Zoo Advertising founder Pawl Cubbin dead at 57
The Canberra Times reports that tributes from Canberra’s advertising and hospitality industries were flowing across social media on Sunday night following the death of Canberra businessman and entrepreneur Pawl Cubbin, aged 57.
Cubbin was the visionary behind many iconic Canberra restaurants and bars including Belluci’s and Public in Manuka, Little Brooklyn in Kingston and Shorty’s in Civic.
But he was most well-known as Canberra’s most prominent advertising guru, establishing Zoo Advertising in the late 1990s ~ which eventually opened offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Singapore ~ and working in recent times on marketing campaigns for the Brumbies, the Centenary of Canberra and for property giant Geocon.
Cubbin’s sudden death on the weekend occurred just days after he announced he would close the Canberra office of Zoo Group. The Melbourne office closed in November 2017 and Sydney entered into liquidation in February this year.
According to Canberra’s City News, his passing coincides with the closure of one of his property and hospitality investments, Academy nightclub, in Civic on Saturday night (April 21)
2 Comments
Terribly sad to read this. Pawl gave me my first ever job in advertising and as a young kid growing up in Canberra, Zoo was such an exciting and fun place to work.
Sad news – a man not everyone liked or agreed with, but a man determined to do things the way he thought best. Pawl demanded high standards and nurtured creativity – giving a lot of people their first break in an agency determined to think bigger than the town it lived in. I’ve got good memories of my time at Zoo.