Trend #39 Dreamvertising

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Brands and advertisers are looking to guide our dreams.

The commercial exploitation of dreams is becoming a reality, but not without eliciting concern from the scientific community. Calls for regulation are placing early adopters of dream incubation advertising in the spotlight. While possibilities still run wild, the next wave of subliminal marketing is uncertain.

Dream incubation or targeted dream incubation (TDI) is a modern field of science with ancient roots where sensory cues like sound are used to shape or “prime” people’s dreams. In a clinical setting, TDI can be used to change negative behaviors, like smoking. In marketing, it is being used to inspire brand affinity.

Dreamvertising sounds like an utopia. But before marketers start to use it for their purposes and are applying dream tech to influence their audiences a deeper understanding is necessary or even regulations to avoid disruption in a very personal field.

Anke Peters

Chief Client Officer at Wunderman Thompson

Anheuser Busch has exclusivity to Super Bowl advertising sewn up, so in January 2021 Molson Coors found a very different way to target Super Bowl fans. Using TDI advertising reminiscent of Microsoft’s Xbox “Made From Dreams” campaign, Molson Coors collaborated with dream psychologist Deirdre Barrett of Harvard University to produce the Coors Big Game Dream film and soundscape, designed to cause viewers to have pleasant dreams set in mountain scenes—that just happen to sway people toward Molson Coors products. The press release reads: “Coors Light and Coors Seltzer want to ensure you’ll have a refreshing dream using the science of guiding dreams.”

Sounds pleasant enough in context, but Massachusetts Institute of Technology neuroscientist Adam Haar believes these practices in a marketing context are scary. While they are known to interfere with our natural nocturnal memory processing, they also could pave the way to more sinister ends. For example, back in 2018 Burger King had more devilish plans.

Its “nightmare” burger for Halloween was “clinically proven” to induce nightmares. Supported by 40 professional signatories from diverse fields of academia, Haar cowrote an opinion piece for DXE, published in June 2021, that cautioned: “proactive action and new protective policies are urgently needed to keep advertisers from manipulating one of the last refuges of our already beleaguered conscious and unconscious minds: Our dreams.”

Why Dreamvertising is interesting?

There is a growing appetite from brands to experiment with dream influencing technology and techniques: a 2021 study by the American Marketing Association found that 77% of US marketers say they plan to use dreamtech for advertising purposes in the next three years. While there are no prohibitive regulations in place, some consumers could perceive such techniques as dystopian. Until we have a deeper scientific understanding, it’s perhaps best that brands approach “dreamvertising” with caution.