In early 2021, Bobbi Gould, a Los Angeles-based travel writer, says she came across a vague ad on Craigslist from a “big brand looking for willing sleepers.”
She’d always been interested in dreams, and the gig paid $1k. So she and her boyfriend decided to sign up.
A few days later, she says she found herself in an old warehouse with 17 other people, hooked up to an EEG machine, surrounded by Molson Coors marketers.
Gould was told to watch the Coors video — complete with hypnotic waterfalls, lush green landscapes, and flashes of Coors products — then doze off to an audio recording of sounds from the video.
Over the next 8 hours, she had a variety of “weird Coors dreams.”
…Coors isn’t the only big brand looking into dreams as potential ad space:
- Microsoft has explored ways to make pro gamers dream of their favorite Xbox video games.
- Sony’s PlayStation has advertised a new game on the premise that it induces dreams about Tetris.
- Burger King rolled out a Halloween-themed burger in 2018 that it claimed was “clinically proven” to induce nightmares.
- Several large airlines have reached out to Haar for help with commercially driven dream-incubation projects.
Marketers have quietly been studying the viability of using dreams to alter our purchasing behaviors.
And in a recent survey run by The American Marketing Association-New York, 77% of marketers said they had plans to use technology to influence dreams within the next 3 years.
