“They were trying to implant [their products] into our brains. It just didn’t really sit right.”
A woman claims she was paid $1,000 by a craft beer company to have adverts for the drink placed in her dreams. The unusual experiment would have taken place in the city of Los Angeles, at the beginning of last year.
According to Bobbi Gould, a 45-year-old writer, she and her partner responded to an ad on Craigslist — a free website that allows users to post classified ads — seeking participants for a marketing experiment with the Coors brewery.
After a few days, she says she found herself in an abandoned warehouse surrounded by Molson Coors marketing hooked up to EEG equipment.
Gould was instructed to watch the Coors clip, which included soothing waterfalls, rich green landscapes, and flashes of Coors items, before falling asleep to an audio recording of the video’s noises.
She saw a series of “weird Coors dreams” throughout the next eight hours.
“I had one where I was on a pogo stick jumping around with Coors products,” she told The Hustle. “In another one, I was on a plane dropping Coors cans on people and they were cheering for me.”
She was then dragged into a focus group to talk about it.
“We all felt like lab rats,” she said.
“They were trying to implant Coors into our brains. It just didn’t really sit right.”
Consume dream
The Coors brewery isn’t the first to try to “inject” product advertisements into people’s dreams. Microsoft is researching techniques to make professional players dream about their favorite Xbox games, according to Science Magazine.
Sony has revealed the development of a new PlayStation game that causes players to have Tetris-related dreams. Burger King claims to have developed a “clinically proven” Halloween-themed burger that can induce nightmares in customers.
According to a recent survey conducted by the American Marketing Association, 77 percent of US advertising agencies intend to employ technology to influence consumers’ dreams within the next three years.
“Our dreams are literally creating who we are.” Dream hatch advertising is not a fun gimmick, but a slippery slope with real consequences. Our dreams cannot become “a playground for corporate advertisers,” said Harvard psychiatry professor Robert Stickgold — who signed an open letter with 40 other scientists — warning of the dangers of such marketing efforts.
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