Dreamvertising: How AI is Buying Your Sleep

Imagine waking up to a bright sunny morning, only to realize you spent the night dreaming about a honeymoon vacation - complete with cocktails, sandy beaches, and a travel brand you’d never heard of. This is not a science fiction movie, nor mere wishful thinking. It’s the emerging reality of dreamvertising, where brands infiltrate our subconscious to reshape our desires while we sleep.

Understanding Dreamvertising

Dreamvertising is an innovative marketing technique that seeks to influence consumer behavior by embedding brand-related content into people's dreams. Using advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and sleep monitoring, advertisers deliver personalized audio and visual stimuli during sleep to shape the narratives of dreams. 

Based on the idea that dreams can create powerful emotional connections to products, this strategy aims to enhance consumer desire upon waking. Yet, beyond its marketing potential, the concept raises significant ethical concerns about privacy, consent, and the manipulation of our subconscious.

Burn That Ad

Back in 2018, Burger King was the first company to venture into dream incubation with its "Burn That Ad" campaign. Through the Burger King app, customers could literally set fire to their competitors’ advertisements using augmented reality. By pointing their smartphones at rival fast food ads (especially McDonalds’s), users could watch them go up in virtual flames. In this initial phase, people were invited to record the dreams they had after watching an advertisement for a competing product, previously “burned”.

Once the dream stories submitted, consumers were rewarded with a screen announcing a free Whopper at the nearest restaurant. 

After collecting the dreams through the app, Burger King used the submissions to conduct an experiment and analyze the content of the dreams to see how they were influenced by the ads and to measure how effective the “burning” campaign was in shaping positive associations with the Burger King brand and negative ones with the competitors.

Burger King’s "Burn That Ad" campaign marked a significant evolution in the use of augmented reality to create interactive consumer experiences by gamifying brand rivalry. This innovative approach not only actively engaged users but also gathered valuable data on consumer preferences.

Other Companies Join

Following Burger King’s campaign, other companies have also experimented with targeted dream incubation (TDI) for marketing purposes. A notable example is Molson Coors, which conducted the "World’s Largest Dream Study" in 2021. The company used TDI to influence participants' dreams before Super Bowl Sunday, aiming to associate its beer with refreshing imagery like waterfalls and alpine rivers. They even collaborated with dream psychologist Deirdre Barrett (an active researcher at Harvard) and paid pop star Zayn Malik to promote the experiment.

Ethical Concerns 

The campaign generated significant buzz. But while researcher Deirdre Barrett emphasized the positive potential of dream manipulation for brand marketing, others were more critical of its ethical implications.

In June 2021, a group of 40 sleep and dream researchers from prestigious universities like Harvard, Stanford, and MIT signed an open letter calling for immediate regulation of TDI in advertising. Published in their journal, Eos, the letter responded to the growing trend of companies using TDI to influence consumers’ dreams for marketing purposes. The researchers expressed concern about psychological manipulation and the lack of clear consent, arguing that manipulating dreams for commercial gain intrudes on personal mental space and could harm the integrity of sleep.

Between Trial and Practice

Will our dreams be colonized, and will the space that is supposed to be private and sacred be exploited in the future? For now, TDI is more in the experimental and research phase than widely used in marketing, with Burger King and Molson Coors’s efforts representing pioneering trials, not established marketing practices. 

However, as corporations delve deeper into dream advertising, experts urge a cautious approach to ensure that personal boundaries aren’t crossed.