to Pathos in which the sad story of the black man is conveyed . . . even though it’s actually kind of funny. This commercial also appeals to Ethos in that it touches base on the ethical dilemma of racism in Thailand. It also touches Logos in that it makes a reasonable connection between the situation facing the black man and the situation facing the toothpaste.

Kind of a weird commercial, I know, but it caught my attention.