Pepsodent’s blackface sponsorship extended a minstrel tradition in toothpaste ads.

Evidence

His idea was to take the Amos ‘n’ Andy show to the NBC radio network, with Pepsodent as sponsor. Kenneth Smith, now head of Pepsodent, and the other executives seemed to like the idea, perhaps because it seemed connected to the old tradition of advertising toothpaste in print using stylized black men with shiny white teeth. (In fact, it was around this time that an English company launched the Darkie brand, with a smiling black man as its logo.) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 303

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the campaign from chapter 1 that made Pepsodent famous; the racist iconography ties the attention economy to minstrelsy and the rise of the Darkie brand.