THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 29

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 29 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.

The PR Insider: How to Align PR with Digital Marketing for More Powerful, Consistent Results

Root Digital: Top Digital PR Trends in 2025

Root Digital: Digital PR Link Building Timeline – How Long Does It Take?

Kaizen: How Marketers Can Turn Trends Into Headlines

Cupid PR: 5 Ways to Tap Into Your Readers’ Pain Points (So Your Digital PR Actually Gets Picked Up)

PRmoment: PR tips on scoring coverage during a heatwave

Distinctly: State of Journalism in France Survey Part 1

Ahrefs: An Analysis of AI Overview Brand Visibility Factors (75K Brands Studied)

Veronica Fletcher on LinkedIn: Reddit just launched a new Trends tool

The PR Hotline: How To Spot Toxic Culture in PR and Create Safer, Healthier Workplaces w/ Amelia Evans

BuzzStream Podcast: Why Relevancy in Digital PR is More Important Than Ever (With Olivia Bence)

Digital PR Explained Podcast: Why Google I/O 2025 is a Big Deal for PR

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

1️⃣ Journalists add links for their readers not for your SEO. If you want a link adding, explain why it would benefit the reader. This means doing so before the piece fades out of the news cycle. The longer you leave it to ask the weaker your chances of getting a link added.

2️⃣ Struggling to get links from your expert comments coverage? Rather than hoping for a homepage link in the article, try creating author profile pages for your experts that can be linked to in the piece. These are more relevant to the article and come across as less of a commercial link.

3️⃣ If you've created a campaign that involves currency data and you're sending it to Irish sites, make sure you convert your figures from £ to €.

4️⃣ The disparity between different tools that estimate earnings per social post can be very drastic. It's not hard to get quotes from influencers/agencies to determine which tools reflect reality the best. Don't just go with the tool that gives you the highest figure and the more shocking headline. Make sure your data is at least a good estimate.

5️⃣ Journalists need comments before their piece goes live. For stories that you can anticipate happening, have comments prepared and sent as soon as they happen (e.g. events that are annual or always bound to happen such as celebrity engagements, divorces, affairs, etc).

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 Largest Cities by Population

Creating seed lists for campaigns can sometimes be trickier and more time consuming than we anticipate. World Population Review has a very handy list of the most populated cities in the world which can be a great starting point when choosing cities for your index campaign. The list covers the top 822 cities (I can’t tell if the cut off is 750,000+ or if they just got fed up at 822 and stopped), and also includes the population figure from the previous year.

2️⃣ Depression Rates by Country

World Population Review is a goldmine of global datasets and this one is really interesting. The dataset contains the depressive disorder rate of every country, revealing the countries with the highest and lowest depression rates. The latest data is from 2021, but data is also available for 2020 and 2019, providing some nice comparison points to previous years.

3️⃣ Victims of Intentional Homicide

This United Nations dataset on homicide rates by country makes for pretty bleak reading, while also providing some pretty incredible insights from a data point of view. The dataset has a thorough breakdown of homicide rates for every country, which includes detailed insights into the gender and ages of homicide victims, as well as their relationship to the the perpetrator. Using this data you can reveal insights such as the worst countries and cities for homicides, the most common victims, and homicide rates by family members or partners.

4️⃣ Food Inflation Rate by Country

Trading Economics is another site that is an absolute treasure trove of global datasets. This one here covers the inflation rate of food prices around the world, revealing where food prices are rising at the fastest rate. The data is live data that gets regularly updated, with the most recent figures for the majority of countries as recent as April 2025.

5️⃣ Records of Weather and Climate Extremes

Ever wanted to know the hottest ever day? The rainiest day? The windiest day? The heaviest hailstorm? World Meteorological Organization have you covered with this handy factsheet on records for different weather and climate extremes.

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 Baby Names by Jetpack.AI

📊 350 RDs, 42 DR 50+

In last week’s newsletter I shared the US baby names dataset that was recently updated for 2025. I think most of the time when we as Digital PRs find a new dataset we look for ways to conduct some interesting analysis using the data. I really like this tool created by Jetpack.AI that takes a different approach, instead focusing on how to present an existing dataset in a creative visual format.

Using the tool you just simply type a name in and it creates a sick chart, as shown below, visualising your name as a chart that shows the timeline of your name’s popularity. It’s simple but at the same time very creative. I really like this as a different example to show how to turn a dataset into a successful link building asset.

2️⃣ Female Delusion Calculator

📊 385 RDs, 61 DR 50+

Speaking of great ways of using datasets to create amazing tools, this female delusion calculator is very cool! The calculator uses US Census data to work out what percentage of the US population meets the criteria that you set using the tool for your ideal partner.

Calculator tools like this can be great link building assets due to their highly shareable nature. “Oh this tool told me I have a 1.2% chance of finding the man of my dreams, see what score you get!”. But like with any good PR story, there has to be a creative angle to it. A tool that shows you how many people match your demographics? A bit dull. But a tool that grades your chances of finding your true love? Fun, exciting, controversial! Creating calculator tools like this won’t be the right fit for every brand, but I do think it’s an underused tactic that has great virality potential when done right.

3️⃣ I’ll Be There For You Hamper by Regency Hampers

📊 8 RDs, 7 DR 50+

Product PR is one of the harder PR tactics to execute, but when done right it can produce fantastic results. And those results are far easier to translate into commercial metrics that go far beyond just a number of links built. Product PR is a great way of building links to your key commercial pages, but the tactic can also directly lead to sales, since you’re making the product the focus of the story. The key, as is always the case, is finding ways of making your products interesting enough to be newsworthy.

This product from Regency Hampers is a great example of how products that are brand collabs, or piggyback off pop culture events, can become effective link building assets. Here they’ve created the ultimate hamper for Friends fans that is full of gifts with special meanings to fans of the show. Given that they’ve used the official Friends logo I assume they have some sort of paid partnership with the brand, which obviously helps in making products more newsworthy, compounded with the release date for the hamper falling in line with the Friends reunion special in 2021. If you do have the luxury of working with a brand that has partnerships with pop culture brands, definitely work with them to see how you can make those partnerships also work for your PR strategy.

4️⃣ What Popular Cartoon Characters Would Look Like IRL by Bored Panda

📊 105 RDs, 44 DR 50+

Bored Panda has some pretty weird stuff on it, but it can be a fantastic source of creative inspo for campaign ideas. You’ll find some really unique creative driven stories on there, and this one is one of my favourite examples of Bored Panda contributors sharing cool shit on the site. This post here reimagined what famous cartoon characters would look like as real people.

Nowadays with the rise in popularity and ease of access of AI tools, producing visuals like this has become easier than ever before. But back in early 2022 when this was first posted, this was something only really talented artists could produce, and was a lot more unique, and therefore a lot more newsworthy.

I feel like the idea of news articles being great link building assets themselves gets very much glossed over, but this is an example of how articles can get covered by other news sites. The Bored Panda piece has earned links on over 100 sites including New York Post, The Sun, and LADbible. From a PR point of view, it goes to show the potential power of landing coverage on the right site with the right story, and how that coverage can also breed further coverage from Journalists finding your story on other news publications.

5️⃣ Drinks Lie by Hyundai

This final campaign I really love as an example of how powerful imagery can be in a PR campaign. In 2022, Hyundai produced visuals that reflect the effect that occurs when driving under the influence of alcohol. It’s a campaign that is super creative but that can also be digested in literally seconds.

It’s also such a cracking campaign from a brand point of view that has a powerful and important message about drink driving. Within the Digital PR space, I think the power of brand perceptions and finding creative ways to tackle important social topics can sometimes be lost on us. Admittedly, a lot of creative inspo from bigger brand campaigns can be hard to replicate on Digital PR budgets. This is a great example however of something that doesn’t have to cost a fortune while still packing a very powerful punch, and doing wonders for a brand’s image.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 29. 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 🙂