Adam McKay’s new movie offers a glimpse at advertising’s final frontier: your dreams

Given the barrage of brands competing for your attention, some days it can feel as if the only time one can reliably expect to escape the desperate frenzy of consumerism is while asleep. However, as You Need This, the new documentary from Academy Award-winning producer Adam McKay’s Yellow Dot Studios reveals, a lot of corporations are hoping to break into that last safe haven as well. 

Weaving together several threads, the film, which debuted April 7 on Apple TV and Prime Video,  traces Americans’ love of shopping back to our colonial past and connects it with the rise of fast fashion—all  in service of a broader story about the current economic system and the catastrophic consequences the entire planet bears because of it.

Even among a nearly 90-minute collection of vignettes about manufacturing needs and constant stimulation, though, the section about how brands are using recent research to incept ads within their target demo’s dreams stands out for its reckless goal of gaining entry into the most intimate of private spaces. It’s perhaps the most striking aspect of a stomach-churning tour through the excesses of unconstrained consumerism. 

“Publicly traded companies are by legal definition and requirement completely amoral,” McKay tells Fast Company. “They want only one thing, to raise their stock price, and the public good and common decency are just obstacles to be overcome or spun in that quest.”

From dreams to capitalist nightmare

Cognitive scientist  Adam Haar Horowitz was doing research at MIT in 2020 when made an incredible breakthrough—Targeted Dream Incubation. By pairing a glove-like sleep-tracking device with software that allowed him to interact with a subject in the early phases of sleep, he found he could use audio cues to guide someone toward specific topics in their dreams. A follow-up study revealed that people who dreamed about a prompted topic through targeted incubation performed better at creative tasks related to that topic than those who didn’t.

“Sleep touches every cognitive process we have,” Haar Horowitz says. “I wanted to know what happens when you touch it back.”

Another result of the initial study, however, took Haar Horowitz by surprise. Brands immediately began clogging his inbox, seeking to use his team’s research to advertise inside people’s  dreams. Although the scientist turned down every offer that didn’t stop beer conglomerate Molson Coors from devising an experimental dream ad pegged to the 2021 Super Bowl.

The company partnered with Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett to create a dream incubation stimulus about Coors beer. A group of 18 volunteers watched a film featuring shimmying beer cans before sleeping,  three times in a row, then listened to an audio component throughout their eventual slumber. According to Coors’s social video about the experiment, five out of 18 subjects reported Coors-related dreams. (Later, the company made the video and audio materials publicly available for anyone interested in trying to replicate the results.) To further publicize the “Big Game Commercial of Your Dreams,” Coors persuaded pop idol Zayn Malik to try the experiment on Instagram Live.

If Molson Coors’ data is accurate, their efforts to put an ad in these volunteers’ dreams had a success rate of roughly 28%. That data might be more compelling, however, if Coors had managed to make the same percentage of participants dream about Coors without undergoing the involved viewing and listening process. 

Still, the results gave Haar Horowitz pause, even before factoring in the role dreams play in relapse and substance disorder.

“Sleep isn’t downtime. It’s processing time,” the scientist says. “If you seed the input, you shape the output. That’s beautiful for therapy and creativity; it’s dystopian for advertising.”

See you in your dreams

If the message of You Need This could be boiled down to a single point, it’s this: In consumer capitalism, enough is never enough. That inescapable focus on excess is part of why Haar Horowitz is convinced brands will build on his research in the near future to streamline the dream incubation process.

“The Coors experiment needed willing participants in a lab. The next version won’t,” he says. “It’ll be a terms-of-service checkbox nobody reads.”

The film’s director, Ryan Andrej Lough—himself a veteran of the advertising industry—sees the current dearth of regulation as making the idea of a more efficient dream-commercial practically inevitable.

“There’s a ton of regulation against advertising and against digital use and AI in Scandinavian countries,” he says, “and within the U.S., there’s almost no regulation or pushback against any of it.”

Haar Horowitz, for his part, has pushed back where he can. After Coors unveiled its dream ad, he teamed up with over 40 fellow sleep scientists to pen an open letter broadly urging policymakers to implement regulations on brands interfering with sleep.

“The alternative,” he says, “is that your Alexa starts moonlighting as a dream advertiser and you find out when you wake up craving a product you’ve never bought.”