[Photo of Marcus Goldman:  Haaretz.com]

BloombergView columnist Matt Levine offered his take on Goldman’s new advertising campaign.

Hey America: Did your dog chew up your sofa? Did a baseball hit your windshield while you were watching a Little League game? Are you mired in unsustainable credit-card debt as a result of the relentless societal pressure to maintain a lifestyle of showy consumerist consumption in the face of stagnant real wages and deep insecurity about the future? Do you know who can help? You will not guess. I mean, Money Stuff readers will guess. But most of America has no idea what's coming for them.

That's right, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is rolling out consumer ads! They "will appear on Facebook, Hulu, Pandora and YouTube," and they "depict debt as an unavoidable nuisance of modern life, not shameful overspending on unaffordable luxuries." A "head of brand management" is involved:

Dustin Cohn, the head of brand management for Goldman’s new consumer lending arm, Marcus by Goldman Sachs, said the bank’s aim was to “destigmatize debt and help consumers explore new ways of managing their debt.”

Here, you can watch them.

The ads are ... fine? Like, they would make me want to run out and get a Goldman Sachs loan to consolidate my high-interest credit-card debt, if I had credit-card debt. My favorite is the one about how Goldman's consumer lending product, unlike credit cards, has no embedded optionality for Goldman: The interest rate is fixed for the life of the loan, and won't go up for late payments or credit-score changes. Goldman's branding push, in its move into consumer banking, is simplicity. Goldman! Its advantage in most of its activities comes from smarts and structure, from mastering complexities that others shy away from. Here it went the other way. I like to imagine that Goldman got a bunch of credit-derivative structurers in a room and asked them to figure out consumer lending, and they looked at some credit-card agreements and were like "holy cow this is too complicated." So they thought real hard about it and were like "what about a fixed-rate no-fee loan where we just make money by charging interest?"

It's lovely, more power to them. Remember the last financial crisis, when Goldman executives were hauled before Congress and asked about their subprime lending practices? And they looked bewildered and said, you know we don't actually lend to consumers, right? Next time they won't have that excuse!