Snap Offers More Ad Credits; YouTube Bids Conservatively On Original Video Content

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Valley Pally

Snap is giving away more free ads, this time to startups associated with tech incubators like Y Combinator, Rough Draft Ventures and Dorm Room Fund, Recode reports. Startups or former startups from these programs will get hundreds of dollars in free inventory, early access to new ad products and access to Snap’s creative tools. Snap can improve the health of its auction by increasing the number of bids – even if it has to underwrite some of them. More. Related in AdExchanger: Snap’s CPMs have been falling since the company opened its programmatic auction because of low bid density.

Real Original

While Amazon and Netflix pour money into original content, YouTube is notably absent from the studio frenzy. To be fair, YouTube will spend hundreds of millions on programming this year, but that’s flat compared to last year and pales in comparison to Amazon’s expected $5 billion and Netflix’s expected $8 billion in investments. Some investors are worried parent company Alphabet risks falling behind in the fight for TV dollars and attention, Bloomberg reports. More. Despite its soft spending, YouTube TV, the company’s subscription bundle, is raising prices to $40 per month after inking a deal with Turner.

Monkey Business

A study published in peer-reviewed journal PLOS One explored whether monkeys develop affinities for certain brand logos when those logos are displayed repeatedly alongside images of high-status monkeys in their group (and genitals). In other words, beer commercials. The rhesus monkeys in the test – the males in particular – showed a marked preference for sexually associated images. “The power of sex and status in advertising emerges from the spontaneous engagement of shared, ancestral neural circuits that prioritize information useful for navigating the social environment,” the researchers write. More.

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