To Sleep, Perchance To...Get Really Annoyed

I can only assume this is an April Fool's joke a day early (there is some evidence in the article to suggest that it is), or an homage to a funny scene from an episode of Futurama. But these days, one never knows... From today's eMarketer:

You have heard of product placement in movies and video games but scientists and marketers have now cracked the code for entering a new channel: advertising in your dreams.

Coca Cola, Speedo and Nike are just three of the many mega-brands that are exploring this new medium called in-sleep advertising. While still in its infancy, eMarketer forecasts in-sleep advertising spending in the US to grow to over $3 billion by 2020, up from less than one million in 2005.
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For the layperson, this is how in-sleep advertising works. All in-sleep subjects have a procedure to implant a nanobot (a tiny robot about the size of a blood cell) into that part of the brain where dreams originate — the pons in the brainstem. Once the chip is in place, it acts something like a wireless base-station, sending and receiving signals from other nanobots.

Before an in-sleep subject goes to bed they put a small device in their ear, not dissimilar to a cochlear implant. When the subject moves into REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, the implant is triggered (by the increase in delta waves) and a nanobot containing the appropriate advertising message is released into the spiral artery of the ear and down through to the cochlear canal. Once it reaches the blood brain barrier, it is programmed to wirelessly send an electrical signal (the advertisement) to the nanobot located in the pons. That nanobot receives the signal, sources the appropriate neuroreceptor and implants the ad.

Oh, sign me up for that.