MEDIA HEADLINER: RAB turns to organiser O'Shea to trumpet the virtues of radio.(Radio Advertising Bureau, Chris O'Shea)

Douglas McArthur believes that O'Shea can make a big difference, Ian Darby says.

You could be forgiven for believing that advertising becomes a gravy train for its big names. Knock a few good ads out, run the creative department for a bit, take a back seat and then wait for the non-exec offers to roll in.

If you were in a cynical or dismissive frame of mind, you could argue that Chris O'Shea's career has followed this route. But that would be grossly unfair, given his passion for the creative process.

And anyway, Douglas McArthur, the chief executive of the Radio Advertising Bureau, which has hired O'Shea as a creative consultant as it takes its message to the creative community, argues that his is no token, bit-part role: 'Chris will be coming in a couple of days a month and will do more if he thinks it will be valuable. He'll be a non-executive director but he's not just a casual consultant.'

The RAB has spent its first 11 years taking the message of radio advertising to media agencies and, while its annual and monthly Aerial Awards have done something to push the issue of radio creativity up the agenda, it wants to do more. Believing that, having grown from a 2 per cent to a 7 per cent medium, media agencies understand the role of radio, the task is to improve standards of radio creativity and to convince creative agencies that it's worth investing in the medium.

McArthur says: 'Radio isn't sexy but it's no longer tatty. We want to go to the next step of there being more great ads and we don't really know exactly how to do it.'

Enter O'Shea. A man with as much experience as anybody in the industry.