Dream-tech Advertising: A Nightmare or a Dream Come True?

    Advertising patterns have gone through major transformations over the past few years. With the advent of social media, most advertisers now resort to social media platforms to advertise and market their products and services. There is a myriad of ads on every social networking site that we use. We come across plenty of ads throughout the day be it on social media, on billboards, television, radio commercials, or print ads. Sleeping was the only way to escape advertisements. But seemingly, brands, accompanied by scientists and researchers have come up with a new technique to enter our sleep by putting their product in our dreams. It sounds funny and incredible, right! But this is actually true.

Source: http://art-of-dreaming.com/blog/dream-incubation/

     It came as a shocker to many people when Molson Coors, a beverage company dropped their new advertising campaign using this technique. Their strategy was to penetrate into people’s dreams to make them buy or to at least shift their focus on their product. They made people watch a short video before they fell to sleep. The video contained refreshing imagery of fresh flowing streams and mountains covered with snow etc. They engaged a Harvard psychologist to create dream-incubation stimuli, and they offered free beverages to encourage people to participate. According to a recent survey, 77 percent of marketers want to utilize dream tech advertising in the next three years. Experts warn, however, that the Coors effort is more than a novelty, and that it may have set the stage for a troubled future.

Source: https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/coors-cant-run-a-super-bowl-ad-so-it-wants-to-infiltrate-your-dreams-instead/

     Dream incubation is not a term coined today but the concept stretches back to ancient Greece when dreams were intimately connected to recovery. Afflicted people visited oracular temples; they conducted rites or sacrifices in order to dream properly and then slept in anticipation of the deity appearing and delivering a cure. In ancient Egypt also people used to lie down in beds at the Saqqara Serapeum with the intention of having divine dreams. However, marketers of today’s world have now started adopting this technology to market their products or service. Quoting another example from the past; In an attempt to boost his productivity and creativity, Salvador Dali was taught to slumber with a spoon in his hand. When Dali began to slip further into slumber, and perhaps a dream, the spoon would fall from his fingers into a pre-positioned supper plate, waking him up in a state where he could recall all the sights or scenarios he had briefly dreamed about.

Source: https://4353dreams.wordpress.com/2021/02/11/the-healing-dream-incubation-hippocratic-medicine-and-scepticism/

    The experts claimed that many marketing research is openly investigating novel approaches to affect and drive purchasing behavior by entering sleep and dreams. The commercial and economic use of dreams to alter dream content by providing stimuli before or during sleep is increasingly becoming a reality. Anything you could think of as a marketing effort might potentially be improved by using sleep as a weapon. Proactive policies are critical to prevent advertisers from manipulating one of our minds' last refuges, our dreams, which are already under siege.