Goldman Sachs is coming to Snapchat.
The investment bank will begin advertising at some colleges Friday, with short video ads appearing in Campus Stories on Snapchat. While Goldman Sachs largely avoided the public eye prior to the financial crisis and its branding in Rolling Stone as a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity", it has been branching out into social media and even podcasts lately. But the Snapchat ads are still a major leap for the firm.
"Our overall media strategy has been to go where our target audience is consuming information" Amanda Rubin, Goldman's head of brand and content strategy, told BuzzFeed News.
The ads are part of Goldman's recruiting efforts and are meant to reach students both at schools where Goldman does on-campus recruiting and where they don't, Rubin said. "We're very focused on campus recruiting, they're all using these platforms, with Snapchat being on one of the biggest platforms for millennial use."
The ads will appear for users at some of the around 50 schools that have access to Campus Stories.
Goldman's interest in the messaging app as a platform to reach potential job candidates was spiked by the introduction of Snapchat Discover, its platform for publishers, Rubin said. "They're going to one platform to engage with friends and snap and also to get their news," she said, pointing to the presence of major publishers like CNN.
The ads will show up on Snapchat's Campus Story, a selection of user-submitted photos and videos at a specific college campus that are then curated by Snapchat employees. This is the first national recruitment ad to run on this Snapchat product.
Goldman's ads, vertically oriented with left to right movement, mention the type of people Goldman wants — and wants people to think they want.
"App Developer," "Game Coder," "Crowd Funding Champion," "Campus Environmental Leader" show up in the ten-second spots, while, say, "Online Poker Shark" and "Child of Important Client" do not.
Despite trend stories insisting that students at elite schools are now choosing startups over finance, Goldman still boasts of being able to take its pick of job applicants. In its annual report, chief executive officer Lloyd Blankfein and president Gary Cohn said in their letter to shareholders that in 2014, Goldman received "nearly 270,000" applications for 8,300 open positions. About 90% of applicants who got offers from Goldman chose to work there, the two men said.