AeroMexico Wants White People, Who Don’t Like Mexico, To Travel To Mexico By Telling Them They’re Mexican

Ad campaigns are created to make us want to buy things. They’re sometimes suggestive, sometimes subtle, and sometimes not. We’re bombarded with ads sometimes without even noticing them, and they may be brilliant and other times disgusting. The purpose of an ad is to provide perspective into the thing we didn’t know we wanted.

With this in mind, AreoMexico, an airline with daily flights to Mexico, believes that tourism to Mexico is decreasing notably because of how some — white Americans — view our southern border country. But is tourism down in Mexico just because the President of the United States has spoken so offensively about it?

According to Forbes, in 2017 39.3 million people traveled to Mexico. While that number may seem pretty good, 75.9 million people went to the U.S. The number one traveled destination in 2017 was France with more than 86.9 million. So AreoMexico wanted to boost those numbers to Mexico by providing travel discounts, particularly to people who perhaps would never conceive of going.

Ogilvy — an advertisement agency hired by AreoMexico — created an ad campaign that would give those people who are hesitant about traveling to Mexico an incentive to travel there. The commercial, which was released last year but is only going viral now, has working-class white people in Texas being interviewed about whether or not they would want to travel to Mexico.

One woman said “No way.” She does not want to visit Mexico. Another said, “Let me stay here in peace and let those folks stay on their side of the border.” One after another, said there’s no way they’d travel there. But the interviewer tells them that AreoMexico is giving discounts to people who have Mexican DNA. And, because some parts of the U.S, including Texas, used to be Mexico, millions of Americans have Mexican DNA without even realizing it. According to CNN, the promotion is “specifically targeted at states in the Western United States, including Arizona and Utah” where people are more likely to have Mexican heritage. So, if someone has 10 percent Mexican DNA, they’ll get 10 percent off a flight to Mexico.

The white Texans interviewed — the same ones that voiced disdain for Mexico got their DNA results, and sure enough, all of them have Mexican DNA. From 3 percent to 54 percent, these white folks are Mexican in some way or another. Lo and behold, after realizing they are Mexican, they’re gladly accepting the discount to travel to Mexico. The ad ends with the slogan: “Innerdiscounts, There Are No Borders Within Us.”

The ad is getting a very mixed reaction on social media. But you cannot deny its cleverness. Here’s the ad below. Let us know what you think in the comment section below.