In an effort to position Goldman Sachs as a thought leader in both the financial industry and in the public discourse, the firm produces a number of recurring content series highlighting insights from Goldman Sachs' economists, researchers, analysts and experts. The Long & Short of It is an original video series with two-to-three-minute videos showcasing Goldman's unique perspective on today's most perplexing challenges and tomorrow's most innovative solutions. This series is intended to help inform the public about important global trends from some of the industry's top leaders. When developing this series, the focus was on featuring topics that are on the minds of our clients (from technology to infrastructure to clean energy) as well as our followers and the broader public.
As the topics are timely and forward-thinking, The Long & Short of It is an effort to place Goldman at the center of some of the most important global conversations. We also aim to provide our take on the innovations and solutions that will affect and impact the economy and society.
Episodes in The Long & Short of It focus on topics ranging from technological innovation to scientific advances to consumer behavior, providing viewers with short, easy-to-understand explanations and a distinct Goldman Sachs analysis. As some of the topics are complex (e.g., 5G, edge computing, silicon carbide), video clips are created in a simple, digestible way, with bold on-screen graphics, making these interesting topics more accessible.
The Long & Short of It episodes are optimized for social media with engaging graphics, highly visual imagery, lending themselves perfectly to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and more. We post these clips organically across these channels as well as in paid promotion and the firm's own channels.
The content is also adapted and reimagined to work naturally in Instagram Stories. The stories are highly graphical, very visual, often featuring key statistics and other Instagram tools native to the platform. By using Stories, we are able to capitalize on user behavior of tapping quickly through stories offering quick takeaways.
In order to optimize our existing content to fit this channel, we've edited our ~3 minute videos to 3-frame stories, leveraging the most important statistics, quotes and clips from our original videos to ensure each topic is still clearly communicated. Instagram's native features are also integrated into these stories which include polls, GIFs and text treatments. Each Instagram Story drives to the Goldman Sachs website, where users can watch the full Long & Short of It videos and read summaries of each.
The Goldman Sachs channel also leverages Instagram Story Highlights to curate all of this content for our audience's on-demand viewing.
In its first year, Goldman Sachs premiered 15 new videos across our social platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube) in six countries (US, UK, Germany, France, Poland, India). Episodes were also translated into the native languages in Asia and Europe, for select items.
The Long & Short of It content was a top performer across social channels in 2018 as it served relevant content to a highly engaged audience. Globally, this content series generated 46M video views, 186M impressions and 162K engagements, contributing to its success. The episode, "A Bull's Case for Oil," with Jeff Currie drove the most overall volume of any episode, amassing 25M impressions, 6M video views and 6K engagements.
