Eight plays and 12 musicals open on Broadway winter-spring of 2025 — but not all will be hits. Some will fail due to bad reviews or a lack of audience. A big culprit is poor advertising.

Performance-marketing agency Sine Digital reports that "boring" ads waste 27% of media spend annually — taking millions from tight show budgets. That leads to decreased ticket sales: 8,000 for every $1 million of media spend.

The result, according to "Meh: The Cost of Dull in Entertainment Advertising" report, is striking. Indifferent ads cost Broadway producers $120 million in lost yearly revenue — and an additional £70 million ($93M) lost in London’s West End. 

Across digital ads as a whole, the agency estimates boring spots cost the theater industry $189 billion globally.

The findings are based on an analysis of 20,000 digital ads and more than 1 billion data points from Sine's proprietary data stack, collected over a five-year period.

Ad waste is due to a variety of reasons: a significant amount of media spend is squandered on ads that fail to evoke emotion, humor, storytelling or lack persuasiveness.

Conversely, ads that register higher viewership use humor, high-arousal emotions and social currency.

“For theaters and live entertainment brands operating on razor-thin margins, inefficiency isn’t just a waste — it can mean the difference between a show running or closing. Advertisers can no longer rely on big agencies alone for media value,” said James Dale, CEO at Sine Digital. “It’s the combination of strong data and compelling creative that truly drives down costs. This report makes a strong business case for emotionally resonant, data-led campaigns and serves as a warning: be boring at your peril.”