Steve, Chris and Hayley, complete with knitwear in a panelled room. Chris Ward Bauer Media is one of the UK’s leading commercial radio operators. Chris Ward is the Content Operations Director and Group Production Director for its Bauer City Network of around 50 outlets. Every week this network reaches around 7 million listeners and generates more than 60 million hours of total listening. Its stations are based in large cities across the North and Midlands of England, and Scotland. They operate under heritage brand names like Hallam, Clyde, Metro and Viking, tiered in three networks with local speech content among the tracks: Bauer City 1 operates a hot AC format, recently repositioned, and it drives the biggest audience, Bauer City 2 plays classic hits and Bauer City 3 is a punchy CHR network. Chris’s team is largely based in Salford, near Manchester but he has a couple of team members in Glasgow and Birmingham too. In this Earshot podcast, hear audio that communicates the new music positioning of the Bauer City 1 network, creative production to support S&P activity and examples of customised sung vocals on playlist tracks that Chris’s team uses on many of the network’s major promotions. Play the audio Chris Ward of Bauer Media. (duration 49’00”, 192kb/s stereo mp3, file size 67.7 MB) Subscribe to the Earshot podcast via iTunes or PocketCasts or Google Play Music. Also in the show Vintage audio from Africa’s first commercial radio station, Lorenzo Marques Radio. If you’d like to get in touch or share your production just email us. We love to play audio from around the world – any station – any format, especially if it has an interesting story behind it. Credits Guest: Chris Ward with audio from his team at Bauer Media which includes James Espley, Reagan Charles, Lydia Athey, Gavin Pearson and Joe Thomas. Research: Hayley Hayes Ambassador of Radio: Steve Martin Earshot Creative Review theme music by the Tiger Club Band. Voiceover is Elly Fairman at Hobsons. Any views expressed are personal. The contributors acknowledge all rights held by the owners, creators and performers of the recorded works which are included solely for the purposes of education and review. From Earshot where views are personal and original writing is licensed under Creative Commons. Follow @earshotcreative and send story ideas and examples of great creative work to the editor @smartin