Wake-up call: Can ads creep into your dreams?

The final frontier for advertising, sleep, is being breached. A technique called dream incubation, earlier used with rather uncertain success to help people build up their confidence, quit a bad habit or learn a new language faster, is now being used to market products. This January, the US-based beer conglomerate Molson Coors launched an ad campaign that announced that it would use Targeted Dream Incubation to subliminally impact the dreams of millions of TV viewers, a night before the Super Bowl. “And so, when we play audio suggestions their brain readily conjures up that image and creates a dream narrative around it.” Haar offers a hypothetical example of how this could affect the sleeping consumer in alarming ways. “As you slept, it would mix into the sounds of waves the brand name and words like ‘Cruise’ and ‘Peaceful’,” says Haar.