Manipulating sleep as a way to get a person to by more beer is a troubling idea. Would be easier to get people to agree on that - nothing useful is coming out of this process for the consumer. But imagine EdTech running with this idea and telling parents that their kids could outperform their competition if the learning continued to happen as they slept. I can see that sit much better with some of the same folks who would not like to be sold beer without their active participation.
“You could have this sort of 1984 situation where advertisers buy advertising time on these devices, and nobody ever knows they’re hearing them.”
It wouldn’t be an entirely straightforward process. To sell a project involuntarily through dreams, the potential advertising campaign would have to be linked to adverts people see while they are awake.
Stickgold said it could potentially be done by playing a certain sound every time a product – a Coors beer, or a Corrs album, for example – is seen during a television or YouTube advert.
Replaying that sound while someone is sleeping, potentially through a home device, would, in theory, then trigger dreams about how nice it would be to drink a beer, or listen to an Irish guitar and violin-driven musical ensemble.
When this type of manipulation is aimed towards a beer-selling problem, it is easier to dismiss it as a cool party trick. Things get way murkier if the seller is able to make a plausible argument that this could be for self-improvement of some form - that is when we get ourselves into real trouble.
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