Dreamvertising: When ads come to haunt our dreams

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  Quantumrun Foresight
• June 26, 2023

Insight highlights

Targeted Dream Incubation (TDI), a field that uses sensory methods to influence dreams, is being increasingly used in marketing to foster brand loyalty. This practice, dubbed 'dreamvertising,' is expected to be adopted by 77% of US marketers by 2025. However, concerns have been raised about its potential disruption of natural nocturnal memory processing. MIT researchers have furthered the field by creating Dormio, a wearable system that guides dream content across sleep stages. They discovered that TDI can bolster self-efficacy for creativity, indicating its potential to influence memory, emotions, mind-wandering, and creativity within a day.

Dreamvertising context

Incubating dreams, or targeted dream incubation (TDI), is a modern scientific field that uses sensory methods like sound to influence people’s dreams. Targeted dream incubation can be used in a clinical setting to change negative habits like addiction. However, it is also being utilized in marketing to create brand loyalty. According to data from marketing communications firm Wunderman Thompson, 77 percent of US marketers plan to use dream technology by 2025 for advertising purposes.

Some critics, like Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) neuroscientist Adam Haar, have voiced their fears about this growing trend. Dream tech disturbs natural nocturnal memory processing and could lead to more disturbing consequences. For example, in 2018, Burger King’s “nightmare” burger for Halloween was “clinically proven” to cause nightmares. 

In 2021, Haar wrote an opinion piece that asked for regulations to be put in place to prevent advertisers from invading one of the most sacred places: people’s dreams. The article was supported by 40 professional signatories across various scientific fields.

Disruptive impact

Some companies and organizations have been actively researching how people can be induced to dream of specific themes. In 2020, game console company Xbox teamed up with scientists, dream recording technology Hypnodyne, and advertising agency McCann to launch the Made From Dreams campaign. The series comprises short films featuring what gamers dreamed about after playing the Xbox Series X for the first time. The films contain footage of supposedly real dream recording experiments. In one of the films, Xbox captured the dreams of a visually impaired gamer through spatial sound.

Meanwhile, in 2021, drink and brewing company Molson Coors collaborated with Harvard University dream psychologist Deirdre Barrett to create a dream sequence ad for the Super Bowl. The ad’s soundscapes and mountain scenes can supposedly encourage viewers to have pleasant dreams.

In 2022, researchers from the MIT Media Lab created a wearable electronic system (Dormio) to guide dream content across different sleep stages. Together with a TDI protocol, the team induced test participants to dream of a specific topic by presenting stimuli during pre-sleep wakefulness and N1 (the first and lightest stage) sleep. During the first experiment, the researchers discovered that the technique does cause dreams related to N1 cues and can be used to improve creativity across various incubated dream tasks. 

Further analysis indicated that their TDI protocol could also be used to bolster self-efficacy for creativity or the belief that someone can produce creative results. The researchers believe these results show the great potential of dream incubation to influence human memory, emotions, mind-wandering, and creative thinking processes within 24 hours.

Implications of dreamvertising

Wider implications of dreamvertising may include: 

• Startups that focus on dream technology, particularly for gaming and simulating virtual reality environments.
• Brands collaborating with dream tech manufacturers to create customized content.
• Brain-computer interface (BCI) technology being used to directly send images and data to the human brain, including ads.
• Consumers resisting advertisers that plan to use dream tech to promote their products and services.
• Mental health practitioners applying TDI technologies to assist patients suffering from PTSD and other mental health afflictions.
• Governments being pressured to regulate dreamvertising to prevent advertisers from exploiting dream technology research for their purposes.

Questions to comment on

• What might be the ethical implications of governments or political representatives using dreamvertising?
• What are the other potential use cases of dream incubation?