The last session of the week was (maybe aptly) titled “Monkey See.” Led by Elizabeth Kiehner and Nick Buttrick, it covered a project between Yale students and ad creatives to advertise to monkeys.

The goal is best encapsulated by Frans de Waal: “To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us.”

Science has found we’re 95-98.5% identical to chimpanzees. And a place called the Comparative Cognition Laboratory has for the last six years been running something called the Monkey Marketplace, which has taught capuchin monkeys how to live with money and exchange it for things that they want every day.

“They’re used to money. They live with money, money makes sense to them,” Nick said.

The Monkey Marketplace has demonstrated that monkeys make mistakes similar to those of humans in a marketplace: they steal, make financial errors in the heat of the moment, etc, so students began thinking it may be interesting to advertise to them.

The project involved developing two premium snack brands targeted to them — snacks that were of equivalent value (Pepsi versus Coke) and for which only one would have advertising. They settled on Jell-O, because capuchins like Jell-O but don’t get it very much, and made each type of Jell-O a different color.

Two major concepts came out hot points for the ad’s theme: celebrity and sex. Capuchins have been found to fight for photos of their alpha male, and they also get really enthusiastic about shots of genitals.

The billboard campaign produced involved a female monkey masturbating, a basic ritual capuchins conduct in public right before the sex act, and roughly equivalent to how we tease with genital pot-shots all the time (consider American Apparel).

Results haven’t been released yet, but the team itself needs help identifying more advertising concepts, as well as people willing to help make this project legitimately open source.

To take part, email contact [at] the-proton [dot] com or follow the project on Twitter @weareprimates.