THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 32

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 32 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.

Muck Rack: The State of Journalism 2025

Get Featured: Pitching is hard at the moment - here's what we can do about it

BuzzStream: Do Certain Sites Engage More With PRs?

Ragan: 30 of the best AI prompts for better communications work

Distinctly: Overcoming the challenge of staying authentic in reactive PR

Distinctly: State of Journalism in France Survey Part 2

Prowly: 9 Best Journalist & Media Databases Compared

Prowly: 17 Top Competitor Analysis Tools to Track Your Competition

Press Gazette: Reach launches series of Substack-based newsletters in bid to broaden audience

The PR Hotline: How To Overcome Imposter Syndrome and Thrive in Your PR Career w/ Amy Irvine

Linking Out Loud Podcast: What Journalists Wish PR Pros Knew w/ Ria Wolstenholme

Linking Out Loud Podcast: How AI Is Redefining Good PR (And The Ethical Considerations Behind This) w/ Raquel Pinto

Digital PR Explained Podcast: I Read Cision’s 2025 Media Report So You Don’t Have To

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

1️⃣ If you see a relevant Journo request but you can’t provide them with the comments that they’re looking for, consider sending them some relevant data you have which may also be useful for the story they’re working on. The Journo request will give you an idea of what topic they're writing about, and your data piece may be strong enough and relevant enough to get a mention in their story.

2️⃣ The Data Visualisation Catalogue is a great resource for learning about the correct charts to use to present your data in the best and clearest way - https://datavizcatalogue.com/.

3️⃣ Think of nofollow links this way, if a site like The Daily Mail nofollow 90% of their external links, do you really think Google are ignoring all of those links? That would make a HUGE gap in its algorithm. Do nofollow links on Betty's Baking Blog get ignored? Sure, probably. On The Daily Mail? Far less likely (imo anyway).

4️⃣ Open rates can be a very misleading metric. If you want to check if a specific Journalist has opened your email, check the timestamp on the open. If it's at the same time you sent the email, there's a good chance it's software "opening" the email not the Journalist. For example, Apple's Mail Privacy Protection automatically fetches and "open" emails before they're delivered to the person's inbox.

5️⃣ Proceed with caution when it comes to clickbait subject lines. It may increase your open rate for that one email but can damage your reputation and lower open rates in the long run.

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 PEI 300: The world’s largest private equity firms

The PEI 300 is an annual list of the world’s 300 largest private equity firms, which just released the 2025 version of the report. The ranking is based on the amount of private equity direct investment capital raised from third-party investors, and could make for some interesting analysis for a finance client for example. The report is free, although you do have to register an account to download the full report.

2️⃣ Global Tech Talent Guidebook 2025

The Global Tech Talent Guidebook is a massive report on the state of people working in tech in major countries and cities around the world. Some of the interesting insights that the report includes are the amount of office space, rent prices, and occupation rate in key markets, the markets with the most AI trained tech talent and job postings for AI skilled workers, which countries have the most universities in the top 1,000 rankings, and which countries have the highest percentage of people with a bachelor’s degree or higher. On the report summary there’s a map that also provides some really useful data for major cities on the amount of tech talent available, the price of operating in the city, and venture capital funding available.

3️⃣ SIPRI Military Expenditure Database

The SIPRI Military Expenditure Database gives the annual military spending of countries since 1949, and uses a number of different metrics that allow you to analyse the scale of each country’s spend in different ways. For example, along with the absolute spending figures for each country, it is also broken down by as a percentage of the nation’s GDP, by per capita, and as a percentage of the government’s overall spend.

4️⃣ U.S. Census: National Population by Characteristics: 2020-2024

The latest national population figures for the U.S. have been released this month, detailing the population numbers by age, gender, race, and hispanic origin. Population figures are great for providing your campaigns with better analysis by weighting the results on a even playing field, but they’re also really useful for helping build out user persona’s of your key target audience. The reports show quarterly changes from the start of the decade, and are also available at a state level, county level, and metro level.

5️⃣ U.S. Census: Languages Spoken at Home and Ability to Speak English

Another really interesting U.S. Census dataset that has recently been released this month. This one details how many Americans speak over 1,300 different languages, offering great insight into the most common foreign languages in the U.S., along with the top 15 languages spoken in each state. Definitely some interesting analysis that you could do with this dataset!

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 Online T&Cs word counts compared to famous books by Which

📊 28 RDs, 9 DR 50+

There’s been a few campaigns centred around the ridiculous lengths of website’s terms and conditions policies over the years that I’ve really liked, this being one of them. Stupidly long T&Cs are something pretty much everyone can relate to which makes for a really great topic to create a PR story around. Not only is it relatable but it also produces a pretty unanimous reaction - again, any topic that is known for annoying or confusing people is a fantastic starting point for a campaign idea.

I really like campaigns that take a single piece of data and find creative comparison points to make the data more interesting and easier for the average person to understand. Here, Which compared the word count of T&Cs to famous Shakespeare books to put into context just how long they are.

Paypal’s T&Cs being over 36,000 words long? Doesn’t really mean whole lot by itself, and definitely not a great PR headline. Paypal’s T&Cs are longer than Hamlet and Macbeth? Now that’s looking a lot more like a PR headline!

2️⃣ UK's Best Cities For Bottomless Brunching by The Bottle Club

📊 17 RDs, 9 DR 50+

Digital PRs love a travel themed Index campaign, and there’s a good reason why. At a time when so many campaign formats are becoming less reliable for producing client pleasing results, Index campaigns have produced consistently good results for years and years. The beauty of them is that you naturally have loads of hyper focused angles built into your results, whether it be for the top ranking places overall, or the top (and if applicable worst) ranking places for each individual metric.

I really liked this example of a travel themed Index campaign by The Bottle Club that ranked the best cities in the UK for bottomless brunching (if for no other reason than the “Best of the Brunch” pun). The ranking factors are great but I do think just looking at 15 cities is a little on the low side. The overall index scores all being so high with the top city having a 100/100 score is a bit confusing too. I do however love the graphics, and especially the restaurant recommendations for the top ranked cities.

Campaigns like this are golden for targeting regional news sites, as evidenced by the landing page getting non-syndicated links from top news sites in Liverpool, Bristol, Leicester, Leeds, Manchester, and more.

3️⃣ The climate impact of trending food & drink by USwitch

📊 9 RDs, 5 DR 50+

I’ll be honest, the carbon footprint of food and drink items is a bit of a weird data point for me that I don’t truly understand, but I do love creative data sources that are used in unique ways for PR stories. In this campaign, USwitch ran 72 trending food and drinks through the My Emissions Food Emissions Calculator, breaking each down by its ingredients to get the overall carbon emissions of each food/drink, with the results finding that cheeseburgers are especially high contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

I’m a big advocate for campaign ideas that find clever ways to combine two topics together as it’s a great way to expand the reach of your campaign’s audience, both in terms of Journalists for your media list, and the people reading the story that you want to get your brand in front of. This campaign didn’t get a ton of coverage from food and drink sites, but the environmental angle did, showing the benefit of having a story that isn’t solely reliant on just one media sector.

4️⃣ TikTok’s most popular DIY trends and the ones professionals say you should avoid by Confused.com

📊 21 RDs, 16 DR 50+

No matter what industry you’re working in, there’s a very high chance that you can find a way to utilise TikTok trends as part of your content strategy. Not all trends and hacks that gain traction on TikTok are actually good though. Some can be dangerous, counter productive, and just flat out bad advice for anyone to be following. The good part about that is they offer a great opportunity for you to use your brand’s real experts to spotlight which TikTok trends people should actually be cautious of.

This campaign by Confused.com is a good example of how to produce a PR campaign that does that. Ideally you’ll be using an internal expert, but in the right circumstances working with an external expert is just as effective (as long as they are a genuine expert in the appropriate field). Here, they consulted with a carpenter and joiner to reveal which of the most popular TikTok DIY trends at the time you should avoid by ranking how much they would recommend the trend on a scale of 1-5, finding that 39% of the trends they analysed could likely damage your home.

Formats like this are great because you can easily replicate them across other industries, and are a fantastic way of showcasing your brand’s expertise and authority on a topic, in a way that genuinely helps your target audience.

5️⃣ Food Color Map by Just Eat Poland

📊 10 RDs, 4 DR 50+

This final campaign is by the Polish version of Just Eat, Pyszne.pl, who created colour palettes of the most popular dishes in 150 countries around the world. If I’m being honest, I’m not a huge fan of colour palette campaigns, but I do think it works well here. To start with, they determined which dishes had the most reviews in each country, and then based on that used a colour palette generator to isolate the colours that stand out the most in each dish.

Map campaigns like this can be great for getting links from a variety of different nations, as evidenced by this campaign earning backlinks from high authority news publications in Nigeria, Romania, Spain, Slovakia, and Poland.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 32. 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 🙂