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Sex sells. It’s rule one in the book of advertising. So when scientists set out to create an advertising campaign for monkeys, they didn’t stray far from the basics.

Social primates like monkeys value information about status in the group hierarchy, and about each others’ sexual receptivity. Indeed primates – both human and non-human – will forego rewards . But could this lascivious interest be harnessed in an ad campaign for monkeys?

To find out, at Stanford University in California and his colleagues enlisted ten , five of each sex. “We thought it would be fun to look at this issue in the advertising paradigm,” he says.

The monkeys were shown an image of a real-world brand logo – say, Pizza Hut – alongside an image of a monkey. This was the “advert”. There were three kinds of images in adverts: a dominant male’s face, a subordinate male’s, or a female monkey’s bare bottom and exposed genitalia.

Later, the monkeys were shown the logo from the advert, alongside a new logo such as Domino’s. They chose which logo they liked best by tapping a touchscreen. Each monkey completed three sessions, each including 70 adverts and 90 choices.

Monkey bottoms

The animals preferred brand logos they had seen previously in adverts. While the sample size is small, the results suggest advertising works on monkeys.

“The neural mechanisms that we share with rhesus macaques are sufficient to mimic human-like associative learning about arbitrary stimuli, like brand logos,” says Acikalin.

Male monkeys liked logos associated with all three kinds of monkey image. However, females were unmoved by brands associated with subordinate males. Acikalin says all information is valuable to the males, even if it is about a subordinate.

It makes sense that monkeys should pay attention to images related to sex. In long-tailed macaques, males have been seen “paying” for sex by grooming females.

It’s not surprising that monkeys like the sort of signals that advertisers tap into, says primatologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK. “Primate brains have evolved to prioritise processing social information – especially information relevant to reproductive fitness – over other types of information.”