THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 27

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 27 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.

Digital PR Tips: PR Campaigns I Saw and Kinda Liked Volume 3

Digitaloft: The Digital PR Summit 2025: Key Takeaways From Every Session

Wales Online: This man started a 'Welsh' news website. He isn't who he says he is

Cision: 8 PR Lessons from the 2025 State of the Media Report

The HOTH: Why Digital PR Backlinks are Essential for Topical Authority

Jasmine Granton on LinkedIn: It's Mental Health Awareness Week - so here are a couple of tips for managers to support your team and reduce the impact a job can have on poor mental health

Grace Burton on LinkedIn: Here are some things to consider including in your brief

BuzzStream: The Rise, Fall, and Recovery of Forbes Advisor (Study)

Press Gazette: How Google forced publishers to accept AI scraping as price of appearing in search

BuzzStream Podcast: Embracing the PESO Model to Join PR and SEO with Gini Dietrich

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

1️⃣ How to write a subject line that a Journalist will use as their headline (this one is a bit wordy so click the link to view it on LinkedIn)

2️⃣ Copy just the urls from a SERP in seconds with https://coveragebook.com/linkextractor/. Search for a term that will bring up your campaign coverage, highlight all of the search results, paste them into the tool, and straight away it deletes all the text and just leaves the links.

3️⃣ Links to product/category pages are like goldust to SEOs. And getting them can actually be quite easy. Sometimes all you have to do is include a link in your release, or ask for your content to be credited to that page (as long as it's relevant) and hope the Journo uses it.

4️⃣ Read the room and research your contacts. Not everyone wants stories about getting beach body ready, or sensitive topics. You only need a minute or two to research a Journo's stories and their social profiles to get a decent feel of what type of stories would be off putting to them.

5️⃣ The most common mistakes in outreach emails come from your personalisation fields. Check the person's name matches their email, check it's spelt correctly and check you've got the publication name right and stylised properly. Check, check, and check again

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 US States and Cities Visited by Overseas Travellers

This dataset by the International Trade Administration is such a valuable resource for any US Travel campaigns. Via the dashboard you can access data on the number of international tourists to every US state and the top cities in each state, along with YoY comparisons for each. The dashboard is made up of some already made reports that make analysing the data without exporting anything very easy, while also letting you download the data for your own further analysis. The page automatically loads on the data download report rather than the data reports which looks a bit confusing but you can just toggle between the reports via the buttons at the top that say “Dashboard”, “Select a U.S. State”, etc.

2️⃣ US Motor Vehicle Crashes

This next dataset from the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is a comprehensive database of motor vehicle crashes in America, dating back to 1994. The data details the total number of crashes broken down by stats such as the number of victims that were drivers, passengers, pedestrians, etc, and the number of fatalities weighted by population or the number of licensed drivers. The dashboard also includes datasets to filter by the age and demos of the drivers and the victims, the type of vehicle, the time of the day, the weather conditions, and the state the crash took place in. If you have a relevant client to make use of this dataset you’ll be flooded with new campaign ideas after a few minutes using this dataset!

3️⃣ World’s Most Polluted Countries and Cities

Air pollution levels is a common metric that I see used in Index campaigns. If you want to quickly access pollution levels around the world this dataset from IQAir is your go to resource. You’ll be able to find pollution levels for 138 different countries based on their annual average PM2.5 concentration. The number of years worth of data for each country varies but nearly all of them have at least two years of data, with many dating back to 2018. There’s also a dataset on the most polluted cities, where you can analyse the most polluted cities, and search for pollution levels by city from a specific country.

4️⃣ Income of the Richest 10% per Country

This is a really interesting dataset from Our World in Data that ranks the top countries based on the income of the richest 10% of people in that country. It’s a really interesting alternative way of ranking the wealthiest countries based on the wealth of the super rich rather than the average population. I really love that all of the data is adjusted for inflation and for differences in living costs between countries to make for better comparisons. The data also dates back as far as 1963 for some countries making it easy to compare which countries’ super rich are getting richer the fastest.

5️⃣ The Number of Airports per Country

This final dataset is from the CIA World Factbook and details the number of airports in all 234 countries around the world. The top countries by itself probably isn’t super interesting, but weighting them by the population of the country or the land size of the country could make the data more interesting. As is often the case, could also be a great ranking factor for a travel themed Index campaign too.

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 Get 100 Greggs Sausage Rolls by Switching Bank Accounts by Virgin Money

I was reminded of this campaign by Amelia Evans’ LinkedIn post this week and I had to share it in this week’s newsletter because it’s such a clever example of how to take a boring bit of data and quickly turn it into a great headline. Banks offering incentives for switching bank accounts to them isn't new and it isn’t really newsworthy. So how do you make that it into a newsworthy PR story? Reframe it as something else!

£125 for switching accounts = boring. 100 free Greggs sausage rolls for switching accounts? Now that’s something people will share and talk about! It’s a really great example of how being creative with data and even basic numbers like this can transform something totally not newsworthy into a huge hit of a PR idea that is also super quick and free to execute.

2️⃣ Does Money Buy Happiness? by Raisin

📊 44 RDs, 33 DR 50+

This campaign that Raisin produced back in 2020 is a really clever example of how you can combine two datasets together to produce a unique story. For this campaign they analysed ONS and Happy Planet Index reports to reveal which countries and UK cities were the happiest, and then added in the average salary/GDP per capita for countries, to reveal the countries that have the highest combined happiness and wealth scores, allowing them to answer the questions of where in the world does money actually buy happiness?

For me, the best data campaigns come from when you’re able to take multiple datasets and use them together to create a genuinely unique story. A lot of the time this takes the form of an Index campaign ranking multiple metrics that have been collected, but it could also be comparing against previous versions of a dataset to spotlight trends in growth, or by finding correlations between two different data points.

I also love how the campaign has calculated the average salary of the top 10 cities/countries in each index and used that as the “cost of happiness”. This gives you a really good snappy stat that can be used for headlines, while also giving the campaign an extra angle on top of the best cities/countries in the index. It would have been interesting to also see the places at the bottom of each index that are rich but unhappy, but I appreciate that some brands are tentative about focusing on angles that rank “the worst…” and land coverage that could be seen as being too negative.

3️⃣ Laughing OnLine by The Pudding

📊 56 RDs, 13 DR 50+

Another classic here from The Pudding. In this post they analysed Reddit comments to reveal how people laugh online, finding that “lol” is the most common laugh abbreviation used by a pretty significant distance. As always with pieces produced by The Pudding, the data analysis is thorough and creative, and the landing pages and data vis look stunning.

I really like the creative touches with the analysis on this piece looking at the trend of abbreviations dating from 2009 to 2019 to reveal how back in 2009 “lol” and “haha” were pretty interchangeable, and then over the next 10 years “lol” massively increased and “haha” had a steep drop in usage. They’ve also included an interactive user poll to track votes of how funny you think something is when you use each abbreviation. Obviously you need a lot of traffic to your landing page to do so, but using your campaign to collect user data via a survey on the landing page can be a really clever way of collecting even more data for your campaign and generating an additional angle to pitch later on.

4️⃣ “Revenge Sleep Procrastination” by Sleep Junkie

📊 52 RDs, 25 DR 50+

This next campaign from Sleep Junkie is a great example of how to combine a trending topic, expert commentary, and unique data insights, all together to create a really well done successful campaign. In this post Sleep Junkie added their expert insights on the sleep procrastination trend to reveal how prominent it is with Americans, why it’s bad for your health, which social media apps are worst to use before you go bed, and how to improve your sleep hygiene.

This could easily have just been a great data piece, or an insightful expert commentary campaign, but by bringing all of these together, they’ve also compounded the results they can achieve from the campaign, especially from an authority building point of view. For a brand that provide sleep tips and mattress reviews, a campaign like this really benefits from how relevant it is to the brand by best positioning them to covert readers into return visitors. I think something that gets lost in Digital PR is the idea of long-term customer acquisition. Yes, traffic to our campaign pages is amazing, but we should also focus on long-term goals such as creating fans of the brand, and loyal users that will turn into customers and make money for our brands/clients.

5️⃣ Disney vs Pixar by Cash Lady

📊 12 RDs, 5 DR 50+

This final campaign I think is a good bit of content inspo as a standalone campaign and an example of what can be done with Movies data for an entertainment campaign. Cash Lady analysed the critic and audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes, as well as Box Office Revenue, for Pixar and Disney films, to create a ranking for each film to reveal the best Disney and Pixar films, and which studio comes out on top.

I don’t love that it’s done by a loans company. It is what it is. Gambling brands often get a rep within the industry as being hard to produce good relevant campaigns for and I massively disagree with that. Loans companies however I think must be the hardest niche to do anything in that is both interesting and relevant to the brand. So I guess they’ve got to find some topics to produce campaigns around right? My issue will always be when brands produce campaigns that they don’t have the required authority to be talking about, a lot more so than a topic that isn’t as relevant but isn’t something that you need to be a qualified expert in to provide insights on. So yeah, relevancy ramble aside, I like this as an example of how you can use data on movies to produce an interesting data study.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 27. 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 🙂