In their weekly interview series Womenize! features inspirational, diverse people who work in the games and tech industry, to share their experiences, give valuable advice and talk about their projects. In cooperation with Womenize! and Madeleine Egger, GamesMarkt is republishing these inspirations.
Womenize! – Inspiring Stories is our weekly series featuring inspirational individuals from games and tech. For this edition, we talked to Dana Publicover, Director of Marketing at PlaytestCloud. She speaks about her her diverse but cohesive career path, her effort to build a practical and supportive FLINTA mentorship program and her desire to be remembered as a collaborative, effective, and enjoyable colleague who helped others grow. Read more about Dana here:
Hi Dana! You’ve built a fascinating career across publishing, marketing, UX, startups, and now gaming. Can you walk us through the journey that led you to becoming Director of Marketing at PlaytestCloud?
I feel like my experience is so random, but it all goes together kind of like that movie Slumdog Millionaire. I use things I learned as an executive assistant just as much as I use the skills I gained as a skydiving instructor. Being a wedding photographer taught me how to de-escalate tense situations and focus on outcomes. Working as a financial journalist helped me make complex abstract things understandable. And the skydiving made me an incredible sales person (try getting someone to jump out of a plane once that door opens!).
Even though I’ve had a lot of “jobs”, my career has been a pretty linear path from Creative Writing degree to Head of Marketing. I moved to NYC the day after I graduated and worked as a Jr. Copywriter at a big flashy agency. I moved in-house to a publishing company and wrote a lot of book ads that I would see on my way to work on the subway! It was really so cool. Because this was around 2008ish, that’s when a lot of roles started becoming more consolidated. People weren’t just copywriters (especially in early-mid-career) and digital advertising was just starting. I think collectively across all the industries, they pointed to young people in the office and said “You! You’re on Twitter! Go figure out how ads work!”
So like a lot of other Millennials I slowly became a “full stack marketer.” The day to day was so broad and so many different things all at once. That’s what I really love most about it (and now I don’t need to fill the gaps with random jobs to get that excitement, haha). You could code something in HTML, learning a new tool, build a sales deck and ghostwrite a letter from the CEO‚ and all before lunch!
I’ve been the first marketing hire at startups and I’ve joined established corporate teams. My role at PlaytestCloud has been sort of a mix of the two. Leading the rebrand and killing a 10-year-old beloved mascot was a really interesting experience (RIP Cloudy McCloudface, never forget, etc etc). But seeing the impact, both internally and externally, was one of my proudest career moments.
Marketing teams are some of the leanest gangs of hustlers at a company. You’ve got to be creative with budget, creative with messaging, and creative with approaches. You’re working with or touching nearly every single other department and you’ve got to get everyone on board to the vision since you need their help! There’s always an exciting problem to work on, and a chance to do something that might fail or succeed. It’s a job that changes all the time, and I think that makes it incredibly fun.
You co-founded the FLINTA mentorship group at PlaytestCloud around the idea of building the support you wished had existed earlier in your career. What principles did you intentionally design into the program and what impact has surprised you most since it launched?
I’ve had some experience with mentorship, mainly as a mentee, in what I felt were really ineffective structures. My co-founder Hannah Mattil, Head of Research Operations at PlaytestCloud, had similar experiences. Things like mentors telling your boss or HR things that came up in the sessions rather than offering support. Or worse, programs that put a pink bow or a high heeled shoe on a banner and did nothing to offer real support or advice. For me, learning how to assert myself and speak up without coming across as “bossy” or “bitchy” was a years-long struggle and something I’m probably still not great at. And as a new mom years ago, the transition back to work was really hard. Especially when you work with a lot of non-parents, it can be so lonely. There were points in my career where I really could have used advice, or at least someone to give me a boost. I always wanted that, and I feel like my wisdom was rather hard-won, so when Hannah and I started shaping Level Up: PlaytestCloud we tried to create all the things we wish we’d had. But we couldn’t just base in on our experience, so we did a lot of research and interviews with the folks who would join the group to make sure we met their needs too. The biggest learning for me was how much two-way mentoring happens. Every session I’ve had with a mentee I’ve walked away with something new to think about, or a new perspective. I know it sounds cliché but I learn so much from them too! As we keep growing the program and enter year two (!!), we’re trying to be really cognizant of keeping something that feels valuable, productive and useful for the members without creating too much extra work or hard-to-meet commitments.
Throughout your career, you’ve helped teams, companies, and individuals grow through marketing, mentorship, and community-building? What kind of impact do you hope to leave behind, both in the games industry and beyond?
You can tell by my history that I’m in the latter half of my working years. 2026 marks my 20th year in the workforce! I don’t remember when it happened but one day I went from being the youngest person in the room to the oldest without noticing. I still feel like I’m just getting started and I have so much more to learn. I know I’m a speck of dust in the universe so I don’t think too much about a legacy or a lasting impact when I move on, but maybe I’d like people who worked with me to think “wow, she got a lot of shit done, but she was still sort of fun to work with.” At the end of the day, that’s really all that matters, isn’t it? Doing work you enjoy with people you like to be around.
