BoSacks Speaks Out: You Can’t Advertise Your Way Out of “No Thanks”

Tom May wrote a blog titled Why the failure of Melania's documentary is good news for the advertising industry. It inspired me to write the following:

Let me start here: this isn’t about politics, personalities, or whichever social‑media gladiator shouted loudest this week. Save that for cable news panels and your cousin who still forwards chain emails.

This is about advertising, the real kind, the kind that either works or doesn’t, and the oldest, least glamorous law in the business:

Bo says you cannot sell what people do not want.

Period. Full stop. End of meeting. Someone please cancel the brainstorm.

It’s astonishing to me that we still need to say this in 2026, but judging by the world’s most expensive object lesson that just hit theaters, apparently, we do.

The $75 Million Reminder Nobody Needed

A documentary launched earlier this year with a marketing budget so big it could have funded several midsize agencies and sent their staff on a retreat with matching fleece vests. The studio reportedly paid about $40 million for the rights and shelled out another $35 million for promotion. The thing opened on roughly 1,500 screens, more than most prestige films could dream of.

This wasn’t a release. This was a military operation. This was marketing shock‑and‑awe. This was, “If we carpet‑bomb the public with ads, surely they’ll care.”

And then the projections came in: somewhere around $2–$5 million expected for opening weekend.

You could practically hear the industry’s collective facepalm echo across North America.

Let me put it gently: you’d get a better return by putting the $75 million in a wood chipper and livestreaming the results. At least then you’d go viral.

This isn’t a failure of advertising execution. It’s a failure of reality acceptance.

Advertising Is an Amplifier, Not a Defibrillator

Here’s the simple physics: advertising is a speaker system. It amplifies what’s already there.

If the track is good, the speakers make it better.
If the track is mediocre, the speakers make it louder.
If the track is something nobody asked for, well, the speakers just make people leave the room faster.

Too many marketers build their plans around a fantasy: the fantasy that “with enough spend, we can MAKE people care.”

Bo says No, you can’t.

If advertising could create desire out of thin air, New Coke would be America’s drink, the Pontiac Aztec would be our national vehicle, and Google+ would be where we host our family reunions.

Advertising can ignite a spark. It cannot create oxygen.

Marketers love metrics. They’ll measure time on page, scroll depth, lift in unaided recall, and number of users who hovered over a button for longer than eight seconds. And yet most teams ignore the one metric that predicts everything else:

It’s not “Would people like this if they knew about it?”
It’s “Do people show any natural interest BEFORE we spend a dollar?”

Search volume. Social chatter. Cultural resonance. Category appetite. Pre‑campaign organic curiosity. If all those numbers read like a monastery headcount, silent, still, and low, you are not launching a campaign. You are performing CPR on an idea that never had a pulse.

And the second you stop spending, the “interest” flatlines.

This documentary case proves the point: when you can drop $35 million on marketing and still barely get a flicker of audience enthusiasm, that’s not a creative failure. That’s the market politely tapping you on the shoulder to say:

“No thanks.”

Why Big Budgets Make People Stupid

A funny thing happens when the zeros multiply on a media plan. Inside organizations, money creates momentum, or at least the illusion of it. The bigger the spend, the harder it becomes to question the premise.

People stop asking:
“Should we do this?”
and start asking:
“How should we execute this?”

A $75 million spend becomes a talisman: If we just invest enough, it will work. It has to. Would the universe let us waste this much?

Spoiler: the universe does not issue refunds for bad decisions.

This is how marketing departments end up performing budget rain dances, convinced that spending big is the same as thinking smart.

Money doesn’t fix misalignment. It just makes the misalignment more expensive.

The Good News: This Failure Is a Gift

The industry has been bouncing between two ridiculous extremes:

Myth #1: Advertising can sell anything.
Myth #2: Advertising doesn’t work.

Both are wrong. And only people who’ve never run a real campaign believe either one.

Advertising works brilliantly when it’s riding a wave of genuine desire. When the offer matches the moment. When the product has actual pull. When the campaign adds clarity, emotion, urgency, or joy.

Advertising falls flat when it’s asked to reverse public disinterest. When the strategy is “maybe the public is wrong.” When the pitch is “ignore your instincts, trust our tagline.”

This latest marketing faceplant is a beautiful, public reaffirmation of the truth professionals live by:

Advertising is powerful, but it is not alchemy.

What Smart Agencies (and Smart Publishers) Actually Do

The best people in this business don’t accept briefs like sacred scripture. They interrogate them. They poke holes. They ask dangerous questions that save clients millions and cost them nothing but pride.

Questions like:

• “Who is the actual audience, not the theoretical audience?”
• “What’s the emotional hook? And no, ‘it exists’ isn’t a hook.”
• “Is this idea interesting to anyone besides the people who created it?”
• “If we do get attention, will the product convert it? Quickly? At all?”

An agency that can’t ask these questions is a factory, not a partner.

And publishers? They should demand better from advertisers, too. Better thinking. Better insight. Better alignment. Better understanding that the media buy is not the magic wand, it’s the delivery system.

Advertising cannot rescue the unrescuable.

Advertising is one of the greatest tools ever invented. It can persuade. It can inspire. It can mobilize. It can build empires.
But it cannot, and never has been able to, manufacture demand from nothing.

So yes, this big, expensive failure is good news. It reminds everyone, loudly and publicly, of a truth we should tattoo on every strategy brief:

You cannot advertise your way out of indifference.
You can only build something worth wanting, and then tell the story so well that the right people can’t help but lean in. Everything else is just very costly noise.

But here’s the deeper truth: our value as an industry isn’t in how loudly we shout, it’s in how honestly we listen. The market will always tell you what it wants and what it doesn’t. Our job is not to outsmart that signal, but to respect it. Products that resonate don’t need to be forced into the world; they move because people choose them. And in an era obsessed with hacks, optimizations, and impossible turnarounds, the most radical act in advertising may simply be this:

Have the courage to build something real, and the discipline to amplify only what deserves the spotlight.

That’s not just good marketing.
That’s integrity.
And integrity, unlike hype, compounds.