Molson Coors ran what they called the “World’s Largest Dream Study” the night before Super Bowl LV, which speaks to an interesting truth. Not the next day. Not the week before the game. That previous night, fifty-odd million Americans were sleeping with their eyes closed, their guards down, and their minds wandering. That timing wasn’t a mistake.
Someone came up with the idea for the campaign, which is called Targeted Dream Incubation (TDI). The idea is pretty much what it sounds like: if you carefully arrange sound and sight stimuli for someone before they go to sleep, those stimuli will likely show up again in their dreams. Coca-Cola collaborated with a Harvard psychologist to make a video with their logo on a mountain and relaxing music. They told people to watch it three times before bed. Five of the 18 people who took part said they had dreams about Coors. That number isn’t crazy. It does not have to be that way. The fact that the experiment was paid for by a big drink company shows where this is going.
The science behind TDI has been around for decades in different forms. Researchers have known for a long time that people are especially open to outside information when they are hypnagogic, which is the state between waking up and sleeping. The brain is still taking in sounds. It hasn’t closed off yet like it does in deeper sleep. MIT researchers created a wearable gadget called Dormio to make the most of this window. Subjects consistently dreamed about themes chosen by the researchers before they went to sleep, according to the researchers. All of them.
There are times when that result makes you feel good. You might also look at it and feel a little uneasy. It makes sense to have both reactions.
What makes this new frontier of marketing different from everything that came before it is the question of consent in a real way. Online ads that are specific to you follow you after you click on something. You noticed billboards because you walked by them. At the very least, you are awake during those transactions. Dream ads work in a space where the consumer has no active defenses, like not being able to scroll past or look away. Coors and Zayn Malik worked together on the original campaign, which is why Malik later said the idea of putting an ad in someone’s dream was “kind of messed up.” He was right, and the fact that he said it in public while still working for the campaign shows that even people in the campaign aren’t sure where this is going.
A poll by the American Marketing Association found that 77% of marketers planned to use dream-marketing techniques in the next three years. That number is shocking, both because it shows how seriously the industry is taking this and because it means that most customers don’t even know the conversation is going on. One should be able to sit with the unevenness there.
Brain-computer interface technology is also growing at the same time. Companies like Neuralink are getting a lot of money because they believe that neural communication will one day be direct. Scientists at the University of Rochester have already found a way to send information straight to primates’ premotor cortex. It won’t be easy to go from there to using it in business, but it’s clear where things are going. It sounds like something from a half-remembered science fiction book: the question of whether marketers will one day be able to “inject” images or brand associations directly into the mind of someone who is sleeping. It’s more of a question of regulations for the near future.
Before anyone thought about a brand logo showing up in someone’s REM cycle, Marshall McLuhan said that the things we use shape us in the end. But the map is too good for comfort. Ads are not the reason why the wearables, neural interfaces, and sleep-stage trackers are being made right now. They are being built for medicine, ease of access, and connecting with other people. It’s almost certain that they will be used for something else, since advertising has used every medium before this one for something else.
The business sense of reaching customers “wherever they are” runs into something that probably shouldn’t be for sale at some point. It’s not clear if the business world figures that out before the technology does. For now, the only truth that can be said is that the pitch deck is being worked on somewhere.
