Meet Martin
Hi everyone! I'm Martin, a 32-year-old Czech dude, currently serving my 7th year in Bohemia’s marketing department. Some people from the community probably know me from my previous role as DayZ's Brand Manager, which I held during what were arguably the toughest times of DayZ's Early Access (0.62 → PC & Console 1.0 launch). I'm married to my wonderful wife Dita, and together we now share 18 months of parenting experience. 
2) What do you do as a Digital Marketing Specialist?
Not the simplest question to start with! I get to contribute to the marketing of most of our projects, and a major part of my daily routine is working with various types of business data. For example: analyzing game sales and player numbers after an update, evaluating how people interact with our websites, social media and/or store pages, and researching what other marketers are doing in the industry. In short, I analyze our games and the videogame market to help our brand managers increase the reach of their work through various digital channels (including paid ads). In theory, it should all lead to growing our Bohemian business and improving communications with our communities (= better games).
One specific output of my work that our community can see is newsletters. We’ve invested a lot of time lately into improving our emails and the tech behind it. There is still so much to do, though, so please let us know how we're doing and what's good or bad.
3) What is the most exciting part of your job?
My role is incredibly varied and, honestly, that‘s the main reason why I really love my job. I get to interact with the communities of all of Bohemia’s games, with many awesome people across Bohemia, and I also get to meet interesting partners from other companies across the games industry. It's also a very challenging job, and I just love a healthy challenge at work!
4) How does one become a Digital Marketing Specialist?
Even with my take on the role, which is more analytical and technical, you first need to conquer the basics of marketing communication, both internally and externally. Roll up your sleeves, dig yourself deep in the social media trenches, and talk to people out there. As soon as you grasp what it takes to communicate with people, take a good MS Excel course and start analyzing the basic data you get from your social media platforms.
Next, invest a lot of time into learning at least one technical area of marketing (web analytics, SEO, paid ads, databases, email marketing, etc.). Be curious and focus on doing things that can measure your company’s business.
If you manage to balance the first-hand combat experience from marketing communication (how things feel out there among people), the internal communication (how things feel in the company you work for), and the analytics (how things measure up on a spreadsheet), you've done it!
5) What does a typical day look like?
I get very few typical days, but I mostly work from home. I wake up around 8-ish, zombie-walk through the kitchen and bathroom, and sync up with the family on our daily plans.
When my kid lets me leave and go to my tiny home office, I start by opening up our reporting dashboards (usually Google Data Studio or Slemma) to see if anything stands out. If nothing does (the usual situation), I dive into Slack conversations/calls or JIRA tickets and either take care of tasks that have been assigned to me or come up with new ones. This goes on until 7-8pm, with some breaks that I usually spend with my kid, wife, or doing some errands around our house. Then it's bath time for the kid and I usually put him to sleep. Before you know it, it's 10pm. There's only time for one or two episodes of Supernatural with my wife and then it's back to sleep!
If I have office days, I wake up at 5, drive myself to the train station, and take a 4-hour train ride to Prague, where I’ll either spend the time prepping for work or catching up on podcasts / YouTube / TV shows. I usually spend 3 days in Prague, taking care of meetings and socializing a little. Only a little, though, because office days are also my only chance to play video games after work!
6) Since you we’re involved in the development of DayZ, do you have any favorite feature or asset that was added to the game?
This is a bit of a cheesy answer, but DayZ's biggest asset and feature has always been the people in the community. I saw DayZ players having some of the best moments in gaming during the 0.63 update, where we basically had 4 guns and a half-broken Ada 4x4. While you need new shiny toys in the long run, you have nothing as a game developer without passionate players and strong core gameplay. 
But okay, okay, I will mention something specific!
Since I love to fine-tune how my DayZ character looks, I was absolutely stoked the day our dev team introduced vest, backpack, and belt attachments. The modders have taken that feature a few steps further and now you can personalize your backpacks or clothes on some servers to look as badass as you want (if you find badass loot, of course)!
7) What are your hobbies outside of playing games?
I'm basically the same as Helga in this - everything I do involves a lot of sitting! I've always been a curious person and an avid reader, so I do a lot of reading. Unfortunately, it's very rarely books these days. Mostly it’s long-form online content.
I like watching spy-themed movies and TV shows (anything Jack Ryan!), listening to good guitar/rock music (anything from Jimi Hendrix to Audioslave), and sometimes I tinker with my old PC hardware. I built my own small home network with a Linux-powered server this winter!
Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of my time interacting and playing with my son, which is honestly also a hobby and form of relaxation for me, especially when he literally drags me and my wife out into the nature because I’ve always liked hiking.
8) Can you tell us a random fact about yourself?
My current family name is not the name I was born with.
9) What job did you want to do when you were little?
I always wanted to be a journalist, but I soon realized that I'm not really a nosy person, which is kind of a requirement. So I chose the next closest thing - marketing!
10) What's your favorite movie, TV show, and/or book?
It’s hard to pick even a top 5 in movies, but definitely House M.D. or Stargate for favorite TV show.
As for my favorite book, it’s probably Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows.
11) And your go-to music playlist is?
Always my Spotify liked songs! No way to describe the genre, though. It's too random.
12) Cats or dogs?
13) Let's get back to video games. What was your first positive interaction with them?
That has to be Tetris! Oh my god, I sneakily played hours upon hours of Tetris as a small kid because we only had some cranky old MS-DOS office PC at home and literally not a single game diskette. Luckily, someone had left something named tetris.exe among all the boring T602 text documents and I was not afraid to run it!
Everyone in the family thought that I’d become one of those whiz kid programmers who teach themselves computer science at the age of six. Meanwhile, I was literally laying bricks.
14) What’s your most memorable video game moment?
The first time I managed to beat one of the super long draft races in Need for Speed Underground.
It was pure childhood happiness. I can still remember that evening. It was 2 or 3 days after Christmas Eve. All the roads were blocked because of the absolutely ridiculous amount of snow we got that year, and once it got dark and we had to go back inside there was nothing else to do besides trying to beat that stupid race with my friends. And boy, did we!
15) Who’s your all-time favorite video game character and why?
Again, hard to pick, but I think it's a match between two very different ones: Zoë Castillo from Dreamfall, or Sam Fisher from Splinter Cell.
16) Which game has had the biggest influence on your life?
Probably the Mafia series since it got me working in the games industry!
17) You have to pick one game to play for the rest of your life.
Definitely Cities: Skylines with all the DLCs and my personal mod set (which is around 11 GBs in size ). One lifetime is not enough to play this game.
18) Name one game you're a pro at.
The original Vietcong - but in single player.
19) And one game you're a noob at.
Oh boy, pretty much everything, but mostly Escape from Tarkov. Never got any further than level 17 in a wipe, and I've been through 6 of those by now.
20) Is there anything else you're currently working on in your spare time?
Yes, but it's a secret!