Chris Ward of Bauer Media, March 2017

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.