Media Headliner: It's a time of transition for IPC Ignite! and its MD.(managing director Eric Fuller appoints Dominic Smith as the new editor of Nuts)

IPC Ignite!'s Eric Fuller hopes that hiring Dominic Smith as the new editor of Nuts will be a huge success.

Eric Fuller admits that the coming few weeks and months could prove to be the most important and critical in his career. Back in November, Fuller made his biggest decision since becoming the managing director of IPC Ignite! - the appointment of Dominic Smith, the editor of FHM in Australia, to succeed Phil Hilton as the editor of the division's biggest property, Nuts.

Fuller, 54, has been a director at IPC for six years, following stints spent at both Emap and Dennis. He was promoted from the position of publishing director of IPC Ignite! to managing director back in September following the departure of his predecessor, Tim Brooks, who left to become the managing director of Guardian Newspapers.

In turn, this move prompted Phil Hilton, the launch editor of Nuts and one of Brooks' closest collaborators, to do some soul searching of his own. He concluded that, having had his nose to the Nuts grindstone since 2003, the time had perhaps come to step back a bit - and IPC sources go out of their way to emphasise how amicable the whole business has been, with Hilton doing all he physically can to facilitate a smooth handover.

Last week, the transition phase began with Smith jetting in to London; Fuller will be anxious that all does indeed go smoothly - because the division has been through a period of unaccustomed upheaval. 'This was an incredibly important appointment for me to make,' Fuller says. 'It's critical that we get this right. Phil Hilton had been here since pre-launch, and it was important we found someone as good as he (Smith) is.'

Nuts is the market-leading men's weekly (its 304,785 circulation is well ahead of Zoo's, its Emap rival, which is on 228,024). However, Fuller says that it's not easy maintaining momentum at a title that leads its sector, not just in the circulation stakes, but in creative terms, too. But he is convinced that Smith is the right man to pull it off.

Fuller concludes: 'Zoo tends to copy (most of) our innovations - which is in itself a measure of our creative leadership. We need to keep the margin of that leadership as wide as possible. You can never stand still.