Levelling Up: Dead Good PR’s Carly Moxey: ‘”There are plenty of other people working within gaming PR who haven’t got here through what would be considered a ‘conventional’ career path.”

Carly Moxey, account director at Dead Good PR, talks humility and confidence, the varied paths to PR, regular appraisals, and her Bloodborne achievements

What is your job role and how would you describe your typical day at work?

The nature of the role is that there isn’t really a typical day. As account director, I oversee all account managers and PR consultants, as well as monitor and maintain our relationships with existing and new clients. On a day-to-day basis, I do still manage some clients, and make sure that I’m available for any general queries and support staff across our PR and influencer teams here in North America and back in the UK.

We were working remotely before the pandemic, and whilst we did have an office in Montréal for staff based there, most Dead Good team members work from home. This set up doesn’t suit everyone, so it falls to the company director (Stu Taylor) and I to make sure that everyone on the team feels supported. The regular team and individual video calls help that, as well as the twice a year staff appraisals and performance reviews.

What qualifications and/or experience do you need to land this job?

I could get flack by the Uni crowd for saying this, but I don’t think that it’s essential to have a formal Marketing Degree or Masters, although it’s definitely a bonus. In my opinion, a readiness to learn on the job, work your way up and a genuine interest in PR and games is just as important. As a humble Bloodborne completionist, if you can bend my ear about anything Bloodborne (or DOOM-related), you’ll have my heart!

Personality goes a long way too. We work in an environment in which we’re the middle-people between clients and media/content creators, and so I feel that being genuine and personable really helps people on all sides relate to you. This is the stuff that you can’t really teach – you either have that skill or you don’t.

I’d always loved games, but even as a persistent six-year-old begging my mum for a ZX Spectrum I could never have imagined that all roads would lead to a PR career within the gaming industry, but here we are! In another life I worked in the Media School at Bournemouth University supporting long-distance Masters Students as their programme administrator.

I worked closely with the university’s marketing and PR teams, this led me to working as a freelance PR consultant within the restaurant industry and then eventually on to Dead Good where I started as a PR consultant.

So all this is to say, there are plenty of other people working within gaming PR who haven’t got here through what would be considered a “conventional” career path. And I view that as a positive, since it provides our area of the industry with a lot of different viewpoints and approaches to campaigns, which can only benefit clients.

If you were interviewing someone for your team, what would you look for?

Read the job description and do some homework on the company! It’s really obvious when a prospective candidate hasn’t done this, particularly if they’ve made it through to the face-to-face interview stage.

It also depends on the level of the position the applicant is applying for, but overall, we want to know why you’d be the best fit for the role. For a more junior PR role, you don’t have to have had experience within the games industry, but how does the experience you do have translate to the position that you’re applying for?

Also, I’d say that getting the balance right between confidence and arrogance is key – having a bit of humility working in a constantly evolving part of the industry really helps, as there is always something new to learn!

What career opportunities are there?

As we’re a team of nine, options are relatively limited, but for junior roles there is a clear path.

The twice-yearly staff appraisals help us and the team members to spotlight their achievements over a six-month period, as well as any development areas we feel are worth highlighting. These are very much an open forum and an opportunity for the team members to explore how they want to progress with Dead Good. It might sound cheesy, but we really do want people to be invested in the business and feel that they have a voice.

We also seek input on potential new business projects from the people who will be working on them – we never want the team to feel that “senior management” are signing up stuff just for the money and then handing it over to them to deliver on what might have been promised.