Owen Ryan. Group Content Director North of England & Scotland. Bauer Media

My best advice would be send your demo as a series of airchecks as opposed to a piece of high value production. Unless you’re an audio producer I’m not interested in whether you can make different pieces of knit together smoothly.

I want to hear the person and the personality.

If you ask for feedback be prepared that you might get it, you might not. Unfortunately PD’s have full diaries and as hard as I try, I cannot reply to everyone that comes in. 

If you send a demo and receive feedback – don’t send me another ‘update’ in 3 months unless I’ve asked for it. You won’t have changed that much and I won’t be in any rush to listen to it.

Include some interaction with callers – that’s very important – but cherry pick, don’t send ‘yes/no’ callers.

Keep it short and to the point – I’ll know within the first minute if you have a style/delivery I want to develop for my station.

Send it as a link – don’t kill my inbox with 10MB files.

Demos aren’t the most pressing part of my day. If my inbox is struggling, the big files get deleted first – your demo could be sacrificed to allow me send the urgent email my boss is chasing me for.

Mainly, be yourself and don’t try and be too slick – everyone can do slick – the best presenters have personality. That doesn’t mean ‘bonkers’ or ‘whacky’ it just means be a real person who I’d want to talk to in real life.

And on that – make sure you have a life outside of radio – radio ‘anoraks’ make boring/samey presenters – real people with something to talk about make engaging communicators. They’ll cut through when it matters and they’ll be in high demand.