From Pickleball to Granfluencers: How ABC Is Pushing ‘The Golden Bachelor’

Ryan’s enthusiasm for the show has been crucial to getting it off the ground too. She joined Disney when it acquired most of 21st Century Fox in 2019 and has been championing the idea of a senior Bachelor since the minute she walked in the door. “There were a lot of great things that came over as part of the Fox acquisition, but one of the best was the people, and at the top of my list is Shannon,” Mills says.

Ryan watched Turner’s casting video early in the process and was completely won over, calling him “so relatable and rootable and charming.” Her team, she says, worked closely with Mills as production got off the ground because “we wanted to be very thoughtful in the marketing of the show to make sure it reflected the tone of what they were making.”

That thoughtfulness comes through in ABC’s early promotional spots. In the clip introducing the grandfather from Indiana to the world, a tongue-in-cheek voice-over celebrates his age: “He posts his thirst traps in a leather-bound album. His DMs have postage. He gets the early bird special anytime he wants. If you call him, he’ll answer the phone. He doesn’t have gray hair, he has ‘wisdom highlights.’ Florida wants to retire and move to him. He’s Gerry.” To introduce the women who will vie for his love, the network released a nearly three-minute video set to Cher’s “Believe.”

The online response to the spots—which have outperformed the marketing for every previous Bachelor installment—suggests that ABC’s calculated risk could pay off. And it’s giving executives hope that even though their marketing is leaning into the golden part of The Golden Bachelor, the show will still have broad appeal. “There’s something very timeless about this love story,” Mills says. “If you were ever going to let your kids watch an installment of The Bachelor, I think this would be the one.”

Ryan is also hoping that fans will gather to watch the show together. “Communitizing is a word that we’re using,” she says. “There’s no better example of that than what we saw this summer with Barbie and Taylor Swift, where people really rallied to come together for a shared experience. While Golden Bachelor is definitely different from those, it does feel like there could be a sort of multigenerational appeal.” That’s why ABC will host viewing parties for retirees in 25 markets, and why it will tap into the phenomenon of pickleball—a sport particularly popular among seniors, including many of the Golden Bachelor contestants—with promotions at official tournaments like the Indoor National Championships in Atlantic City.

Though the marketing budget for The Golden Bachelor isn’t as big as it might be for, say, a new Thursday night drama, Ryan says it fits with her larger strategy of creating individualized campaigns for each show. “The goal is always to try to get people to tune in and watch, but it’s also really to create that emotional connection with our audience,” she says. For a young-leaning, female-led, digital-first show like Hulu’s The Kardashians, that meant hosting an influencer event in Malibu. For Abbott Elementary, ABC focused on highlighting the work of schoolteachers.

ABC won’t know whether the marketing push has paid off until the September 28 premiere of The Golden Bachelor. But Ryan says she already knows it’s working with one key focus group: her mother and mother-in-law, who are both in their 70s. “I showed them both the first promo that revealed Gerry, and my mother-in-law—who’s single and from Indiana—said, ‘Is it too late to try out for this show?’”