Following a previous Snapchat campaign aimed at campus students from last year, Goldman Sachs is doubling down with a broad investment across the messaging service’s Discover and Live Story channels.
Major financial players like American Express, Visa, MasterCard, Bank of America and JP Morgan have also been early adopters to Snapchat advertising.
Goldman’s ad buy, which will go live Wednesday, will center around International Women’s Day and will highlight entrepreneurs from the company’s “10,000 Women” initiative, which funds small businesses led by women in developing countries.
Goldman Sachs isn’t the most intuitive client for a platform like Snapchat, which has an audience that’s mostly below working age and unconcerned about managing their assets.
But this buy is less directly tied to hiring young people, as the campaign is being deployed across editorial channels, as opposed to Snapchat’s campus-focused live story option.
Goldman’s campaign will also mark the first sponsored content takeover across the Snapchat Discover channel. A Snapchat spokesperson stressed that while Goldman is sponsoring the coverage, Snapchat coordinates the editorial and placement without client influence.
It’s a new and tricky concern for Snapchat, which built out its publisher distribution platform before more recent efforts – still tentative – to invest in its ad tech infrastructure. Now the company must manage that monetization without creating editorial conflicts or forcing publishers to feature certain content.
Snapchat Discover partners BuzzFeed, Vice, National Geographic and Refinery29 will feature the new Goldman campaign.
For now, advertising deals are negotiated and placed manually, since Snapchat doesn’t have an API. Though the company seems to be adding ad tech talent – as evidenced by its hire of Facebook Audience Network builder Sriram Krishnan – there’s still much work to do.
