Casting a great podcast host
By Rachel Fountain, Executive Producer
Casting a host who can relate to your audience, drive engagement with your show, and represent the tone of your podcast is crucial. But it’s also hard work!
We’re taking you inside the casting process for a show Deadset Studios created for the University of Queensland. The goal: Create and cast a podcast to connect with a young audience of recent University of Queensland (UQ) graduates.
A boring organisation would have said “let’s get the most important academic in our organisation to host a show about the great things we’ve done!”, but not UQ. Their switched-on team understood that to make a great piece of narrative content that would cut through to Gen Z and have a long tail, they needed to be authentic. A thinly veiled advertorial was not going to cut it. Your audience will sniff you out in a SECOND if you try this:
Once we’d worked together to create a format and a sound for the podcast, it was clear what kind of host we needed to cast. The host needed to:
Have an authentic appeal to the target demographic (young UQ graduates)
Have the journalistic/interview skills to drive an interview and ask questions the audience would want to hear about
Be a Queenslander, ideally they would also be UQ alum
Be entertaining, empathetic and authentic about issues like climate change, science, anxiety and conspiracy theories.
Next steps were to apply that matrix to the real world. That’s where we hit the phones, watched, read, and listened widely.
But we also wanted to zag and cast someone surprising, who you wouldn’t expect to front the podcast for a prestigious sandstone university.
In this case, we struck gold.
Beloved former triple j Hack reporter, current manager of radio station 4ZZZ, nose-pierced mullet-wearer and as luck would have it... University of Queensland alum Stephen Stockwell, aka 'Stocky'.
Stocky has authenticity and appeal with Gen Z you simply cannot buy, and they also trust him from his years reporting on issues they care about. He’s real and vulnerable on tape, has experience stringing a story together, interviewing people on complex issues and finding the unique calling card within a story that will help the audience understand. He’s also the absolute last person you would expect to appear as an ambassador for a century-old Group of Eight university.
It’s a testament to Stocky and the UQ team that both were prepared to take a chance to connect with their audience – and it works! You can hear how successful it was in the nuanced episodes in the Doomscroll Remedy podcast feed. It’s a real favourite of ours, go and listen!
