Robert Harwood Matthews, chief executive of TBWA/Manchester discusses the merits of radio advertising in this day and age.

This has however forced me to ask myself recently if I actually miss it. The truth is I do, I miss music and I miss the banter of breakfast DJ's, the relentlessly gloomy Today programme and so on. What I'm not missing though is commercial advertising, which is odd as I love ads.

As a medium, radio should be incredibly powerful, the power of suggestion, the intimacy, the emotive qualities are all there by the bucketload. It has latent powers like no other medium.

So what's going wrong? Whichever station I go to on my DAB radio at home (I'm not a complete luddite) I'm battered with the most awful ads, repetitive, lazy rubbish that more often than not will encourage me to switch channel or better still to last.fm (see, further proof) Ask anyone what their favourite ad is and it won't be radio but they will tell you they have been influenced by content they heard on the airwaves.

There are probably a number of issues here. RAJAR-chasing stations eager to sell, sell, sell, have upped their minutage, reacting like overzealous managers with an eye on the short term. Their sales pitch often undermines their fabulous creative opportunity with endless talk of low cost ways of reaching XYZ listeners. Stations have by and large been slow to innovate their formats or to make the innovations fairly low brow, though I notice Bauer bucking the trend with 'commercial free' commercial stations and multi platform properties. Most of all though I think that the agencies have reacted to this and backed away,as have clients and mainstream radio is more often than not considered to be the best pile it high sell it cheap formula.

Radio 'plays well with others', the current fashion for trans media narratives is underutilising this platform, relying on digital, print and TV yet the RAB or any decent station exec will show you how well radio works in partnership with other stations. As Orsen Welles knew, if people heard the message, they'd believe it. This represents a vast creative territory, one that isn't vastly expensive and has efficiency. A well crafted campaign switching between my desktop at work and/or my radios could be stunning. Even at it's simplest, take an idea from TV with  a strong aural element, that new Natural Sweet Co ad with the 'bring on the trumpets' for example (youtube it if you missed it, it's genius.) We are not doing radio proud.

Personally I'd like to see, nay hear, a return to decent radio with agencies developing new IP's, there will be things we can do for our clients on air that actually generate revenue themselves, new forms of content, and we should simply be making the effort to raise the craft skills. NW agencies if anyone can should be able to do this. Otherwise maybe the stations should put their prices up or start veto-ing ads and we’d start to think about what we're missing.