THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 22

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 22 of The Digital PR Observer Newsletter.

If you missed last week’s issue, or any others, you can always catch previous issues of The Digital PR Observer Newsletter here.

Here’s what you’ll get in this newsletter:

• The latest Digital PR news and resources

• 5 quick fire tips to enhance your Digital PR activity

• 5 data sources you can use for Digital PR campaigns

• 5 successful campaigns from the archives

If you're not already signed up, you can do so at using the button below.

Here is the latest Digital PR news and resources from the last week that you might have missed.

Press Gazette: Virtual reality: The widely-quoted media experts who are not what they seem

Journalism.co.uk: UK journalists face growing battle for information access

Prowly: PR Tools: A Complete Guide to the Top 30+ Digital PR Tools 2025

NOVOS: 4 Simple Ways eCommerce Websites Can Get Press Coverage

PRmoment: What does an award-winning PR campaign look like?

BuzzStream: How to Pitch a Podcast (Tips and Examples from Hundreds of Pitches)

Sheridan Okey on LinkedIn: Digital PR in 2025 is about strategy, relationships, and hacks that actually get you noticed. Here are five that work right now

BuzzStream Podcast: How Digital PR Builds Brands with Jane Hunt of JBH

The Digital PR Podcast: Bad Hiring, Burnout, and Building a Career You Love with Lauren Spearman

Five quick fire Digital PR tips to help make you better and more efficient at getting SEO results via Digital PR:

1️⃣ “NoFollow” is a really good Chrome extension if you want to save time checking if your links are nofollow links. Once it's running on the page it will simply add a red box around any links that are nofollow.

2️⃣ Don't get so obsessed with new customers that you neglect your existing ones. They're the strongest sales and marketing resource you have. Engaged unbiased champions of your brand are the catalyst for the domino effect you need to supercharge the growth of your business.

3️⃣ When you take on a new client, work with them to come up with a list of "dream publications" to get coverage from. This is great for setting a more specific goal to be working towards, and turning coverage on certain sites into a bigger achievement to celebrate. Also works really well on an individual level when you start a new role to have something to work towards and celebrate when you achieve.

4️⃣ The relevance of a campaign to the brand isn’t always as straightforward as “a sofa brand producing content about sofas”. Think more along the lines of what content would be relevant to your target audience.

5️⃣ Things are gonna go wrong. This is inevitable. You'll make mistakes, fail to meet KPIs, have awkward conversations with clients, get harsh feedback from Journos. Your career isn't defined by mistakes but how how you bounce back from them.

Each week I’ll be sharing five data sources that you can use, either for content inspo, or as data sources for your campaigns.

1️⃣ Spotify Charts

There is soooo much great content that can be produced with Spotify data, which makes it one of my absolute favourite data sources for campaigns. Spotify publish the most played tracks and top artists on a daily and weekly basis, both at a global and country level. For some major cities, you can get even streaming data at that level too. The daily songs charts also date back to January 2017 giving you lots of great historical data too. Bonus tip: If you want the number of streams any song has, load the Desktop version of Spotify up and when you view an artist/album you’ll be able to see the number of streams it has.

2️⃣ Kworb Music Charts

Spotify isn’t the only source that you can use for the top trending songs. There’s also Apple Music, YouTube, Shazam, and Deezer who all publish streaming data on the most played songs. Kworb is a super useful site that curates all of those charts in each country so you can quickly collect and analyse all of that data from one source. From Kworb you can also find some amazing datasets such as these charts of the most streamed song on Spotify from each decade and each year since 2010, and the most popular artists across all streaming services with the country they are most popular in.

3️⃣ Census.gov: Poverty in the United States

This US Census dataset is a great deep dive into poverty levels in America. In the Excel files you can find data such as poverty levels by age and race, how poverty levels have changed over the years, the States with the highest poverty rates, and much more around different personal demographics.

4️⃣ ONS: Private rent and house prices

This ONS dataset is updated on a monthly basis and provides a lot of great data on rent and house prices across the UK. As a snapshot you’ll be able to get stats such as the price index of different types of houses and rentals broken down by location, the average house price for first time buyers dating back to 2012, the average house price in every local authority, and much more. Not all ONS datasets include data for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but these do.

5️⃣ Global Food Wastage Dataset (2018-2024)

This is a really interesting Kaggle dataset imo. It gives you an Excel ready breakdown of food waste across 20 major countries covering 7 years worth of data. What is really interesting though is the breakdown of food waste by eight different categories such as fruit and veg, dairy products, beverages, and more. As well as the total amount of waste, you also get the estimated financial loss of each layer of food waste per country.

In this next section, I take a look at five campaigns from my archive of campaign inspo, with some quick fire analysis of what I liked about them and what made them work. Referring Domains (RDs) figures are taken from ahrefs.

1️⃣ The best and worst tech giants to interview for in 2024 by Resume.io

📊 36 RDs, 6 DR 50+

I love it when a campaign manages to combine a creative methodology with an idea that is very on brand, and that’s exactly what Resume.io pulled off with this campaign. To discover with Tech giants were the best and worst to interview for, they analysed the interviews section of each company’s Glassdoor page to research which had the hardest difficulty scores and the most positive experience scores.

The success of the campaign goes to show that you don’t always need a huge sample size for your seed list in order for it to be a hit. In some cases like this where you have a more niche focus, that can not only help to give more focus to your campaign, but also make it quicker (and therefore cheaper) to produce.

Plus, once you know your initial seed list has been a success, if the campaign format allows for it, you can always revisit the idea and expand the scope to cover more areas/sectors/etc, with the added peace of mind that you’re pitching an angle you’ve had previous success with.

2️⃣ Champagne sales slump due to lack of ‘celebration’ and joy in the world by LVMH

I tend to focus more on hero campaigns with a landing page in this section over examples of Reactive PR, but this clever bit of PR from LVMH is one of my favourite examples of turning a simple bit of internal sales data into a banger of a headline. LVMH used their internal sales data to discover a downward trend in champagne sales. Which in itself isn’t really all that interesting.

This is where the PR magic comes in. Using the fact that champagne is usually broken out to mark an occasion of celebration, LVMH cleverly used that to turn their data into a story. This led them to earn coverage on sites like New York Post, Fortune, and Business Insider, with headlines such as “Champagne sales are suffering because people are too sad to celebrate, LVMH says” and “Champagne sales slump due to lack of ‘celebration’ and joy in the world, industry execs say”, all from one little bit of sales data.

3️⃣ The viewpoints around the world with the best visibility by Premier Inn

📊 14 RDs, 6 DR 50+

I love campaigns that do something a bit different with their methodology and this is a great example of a campaign with a unique methodology that allows it to tell a compelling story. Premier Inn researched weather data for popular tourist viewpoint destinations to discover which had the least amount of cloud coverage, allowing them to reveal the viewpoints with the best visibility.

It’s a great example of data analysis and storytelling skills coming together in a creative form. Making the connection between weather data, cloud visibility and tourism is really clever and shows the benefit to be gained from applying a creative storytelling approach to analysing data sources.

4️⃣ The Most Attractive Nationalities In The World by Pour Moi

📊 107 RDs, 53 DR 50+

This campaign by Pour Moi is a good example of how AI can be used to bring a campaign to life. Pour Moi analysed Reddit posts that mentioned a country and keywords related to attractiveness, to reveal which nationalities the internet found to be the most attractive. It’s a clever example of how you can use Reddit data to gather valuable audience insights for a campaign.

Once they had the data, they then used Midjourney to create images of what an attractive man and woman would look like in each country. Journalists love it when you can provide them with high quality imagery as part of your campaign’s media pack, as it helps to save them time sourcing their own images, and makes their article more complete and better equipped to attract more clicks (one of the key KPIs Journos are measured against).

5️⃣ How Often People Send & Receive Nude Pictures by Bad Girls Bible

📊 27 RDs, 10 DR 50+

Survey campaigns can admittedly be a bit hit and miss, but when you have a topic with a large audience that is also trending in the media, surveys can become a very successful link building asset. This survey by Bad Girls Bible, a podcast on how to have better sex, explores nudes culture in the US. It hits a lot of the notes that a survey campaign needs to be a hit - a topic everyone can relate to, one that people will be interested in learning more about people’s views on it, and is evergreen enough that it can be used to earn coverage throughout the year, and even for multiple years.

I really like the questions that they’ve used in the survey too that allow the campaign to go far beyond just how often do people send nudes but really digs into how people feel about them, while also touching on the moral issue of unauthorised nudes and keeping nudes of exes. The graphics look stunning too. Overall, this is one of my favourite survey campaigns in terms of how well put together it is from a creativity, audience insights, and overall storytelling point of view.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 22. Same time again next week ✌️

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Each week in the newsletter, you’ll get:

• The latest Digital PR news and resources

• 5 tips to enhance your Digital PR activity

• 5 data sources you can use for Digital PR campaigns

• 5 successful campaigns that we liked

If you’ve missed any previous editions of the newsletter, you can go through the archive of issues on the Digital PR Tips website.

Have any feedback for the newsletter? Anything you liked, disliked, or want to see more of? Send an email to matt@digitalprtips.com and let me know 🙂