His skin was darkened to depict an Indian man and a Malay woman wearing a headscarf, and he also portrayed a Chinese man and a Chinese woman. Each character was shown holding a plate of food paid for electronically.

“Brownface in a Singaporean ad in 2019. I thought we already went over this,” magazine editor Ruby Thiagarajan said on Twitter, in a post that had been retweeted nearly 3,000 times by Monday.

“Brownface” or “blackface” are terms referring to the practice of darkening an actor’s skin to portray a person of a different race.

Mediacorp, through its celebrity management arm The Celebrity Agency, apologised “for any hurt that was unintentionally caused”.

“The message behind this advertising campaign is that e-payment is for everyone,” it added.

Racist landlords in Malaysia to Chinese privilege in Singapore, why is Asia so hung up on skin tone?

The broadcaster would not confirm whether the ad had been pulled but it had disappeared from a website as well as some public places where it was displayed last week.

Most of the criticism centred on how the ad had used just one actor from the country’s main ethnic group, rather than getting other performers to play the different roles.

“They could have hired an artist for every single race? Is it really hard?” one Twitter user said.

A Singaporean office worker said she found the ad “very, very insensitive”, but other social media users said they thought there was nothing wrong with it.

“I don’t see the issue, don’t be too sensitive over ads like this,” one comment said.

"This one's for all the Chinese people who don't know their place / We in 2019 man / This s...'s a disgrace," she said in the nearly three-minute song.