The Expensive Lie
Why Does Broadway Keep Spending Millions on Marketing That Doesn't Work?
Every morning, I take the 1 train uptown to 116th St, and every morning, I am confronted with the same question, though it is never asked aloud: Why are we still pretending?
The pretense is everywhere. It’s on the side of the bus—a gradient background, a headshot that could be anyone, text in a font that screams expensive but says nothing. It’s on the subway platform, where another show I cannot identify promises an experience it has no language to describe. It’s in the taxi creeping past, where $1 million in marketing budget has purchased the right to be forgotten by the time the light changes. The pretense is that this is working. The pretense is that we don’t know better. The pretense is that the crisis now unfolding across Broadway—330,000 fewer unique human beings walking through theater doors last season alone—is a mystery whose solution eludes us.
But here is what we know, what we have always known, what the data now confirms with the cool precision of mathematics: people do not buy theater tickets because they saw an ad. They buy them because someone they trust told them to.
Nielsen puts the number at 88%—that’s how many consumers trust recommendations from people they know above every other form of marketing. McKinsey estimates that word of mouth drives between 20 and 50 percent of all purchasing decisions. Jimmy McNicholas, who runs creative at SpotCo and has worked on Hamilton, Cats, and Kinky Boots, doesn’t equivocate: “The biggest driver of ticket sales is actually word of mouth.” And then there’s the Broadway League’s own data, analyzed by Ken Davenport, which reveals something extraordinary: approximately 6% of theatergoers—those who see fifteen or more shows per season—account for 35% of all ticket sales. This pattern holds across shows, across the chaos of pandemic recovery and the return to some new normal that isn’t normal at all.
What these numbers describe is not an audience but a mechanism. These super-fans—this passionate 6%—are not simply buying more tickets. They are recruiting. They are posting. They are organizing group outings. They are doing the work of conversion, the work of evangelism, the work that no advertisement, however clever or costly, can do. They are, in the most literal sense, the marketing department. Unpaid. Effective. Motivated by something that cannot be purchased: genuine love.
And here is the paradox that should keep every producer awake at night: we know this. We have always known this. The numbers merely confirm what experience teaches. Yet this industry—the entire apparatus of budgets and agencies and billboards and “four-quadrant” targeting—remains organized around ignoring them.
II.
There is a name for what happens when you know the truth and choose to act as though you don’t. James Baldwin called it “the lie.” And what makes a lie dangerous is not that it deceives others but that it requires us to deceive ourselves.
SINE Digital’s 2025 study gave the lie a price tag: $120 million annually. That’s 27% of Broadway’s digital advertising spend, wasted on what the study’s authors, with admirable restraint, termed “dull” campaigns. These are advertisements that generate no joy, no awe, no excitement, no anger—none of what behavioral scientists call “high-arousal emotions.” They generate indifference. They generate nothing—and we can say that with confidence because SINE quantified it through controlled multivariate ad-performance testing, isolating creative variation and measuring its downstream impact on clicks, conversions, and revenue across campaigns that reached millions of impressions.
But Broadway is not restructuring. Broadway is doing what it has always done, which is to say: Broadway is lying.
Let me show you what the lie looks like in practice.
Bad Cinderella, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s return to Broadway, announced itself in October 2022 with a viral moment: the star spray-painting “BAD” over the show’s title while delivering a line with a leg kick that became, instantly, a TikTok phenomenon (“Im your BAD Cinderella”). Sixty million views. Massive cultural penetration. The marketing team could point to numbers that would make any agency proud. And then the show closed after 85 performances. Because what those sixty million views generated was not affinity but irony. People came from curiosity, or from cruelty—the desire to see a disaster up close. They did not come back. They did not tell their friends “you have to see this.” They did not become evangelists. The marketing had built a meme (because of its cringiness and lack of awareness) where it needed to build a constituency.
Real Women Have Curves had a different problem, which was actually the same problem. Here was a show with everything: beloved source material, Justina Machado, a story about immigration and family and identity that could not be more urgent if it tried. The people who would have loved this show—Latin audiences, immigrant families, anyone who has ever felt the weight of expectation and cultural dislocation—were waiting for it. They did not know they were waiting for it, but they were. The marketing could have found them. Instead, the marketing made it about body positivity. Generic. Vague. Indistinguishable from a wellness brand. One Reddit commenter asked the obvious question: “Who’s going to walk around with a t-shirt that says ‘Real Women Have Curves’ and not think it’s some Dove commercial?” Another commenter reflected: “The word on the street is the producers didn’t want the marketing to lean into the true story of the show (being an immigrant).”
This is not a failure of imagination. This is not a lack of resources or talent or expertise. This is a choice. And the choice is the lie: the decision to believe, against all evidence, that the path to commercial success runs through the suppression of specificity.
Lempicka—about queer joy, about artistic obsession, about the erotic possibilities of painting in 20th-century Paris—was marketed as a period romance with flowers. Queer audiences, the show’s natural constituency, asked online afterward: “Why didn’t we know? Why was this marketing so basic, catering to straight people, when really this musical was for us?” Someone who was in the queer community, who was deeply engaged with Broadway, who sat center orchestra, had no idea what they were about to see. The marketing had done its job so well that it hid the show from the very people who would have made it a success.
This is the cost of the lie. Not just money, though the money is real. The cost is human: artists creating work that audiences would love, only for the marketing to systematically prevent those audiences from finding it. The cost is the word-of-mouth engine that Nielsen and McKinsey tell us drives purchasing decisions, deliberately suppressed in service of a strategy that produces only failure.
III.
Here is what I find interesting about this— Why do smart people, people who understand theater and audiences and storytelling, continue to make choices that the data tells them will fail?
The answer, I think, is that Broadway has not yet reckoned with the fact that the world changed.
Media analyst Evan Shapiro calls the new world the “Affinity Economy.” The old world was about reach: how many people can you get your message in front of? The new world is about passion: how intensely do people care? Shapiro’s data makes the case with brutal clarity. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has 392 million Instagram followers. His engagement rate is 0.1%. Taylor Swift has 281 million followers. Her engagement rate is 2.5%. The Rock has reach. Swift has what Shapiro calls a high “Key Passion Index”—KPIx for short. She has affinity. She has people who don’t just follow her but who make her part of their identity, who recruit others, who generate the word of mouth that actually moves the culture.
This is not a social media phenomenon. This is a fundamental reorganization of how value is created. A24, the film company, built a multi-billion-dollar business by understanding this. As their recent New Yorker profile notes, the company has cultivated a brand powerful enough that some fans treat it almost like an auteur itself—one filmmaker even knew A24’s cultural moment had arrived when she saw someone walking a dog with an A24-branded leash. According to a 2024 Bloomberg article, 60% of their audience sees films because they are A24 films. Not because of stars or budgets or advertising. Because the company itself has become a constituency. Their fan club charges annual fees—not as a discount program but as a declaration of identity. If you pay to join an A24 fan club, you are not a casual consumer. The studio’s marketing leans into provocation and topicality, whether partnering with the Satanic Temple to generate attention for The Witch or encouraging directors to pursue material that sparks debate. The fans, in turn, become evangelists. And evangelists are worth exponentially more than casual consumers because evangelists recruit.
Now think about those Broadway League numbers again. Six percent of theatergoers accounting for 35% of revenue. That’s not just a statistic about ticket sales. That’s a statistic about mechanism. Those super-fans are not just buying tickets. They are creating the conditions under which other people buy tickets. They are the engine. And Broadway is optimized to ignore them.
The question is: why?
IV.
In November 2025, a 34-year-old democratic socialist named Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City. This should not have been possible. His opponent, Andrew Cuomo, had $40 million in backing from real estate interests and business groups. Mamdani had volunteers. One hundred thousand of them. They knocked on 436,600 doors. They did not knock on those doors because they were paid. They knocked because they believed.
What did they believe? The answer is simpler than you might think. They believed in affordability. Not affordability as a talking point or a polling-tested message. Affordability as a singular, almost obsessive focus. Free buses. City-run grocery stores. Universal childcare. Rent freezes. The message was not designed for everyone. It was designed for working people crushed by the cost of living in New York City. And those working people—Mamdani’s 6%, if you will—became organizers.
The campaign understood something that Broadway doesn’t. They understood that depth beats reach. That one volunteer having an authentic conversation at fifty doors converts more people than fifty thousand impressions of a billboard. Because the volunteer is not trying to persuade everyone. The volunteer is speaking to someone specific, in language that assumes shared experience and shared pain. And when that works—when the person at the door recognizes themselves in the message—they don’t just vote. They volunteer. They become recruiters themselves.
The campaign also understood friction. They created “Zetro cards”—stamp cards where canvassers earned merchandise for hitting milestones. They organized a citywide scavenger hunt. They cultivated identity groups like “Hot Girls for Zohran” who made pink posters and treated organizing like a social movement. This seems, on its face, unnecessary. Why create barriers? Why not make it as easy as possible for people to support you?
Because ease selects for casual support. And casual support doesn’t win elections. Or fill theaters. What you need is committed support—people who have invested enough time and effort that they’re emotionally bound to the outcome. The difficulty is the filter. The campaign understood this. Broadway does not.
South Asian voter turnout increased 40% in the Democratic primary. Not because Mamdani bought ads targeting South Asian voters. Because organizations like DRUM Beats mobilized their communities with materials in Bengali and Urdu, with policy specifics tailored to their needs, with the assumption that these voters were not a demographic to be reached but a constituency to be organized.
Cuomo spent $40 million trying to reach everyone. Mamdani spent a fraction of that activating the specific people who would recruit everyone else. And here is what makes this relevant to Broadway: the mechanism is identical. Broadway audiences and New York City voters are demographically similar—educated, affluent, predominantly female, influenced primarily by personal recommendation. The difference is that voting is free and Broadway tickets start at $60. But if Mamdani could mobilize 100,000 people to do unpaid labor in the rain, surely Broadway can activate passionate fans to post about shows they love and bring friends to things they’re already paying to see.
The question is not whether it works. The question is whether we’re willing to do it.
V.
But a problem occurs when virality is mistaken for success.
Beetlejuice was saved by TikTok—this is the story Broadway tells itself, and it’s true as far as it goes. Cast member Presley Ryan started posting chaotic backstage content. The fandom exploded. The show got extended, returned, became a case study in organic digital marketing. This is the dream: passionate fans creating content that reaches millions and converts them into ticket buyers.
But here is what that story obscures. Six, the musical about Henry VIII’s wives, also went viral on TikTok. One trend in particular: “Yeah that didn’t work out.” Teenage girls used it to show off their new boyfriends, contrasting them with disappointing exes. The trend was everywhere. The song was everywhere. And if you were a producer looking at engagement metrics, you would have been thrilled.
Except the song is Katherine Howard’s “All You Wanna Do,” and it’s about nonconsensual sexual encounters and grooming from age thirteen. The musical is examining how women’s narratives are erased and rewritten by men in power. The TikTok trend turned it into a boyfriend flex. The context collapsed. What went viral was not the show but a version of the show that had nothing to do with what the show actually was.
Trevor Boffone, in his book TikTok Broadway, calls these “stealth musicals”—shows that proliferate on TikTok “in ways that are completely removed from their dramaturgy.” The engagement is real. The views are real. But the connection to the substance is severed. And that severing has consequences. Yes, tickets sell in the short term. But you’re building an audience that came for something you’re not actually offering. They don’t become super-fans. They don’t recruit others who will genuinely connect. You get a spike, not a sustainable constituency.
This is the trap of uncontrolled virality. You cannot manufacture it—that much is true. But you can create the conditions under which the virality that happens serves your show rather than cannibalizes it. You do this by giving your potential evangelists what I call sacred texts: the context, the meaning, the substance that makes them genuine advocates rather than casual sharers. You create friction that filters for people who actually understand what you’re offering. And then, when they create content, they’re evangelizing for the actual show.
Death Becomes Her did this. The marketing knew exactly who the audience was—theater queens, drag enthusiasts, people who worship at the altar of Christopher Sieber and camp aesthetics—and it spoke to them directly. Not in a language designed to be accessible to everyone. In a language that assumed insider knowledge. If you got it, you got it. If you didn’t, the marketing didn’t apologize. Result: a sustainable hit driven by people who understood what they were seeing and recruited others like them.
Oh, Mary! did this. Social media manager Austin Spero was explicit: “We all know it’s a gay boy on a computer.” That’s not demographic research. That’s identity. The marketing treated a surrealist camp comedy as if it were a very serious drama, creating mystery through specificity. Result: sold out.
Prince F***** did this. The show runs across the street from Chick-fil-A, and the marketing made jokes about the location that only land if you know Chick-fil-A’s history with LGBTQ+ issues. When Lily Allen released a song, the show’s social media posted about it—not because it was “on brand” but because the constituency cares about Lily Allen. Half the marketing genius is watching straight white men stammer about whether they’re allowed to say the title aloud (thank you for that Jordan Tannahill). That discomfort is the filter. Result: sold out.
These shows understood what the successful ones always understand: you don’t reach the masses by designing for the masses. You reach the masses by finding your 6%, giving them something worth believing in, and letting them recruit everyone else.
VI.
The framework is simpler than you think, though executing it requires a kind of courage that Broadway has not yet mustered.
First: identify your 6%. Not “theater fans” or “tourists” or some broad demographic category. The specific people who will see this show three times and recruit ten friends. For a musical about Asian American diaspora and family expectations, that’s not “Asian Americans 25-45.” That’s adult children of immigrants navigating dual identities, people who have felt the weight of “we sacrificed everything for you,” anyone who has translated for their parents at the doctor’s office or hidden parts of themselves to keep family peace. Three to six months before previews, conduct actual ethnography. Then rewrite your agency brief. Remove the language about “four-quadrant appeal.” Replace it: “Identify and activate the 6% who will recruit through word of mouth. Optimize for passion intensity and recruitment behavior, not impressions..
Second: give them sacred texts and create friction. Your social content should assume insider knowledge, not explain everything to everyone. Your merchandise should signal identity, not just display your logo. Create rituals that require effort. Hamilton’s #Ham4Ham lottery required showing up in person. A24’s fan club charges money for what could be free. These mechanisms don’t maximize the size of your audience. They maximize the passion of your audience, which generates the word of mouth that 88% of consumers trust above everything else you could spend money on.
This requires budget reallocation. Reduce the static out-of-home advertising—the bus ads, the billboards, the taxi-tops that generate reach without passion. Redirect those resources to community management, to fan infrastructure, to creating spaces and rituals where your 6% can gather and organize. Hire people who track not impressions but repeat attendance, not reach but recruitment rates.
Third: measure what matters. Stop tracking impressions and follower counts. Start tracking the Key Passion Index. Are your evangelists making your show part of their identity? Are they wearing your merchandise and posting themselves in it? When you read comments, are they generic (”looks great!”) or specific (”this scene about artistic compromise destroyed me because I lived it”)? Are you creating people who see the show once, or people who see it three times and recruit ten friends?
By week three of previews, set specific thresholds. Target: 15% of week-one audiences return for a second viewing by week eight. Twenty-five percent of social engagement shows high emotional resonance—genuine connection to substance rather than generic excitement. Thirty percent of your identity-signaling merchandise sells through. Track these numbers weekly. They tell you whether you’re building a sustainable word-of-mouth engine or just creating noise that will evaporate.
VII.
Here is how specificity scales, which is the thing that terrifies producers most. They hear “focus on 6%” and think “abandon 94%.” But that is not how this works. That has never been how this works.
Hamilton did not start with television commercials aimed at generic theatergoers. It started with hip-hop enthusiasts and theater obsessives at early workshops. Those people got obsessed. They told others. The #Ham4Ham lottery created a daily ritual that filtered for true believers. The Mixtape album dropped before Broadway opening, letting the music ecosystem process it and spread word of mouth organically. Only after this passionate base was established—only after the 6% were evangelical—did the marketing open up to broader audiences. And crucially, it never diluted itself. The marketing remained sophisticated, never dumbed down to chase a mainstream that didn’t need chasing. The masses came to Hamilton. Hamilton did not go to the masses.
This is the mechanism. The 6% generate word of mouth that reaches the next 20%, who generate word of mouth that reaches the next 30%, expanding in concentric circles. But each circle remains anchored to authentic passion. The casual attender who comes because a friend wouldn’t shut up about it arrives with something invaluable: trust. Nielsen’s 88%. They have context about why it matters. They have someone to discuss it with afterward. They are exponentially more likely to connect with the actual substance of the work, to return, to become recruiters themselves.
You don’t stay at 6%. You start at 6%. The 6% is not the ceiling. It’s the foundation. Everything scales from there, or it doesn’t scale at all.
VIII.
So here we are. The data is clear. The mechanism is proven. The choice is in front of us.
The question is not whether this works. The question is whether we have the courage to do it.
And here is what I think that courage requires. It requires admitting that we have been lying. Not to others—though we have been lying to others—but to ourselves. We have been telling ourselves that the path to filling theaters runs through mass appeal, through reaching everyone, through suppressing the specificity that would alienate someone who was never going to come anyway. We have been telling ourselves this because it feels safer. Because spending a million dollars on impressions that mean nothing is psychologically easier than spending $200,000 activating evangelists who might not materialize. Because we can point to reach numbers and justify the spend even as the theaters empty.
But safety in a death spiral is not safety. It’s just death with better optics.
Monday morning I will get on the 1 train, and I will see more forgettable ads for more shows I cannot identify. Another show will close after 85 performances, its natural constituency never activated, its potential word-of-mouth engine never built. And somewhere online, someone will write the question that haunts me: “Why didn’t we know about this show? It was for us.”
The last theater has not gone dark yet. But it will, if we continue to choose the lie over the truth. And when it does, we will not be able to say we didn’t know. We will only be able to say that we knew, and we chose not to act. That we heard the voices of the people who would have filled our theaters, and we decided to speak past them in pursuit of a phantom audience that was never coming.
This is the choice. And it is being made right now, in every marketing meeting, in every budget allocation, in every decision about whether to be specific or to be safe.
I know which choice I would make. The question is: which choice will you?
Sources
American Marketing Association New York, Brilliance in Marketing: Marketing Hit Broadway Shows – Hamilton, Cats, and More (2017).
Boffone, Trevor, TikTok Broadway: Musical Theatre Fandom in the Digital Age (Oxford Univ. Press 2024).
Barasch, Alex, A24’s Empire of Auteurs, New Yorker (Aug. 25, 2025), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/01/a24s-empire-of-auteurs.
Davenport, Ken, Broadway Demographic Report 2023–24 Season: The Tourists Are Back! The Producer’s Perspective(Feb. 9, 2025).
Davenport, Ken, Results Revealed: Who Came to Broadway in 2022–2023? The Producer’s Perspective (Dec. 17, 2023)
Davler Media Group, Why Did Broadway Lose Almost a Third of a Million Theatergoers Last Year?, City Guide News(Feb. 1, 2025)
McKinsey & Company, Ole Jørgen Vetvik, Alastair Henderson & Jesko Perrey, A New Way to Measure Word-of-Mouth Marketing, McKinsey Quarterly (Apr. 2010),
Nielsen, Consumer Trust in Online, Social and Mobile Advertising Grows (Apr. 10, 2012)
SINE Digital, MEH: The Cost of Dull in Entertainment Advertising (2025)
Shapiro, Evan, The New KPI, Media War & Peace (Substack 2025), https://eshap.substack.com.
Treisman, Rachel & Brian Mann, Mamdani Wins New York City Mayoral Race, in a Historic Victory for Progressives, NPR (Nov. 4, 2025, updated Nov. 5, 2025)