Fenster writes:

That ol’ vampire squid, Goldman Sachs, has for a while been running an ad campaign that attempts to put the firm’s accomplishments in the best possible light.  To paraphrase Dr. Johnson on the subject of a dog walking on two legs, what’s remarkable here is not that it is done well, but that it is done at all.

Goldman has long had a media arm, to be sure (full disclosure: in the 1980s, I was the “talent” on a video produced by Goldman highlighting its international communications capabilities).  But it didn’t really have much in the way of a face to the public at large–there, it was as rarely seen as, well, a giant squid.

At one level, the new ad campaign seems to simply aim at a broader set of insiders.  By stressing things like job creation they are doubtless looking to cast a wider net in search of new kinds of opinion leaders.  But the ads are also crafted to make them look friendly and nice to average Americans–not a bad goal given the heat it has been under.  Will it work?  Who knows–for one, the fabled Jerry Della Femina thinks the approach is laughable, and that no one will really buy the notion that Goldman is suddenly a nice place.

Here’s what I find odd though.  Perhaps it is because I read about finance, but I regularly get Goldman ads looking out from me from various websites that I visit.  You’d think that with all the money they have, they would be attentive to things like visual quality.  Yet a number of their website ads are built around poor quality images.  Why would they do that?

Here is an ad touting their redevelopment expertise.  This is from Goldman’s own website and so it is a good quality image.  This ad is also one that appeared in a lot of print ads, and Goldman probably got mileage out of the fact that the model they used came across as cute and wholesome.

But this is how it shows up on a web page.

The logo is clear enough but the picture stinks.  Is this a technical thing or are they just being clueless?