Long before Randall Park became the center of international controversy for portraying Kim-Jong Un in The Interview, he was just Chris Park, mild-mannered doggy daycare owner. Or at least that’s what he was called by the commercial banking arm of J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM), which used him in an ad for one of its business credit cards (without ever mentioning that their pitchman was actually an actor).
The print ad ran all over the place last year, including in the pages of Fortune — which is where I noticed it yesterday, while flipping through an old issue. Here it is:
And here is the video version (beginning at 0:10):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEaoSoq26SQ
How wonderful that he earns 5x rewards on office supplies by using his Chase card. Or it would be were he actually a pet caretaker owner, instead of this guy:
I guess that’s the downside of advertisers using actors instead of ‘real people’ in ads. Every now and then, one of your “doggy daycare owners” might become better known as the fictionally-assassinated version of a still-alive global villain.