Yes.
> in advertising
No, in hiring 500 compiler and tool developers, developing and supporting libraries, optimizing it for niche use cases.
[1]: https://www.theregister.com/2003/06/09/sun_preps_500m_java_b...
No, I'm not talking about financial backing in general, I'm talking specifically about advertising the language.
There's no doubt that a big ecosystem helps a lot, Python is a good proof of that ; but this is not what i was talking about.
Java and C# are the only one's that fit this. Go and Rust had some publicity from being associated with Google and Mozilla, but they both caught on without "millions of dollars in advertising" too. Endorsement by big companies like MS came much later for Rust, and Google only started devoting some PR to Go after several years of it already catching momentum.
No amount of advertising is going to propel Haskell to a mainstream language. If it wants to succeed (and let's be honest, it probably doesn't), it's going to need an investment of millions of developer-hours in libraries and tooling. No matter how pretty and elegant the language may be, if you have to reinvent the wheel every time you go beyond "hello world" you're going to think twice before considering it for production code.
Rust is a significant counterexample
The difference between academia languages such as ocaml or haskell and industry languages such as Java or C# is hundreds of millions of dollar in advertising. It's not limited to the academy: plenty of languages from other horizons failed, that weren't backed by companies with a vested interest in you using their language.
You should probably not infer too much from a language's success or failure.