Future Forward: Zac Skulander

Fairfax's Zac Skulander

ZAC SKULANDER is a former PANPA Hegarty Scholarship winner and a rising star in in-house advertising for Australian newspapers. He will speak at the PANPA Future Forum in August about cutting-edge thinking at advertising agencies around the world. Here, he gives us a taste of where he sees the future of the craft.

On winning the Hegarty:

The Hegarty Award has allowed me to travel overseas to see what the rest of world is doing at what is a very interesting time for Newspapers. I spent the majority of my time in New York and had the chance to meet with some of the top creatives in the world. I was also very lucky to attend the International Newsmedia Marketing Association conference in New York which was amazing. It gave me the opportunity to meet and talk with people from all over the world to discuss newspapers on a global scale and see what the challenges and opportunities are.

On how Australia holds up:

Fairfax’s recent video-in-print campaign for Peroni was a great innovation and a good step forward for us. We do compete on a global level. We do some amazing creative and innovative things both online and in print in Australia. Some of people I spoke to abroad already knew about some of things we have done here, like the 3D newspaper we did, so I guess this is a good sign for us as a region.

On loyalty to the medium:

The thing that keeps me in newspapers is that they are always evolving. Nothing stays the same – and in turn, my role has evolved here at Fairfax Media. I started just on newspapers, then I had the opportunity to work on the best newspaper-inserted magazines in the country and now I get to work with the digital guys and they are truly a breath of fresh air. Some of things they come up with are amazing.

On the relationship between in-house and agency advertising:

In-house creative has its place in the industry, no matter what the medium. There are some situations that creative agencies don’t need to be involved in, advertorials for example. But there are a lot of things that the creative agency simply must do, like big brand campaigns.  What I try to do is to inform the creative agencies on new things that we can do as a media company. Sometimes we offer to do the creative, but most of the time it is done by the creative agency. As long as we work closely together to make sure everyone is happy, the end result is usually a very good one.