Advertisers Now Targeting Your Dreams
Advertisements are a constant in the world we live in, an overwhelming exposure we’re hard pressed to escape. In fact, we might as well include them alongside death and taxes as things that are absolutely sure in life. We see them in our education, entertainment, transport, pretty much everywhere we go. But now they’re targeting another aspect of life that we might have thought was a sacred individual space - our dreams.
In June of this year, a group of scientists released an open letter discussing an increasing use of TDI - Targeted Dream Incubation, a phrase that sounds straight out of the movie Inception. What it represents is something that would fit in with a sci-fi movie as well. The letter, titled “Advertising in Dreams is Coming: Now What?” points to several current and future uses of the technology that raise strong concerns about the ethics of the practice, and concerns of abuse and harm to consumers.
The core focus of discussion, at least for now, is an advertising campaign for Coors beer which launched in time for the Super Bowl advertising season earlier this year. The advertisement encourages users to go to CoorsBigGameDream.com, which sadly now just redirects to the main Coors site. At the time of the campaign, however, users would find a “dream-inducing film” which they were instructed to watch 3 times in a row, before playing and going to sleep to the sounds of an overnight soundscape. The combination, they promised, would produce dreams of relaxation, refreshment, contentment, and of course - Coors Light and Coors Seltzer.
In their Press release, the Coors advertising team acknowledges something that many of us have experienced ourselves - an increase in increasingly weird and uncomfortable dreams throughout the pandemic, and an increasing feeling that we are all going through these dream feelings together. They introduce Dr. Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist who wrote a book entitled pandemic dreams, as the scientific mind behind helping them develop this dream stimulus tape.
Now it’s gut check time. How do you feel about advertisers trying to manipulate your dreams to increase sales? I can’t speak for everybody but for me there’s a knee jerk reaction to feeling like this is manipulation and an invasion of a personal inner space where I don’t appreciate advertisers inserting themselves. One mitigating factor in the case of Coors Big Game Dream campaign is that it’s not shadowy or hidden, in fact it doesn’t happen at all without a person going to the website and intentionally consuming the media required for the experience. There’s no way to do it without knowing the very specific steps you have to take to make the campaign work. Regardless, the technology brings some concerns to the forefront. Let’s investigate further.
One of the immediate ethical questions to come to mind with this campaign is the issue of using these techniques to sell addictive products. For comparison, we look at a study using targeted dream incubation to help people stop smoking. In this study, smokers were exposed to the smell of cigarettes mixed with rotten eggs while they were sleeping and in a dream state. Those who were exposed to these smells smoked 30% fewer cigarettes over the course of a week, despite having no recall of actually experiencing the smells while sleeping.
While the letter points out that there is no definitive evidence pointing out whether or not dreams can worsen addiction, dreams of using substances have been correlated with stronger sensation of cravings in those with a history of substance use. The lack of any scientific study determining whether dreams of substances such as alcohol can have deleterious effects makes this campaign dangerous in the eyes of some, who believe that exposure to it could challenge those who are maintaining abstinence despite previous struggles with alcoholism.
Of course, although this particular example requires significant opt-in and participation on the part of consumers, it’s very easy to see a circumstance in which this is not the case. Just last week, at the time of this writing, Amazon was granted clearance by the FCC for a radar which can be used to detect when a person is sleeping and gather data about their sleep cycles. It’s not outright stated what type of device is meant to include this capability, other than it not being a mobile device, so many are betting on this being a new standard feature of the Amazon Alexa, while the Google Nest already has similar capabilities.
It should be noted, of course, that both Amazon and Google are giants in the space of advertising and would have ample incentive to expand their advertising frontiers even further, and using a remote sensor to detect when you’re in the most susceptible stage of dream sleep would be a very efficient method for managing the targeted injection of dream advertisements. Am I saying outright that any company is currently engaging in these practices? Not at all, I wouldn’t make such a claim without evidence that such is already happening. But the state of social advertising is becoming notoriously aggressive and pervasive, and I believe it’s something to keep a close eye on, or we will be there sooner than we’d like to believe. This type of technology would likely require some type of opt-in, but we all know how that goes with other privacy-violating features; most likely all it would require would be a simple terms of service update where you’ll have to click the “I agree” button the next time you open up the app.
Just because I don’t have evidence to say that it’s happening right now, however, doesn’t mean that it’s not an immediately pressing issue. One of the letter’s coauthors, MIT’s Adam Haas, has stated that he’s been contacted by multiple companies, including Microsoft and two airline companies, in regards to helping them develop their own targeted dream incubation projects.
While we’re on the topic, let’s briefly touch on a couple other examples of dream incubation which are included in the letter. On the kitschy side, Burger King released a “nightmare burger” for the 2018 Halloween season. They reported that clinical trials in 100 people over 10 days showed a 3.5 times increase in nightmares in those who ate the burger. Sleep scientists have stated that this is likely due to ingesting large amounts of protein and cheese before bed, which would result in disruptions of the sleep cycle and lead to an increased incidence in nightmares. If I had to speculate, being that dreams tend to develop according to conscious attention, the novelty of a bright green bun and the promise of the burger creating nightmares may have also played a role.
Those of you who are gamers may be interested to know that the realm of gaming has also reached into these practices, and before you start any console wars, you should know that both Sony and Microsoft have been involved. For Microsoft’s part, there was the “Made from Dreams” campaign, where Xbox worked with researchers known for their work in targeted dream development, to influence and record the dreams of gamers after using the Xbox Series X. This even includes a 3D spatial soundscape representing the dreams of a blind gamer who dreamed about playing Destiny 2. I’ll plug in a couple of clips from their releases here and link the full videos in the description so you can watch the full presentation series if it interests you.
Playstation took a different tactic, advertising something that has a history of scientific research: the Tetris Effect. This is based on findings that after spending time playing Tetris, people will see images of the game being played in their hypnagogic imagery as they’re falling asleep. For reference, hypnagogic imagery refers to imagery associated with a sleep stage that is typically not quite fully in REM sleep with fully developed dreams, but the imagery can still be present. Although named after Tetris, the Tetris Effect doesn’t manifest just with video games but with any repetitive visually-oriented task. It’s thought to be the result of the brain processing experiences and skills and transferring them to long-term memory, and is even associated with improvements in the skill or movement being experienced.
This is a nice segue into what the researchers are pointing out; targeted dream incubation is not new, nor is it inherently bad or without merit. Dream incubation has been practiced for spiritual or meditative purposes for thousands of years. It’s also a growing field of science where studies are indicating that the content of our dreams can predict our resilience, our ability to process traumas, and several facets of our well being as a whole. The fact that this field of study shows growing potential for practices contributing directly to well-being seems to underscore the idea that manipulating these practices for commercial gain risks compromising a very important field of research. Interestingly, this letter comes very shortly after a new scientific study showed that researchers were able to communicate with sleepers who were engaged in lucid dreaming, with the dreamers able to answer simple questions in their sleep by moving their eyes in a controlled pattern.
To close this off, let’s hear some quotes directly from the letter itself, as they make their case more strongly and eloquently than I can do for them.
“The potential for misuse of these technologies is as ominous as it is obvious. TDI-advertising is not some fun gimmick, but a slippery slope with real consequences… As sleep and dream researchers, we are deeply concerned about marketing plans aimed at generating profits at the cost of interfering with our natural nocturnal memory processing. Brain science helped design several addictive technologies, from cell phones to social media, that now shape much of our waking lives; we do not want to see the same happen to our sleep. We believe that 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.”
That’s all for now, I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode and learned something interesting, if not potentially scary. Tell me how you feel about these practices in the comments below, and if you would ever consider opting in to receiving targeted advertisements in your dreams? What kinds of offers or rewards would it take for you to accept such an arrangement, if any at all? After you’ve left a comment, please do consider leaving a like or a dislike indicating how you felt about the video, as well as subscribing if you’d like to be notified of future releases. Until next time, it’s been a pleasure as always. Thank you.
