THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 36

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 36 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

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

Screaming Frog: Out of Cite: Why Your PR Wins May Be Missing From AI Search

PR Lab: 150+ PR Statistics You Need to Understand the Industry in 2025

Reboot: Digital PR Statistics 2025

Motive PR: Digital PR Statistics 2025

BuzzStream: PR Trends: The Shifts You Can’t Ignore in 2025

Jessica Pardoe: The Terrible PR Career Advice I Now Choose To Ignore

Digitaloft: How to calculate your brand’s (or category’s) total organic revenue potential

JBH: How to Report on AI Overviews in Digital PR Campaigns

JBH: What Google’s AI Overviews Mean for Digital PR (and How Your Brand Can Adapt)

Motive PR: Using AI to improve digital PR campaigns and streamline processes

Motive PR: How affiliate marketing and 'Skimlinks' could affect your backlink strategy

fatjoe: The Future Of Link Building: Statistics And Takeaways You Should Know

Search Engine Land: In GEO, brand mentions do what links alone can’t

Ahrefs: New Study: AI Assistants Prefer to Cite “Fresher” Content (17 Million Citations Analyzed)

James Watkins on LinkedIn: Links Are Not Dead: Why digital PR, brand PR, and SEO must converge in the age of AI

Richard Paul on LinkedIn: Ways to overcome creative blocks

Search Engine Land: Google releases AI Mode in the UK

Press Gazette: Ladbible launches Betches in UK to talk ‘with, not to’ millennial and Gen Z women

BuzzStream Podcast: Rewriting PR for the AI Era: From Links to Brand Signals w/ Beth Nunnington

Digital PR Explained Podcast: From Spy Balloons to Swifties with Aliza Bran on Her Wildest PR Pitches

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

1️⃣ If you have a trending news story that you want someone to see asap, take a look at who is publishing articles that day on your target site. Not all Journalists will be working a traditional Monday-Friday 9-5 shift.

2️⃣ Reactive PR isn't just a short-term strategy. Keep doing it right and even if you're not landing coverage with every attempt, Journalists will remember you if you keep sending them helpful reactive comments, and they may just come straight to you in the future for relevant opps.

3️⃣ If you don’t have an existing large budget for big Digital PR campaigns, show your client/boss what you can do on a smaller budget first. Focus on reactive PR, Journo Requests, and creating stories with quick and free data.

4️⃣ Analyse the backlink profile of competitors as well as your own. This will highlight not only the links they have that you don't, but also the links you can target that neither of you have, allowing you to extend that link gap more in your favour.

5️⃣ You'll get better SEO results from producing content that is consistently building a steady number of links month after month rather than having a one hit wonder campaign once a year.

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 Cirium Airports and Airlines On-Time Performance 2024 Review

This annual report by Cirium is full of interesting insights if you’re ideating for a Travel client for example. The report is an overview of the reliability of airports and airlines based on the percentage of flights that arrive on time, with insights including the most reliable and unreliable airlines and airports, what countries they’re in, data breakdowns of top airlines including the worst months for late flights, and the worst airlines in each continent for cancelled flights. The report is released each year around December/January, but they also release monthly reports too.

2️⃣ OECD Pensions Outlook 2024

The OECD Pensions Outlook report is another great industry report that is released on an annual basis and is full of data-led insights. The report is released in December of each year and includes a massive amount of global data points across the 200 page document, with some great insights that could be used for global index or map campaigns, such as the percentage of the working population with a pension, how pensions are taxed in different countries, and much more. These reports can also be great resources for spotting trends to create expert commentary campaigns around.

3️⃣ America’s Health Rankings 2024 Senior Report

Most audience insights reports that you find will be based on data for the general population, but reports that focus on a specific demographic can be super valuable for really hyper targeted insights into a specific group. This report from America’s Health Rankings is a really excellent data roundup on the health of adults aged 65+ in America. The report is a lot more user friendly than many industry reports but you can also easily download all of the data as a csv file too. Some of my favourite data points in the report include the rate of drug deaths by state, which states are most on target to meet Healthy People 2023 targets, and an overall ranking of the healthiest and least healthy states for seniors.

4️⃣ World’s Wealthiest Cities Report 2025

Henley & Partners’ wealthiest cities report is a great insight into where the super rich live, and which cities are growing at the fastest pace as wealth hubs. The report is broken down into a series of individual reports including the cities with the most millionaires, the cities with the most centi-millionaires, as well as the most expensive cities to live in.

5️⃣ We Are Social Digital 2025 Report

The Digital 2025 report by We Are Social is an absolutely massive deep dive into the state of digital media use and consumption around the world, with big breakdowns by a multitude of individual countries too. The report is a crazy 640 pages so includes way too much to cover all the main things, but if you want to understand how audiences use the internet and different social media apps, this report is definitely one for you.

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 Worst Abused Athletes in the World by Pickwise

📊 73 RDs, 33 DR 50+

I’ve shared a few campaigns created around sentiment analysis of social media posts in recent issues, and this is another one that I think is a really effective example of the format. In 2021, Pickwise analysed the number of tweets from the past 12 months that included a series of abusive terms aimed at the most popular athletes in the world.

Data led campaigns like this based around the top sportspeople are always going to have a strong appeal to Journalists because they know that anytime they can put a certain person’s name in a headline it will get more clicks than your average story will, particularly when you can combine that with a strong and relatable emotional storytelling plot like “the most hated athletes”.

The campaign page is pretty basic, which is usually fine, but I do think there’s a bit of a missed opportunity with this campaign to create a more engaging landing page for the user to explore the data. For example, analysis of the most abused players in each sport, and also looking at the count of abusive messages as a percentage of total posts about that athlete rather than just an absolute count. The methodology section is also slightly lacking with information missing on examples of the abusive terms that were analysed in the study, and 75 athletes doesn’t seem a great sample size for a study like this across so many different sports (especially when one of those 75 apparently was Stan Collymore who ended up as the 13th most abused athlete in the world on Twitter in 2021).

It is a very cool concept though which clearly performed very well at the time with links on sites such as New York Times, The Independent, GiveMeSport, and SPORTbible. It’s also one that can easily be replicated too, in a way that organically gives you so many different angles across different sports (there’s also a potential gender and race angle to be added to the analysis too). A similar study has also recently been published which you can view here.

2️⃣ The World’s Most Physically Demanding Landmarks by PureGym

📊 38 RDs, 21 DR 50+

This campaign by PureGym ranking the world’s most physically demanding landmarks is one of my favourite examples of an index campaign which uses very creative ranking factors, but can also be a really genuinely useful resource for their target audience. To rank the landmarks that are the most physically demanding, PureGym analysed the number of steps required to experience the landmark to its fullest, the elevation change during the ascent of the landmark, and the average temperature of the location.

I love those metrics as a creative approach to choosing ranking factors for an index (especially the number of steps) that are not only great data points but also work really well together, which isn’t always the case with index campaigns where you might get some nice data points but they don’t necessarily compliment each other in an index format that well.

Along with the methodology side of the idea being on the money, I also love how well this works from a brand point of view. PureGym (or more specifically the PR team that created this campaign) know that their customers will be interested in hiking destinations, and which trips can also be a fitness exercise. So it’s super on brand, but it also has a great real life use as a combined travel and fitness resource. I’m also a big fan of the campaign page adding to the data findings with expert tips on preparing for a physically demanding walk, and how to recover the day after - great for showcasing those E-E-A-T signals, and giving you extra angles to pitch around the expert tips.

3️⃣ The Most Dangerous & Safest States for Online Dating in the US by PrivacyJournal

📊 333 RDs, 39 DR 50+

This is another index campaign that I think works really well from both a data point of view, and a brand perspective. The campaign by PrivacyJournal ranks the best and worst states in America for online dating safety (bad news if you live in Nevada). From a brand point of view, PrivacyJournal describe themselves as a brand that “help to protect your privacy in the digital age”, so targeting people interested in online safety definitely works for them in terms of creating brand awareness in front of their target audience, while also creating positive brand messaging.

It’s effective from a methodology point of view too, with the index ranking states based on the number of reported romance scams, identity theft cases, fraud cases, registered sex offenders in each state, and the prevalence of STDs, as well as violent crime. You could perhaps argue it’s more focused on safety in the dating world either online or offline than specifically online dating, but it works more than well enough, and also has bonus points for a really clear methodology that links to the data sources used (always great for saving us the effort of finding them ourselves, while also helping to spark some creative triggers for our own ideas). Again, I also love the inclusion of the expert advice at the end on how to spot dating scams and stay safe online.

The backlink profile of this campaign is also a really good case study in the flaws of DR/DA as a metric. You could easily look at roughly 90% of the linking domains being under DR 50 (and a lot under DR 30 too) being a sign of a lot of average links from low quality domains, but most of them are actually links from U.S. radio stations. Many of these radio station sites don’t have great DR/DA metrics, but anyone that isn’t a robot can tell that they’re obviously good sites to get links from, and more importantly, they’re sites that actual people read.

4️⃣ Get paid $100K to swim at pools across the country! by Swimply

📊 60 RDs, 25 DR 50+

I always say this when I include a dream job campaign here - I get it, they’re marmite campaigns. Not all of them work for me, but I really liked this one, mostly because Swimply have turned it into such a massive role that it does genuinely feel like a dream job, and not one of those “we’ll pay you a few hundred quid to watch some films” type of dream jobs.

The role itself, created by a site that lets you find and rent private pools, is for a Chief Pools Officer and involves spending the summer visiting all 50 U.S. states and testing out Swimply pools, and even hosting pool parties across the country, with a guaranteed $50k income to cover expenses, and an extra $50k in performance bonuses based on content engagement. So basically a full time influencer role. Now whether the role ever existed or was just purely done for PR coverage is a fair and valid question, especially when the dream job role looks as great as this one. But regardless, it works super well from a brand perspective, and earned them links on 60 sites, including Travel + Leisure, The Sun, and Student Beans.

5️⃣ Sports Stars Earnings per Minute by OLBG

📊 38 RDs, 18 DR 50+

The final campaign in this week’s issue comes from OLBG, who in 2020 ranked the best paid sports stars based on how much they earned per minute of game time in their respective sports. It’s a cool concept for sure, and Journalists love writing stories about how much famous athletes earn, and this puts a creative spin on that angle. I do think ranking combat sports against other sports isn’t the fairest comparison point ever, but it clearly works, and it gives you a strong main hook around McGregor earning £37.8m per minute (not too sure about the decision to extrapolate his total earnings of £25.2m since he only had 40 seconds of Octagon time, it’s not like he actually earned £37.8m).

As I referenced with the first campaign in this issue, campaigns like this that you can repeat across multiple sports can be extremely valuable in seamlessly creating lots of different data points and angles to pitch to a really wide range of sports Journalists that cover the respective sports. The majority of the linking coverage seems to be based around the top 10 list headlined by McGregor, so I’m not sure if they expanded the dataset or the outreach much, but there’s definitely scope to do so with a campaign idea like this.

The landing page has been redirected now and the Wayback version of it doesn’t load the data properly, so I’ve linked to a piece of coverage covering the campaign, but with links from sites such as The Sun, talkSPORT, and GiveMeSport, it’s clear the campaign was a strong performer of an idea.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 36. 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 🙂