THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 37

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 37 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: AI Overviews cutting publisher clickthrough rates by 50%, new report finds

Minty Digital: 31,711 links later. Lessons from 2025’s biggest travel PR campaigns

Get Featured: Make journalists want to work with you

Cedarwood Digital: Reimagining E-E-A-T: How Ethos, Pathos & Logos Supercharge SEO Campaigns

Motive PR: How to land product reviews in top-tier media for AI visibility

Motive PR: Digital PR tips for businesses in the travel industry

Minty Digital: Will Posting on Reddit Help Your Brand in AI Search?

Semrush: AI Mentions: How to Get LLMs to Mention Your Brand

BrightEdge: Brand Visibility | ChatGPT and Google AI Approaches by Industry

Siege Media: How To Measure PR ROI in the Age of AI: A Framework for Proving Business Impact

Press Gazette: Reddit claims top spot as most cited domain in AI-generated answers

Ahrefs: Is SEO Dead? Real Data vs. Internet Hysteria

Search Engine Roundtable: Danny Sullivan Steps Away From Google Search Liaison Role

The Digital PR Podcast: Using HARO To Navigate The Expert Economy w/ Brett Farmiloe

BuzzStream Podcast: Building Your Website’s Topical Authority with Kevin Indig

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

1️⃣ Don't forget that not all U.S. Journalists are on the same time zone. If you want to make sure your pitch lands in their inbox at a certain time, try and find their Twitter profile or their profile on a media database and there will usually be a location in there to tell you what time zone they're in.

2️⃣ Always test send your outreach emails to yourself and team members before sending. Remember to not just open them on one device, also test them on mobile vs desktop and laptop screen vs bigger monitor screen.

3️⃣ If you're unsure what JournoRequest responses should look like, run your own JournoRequest and see what kind of responses you get. This will give you an idea of what works well and what doesn't.

4️⃣ All the outreach tips and hacks in the world don’t mean anything if the story itself isn’t interesting and relevant enough. It’ll help get your pitch read but the end result will still be the same.

5️⃣ Interactive assets are awesome for turning coverage into links because writers can’t copy them into their post. This means that they almost have to link to the page as an extension of their story.

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 2024 Top Baby Names in England and Wales

Last week ONS released their annual baby names report for England and Wales, revealing that the most popular boys name is Muhammad, and the most popular girls name is Olivia. Baby names content are a popular format for PR campaigns so my advice is to try and be as creative as possible when using this data source. Find names linked to a trending topic, film, show, etc, and also look for trends in how names have grown or declined over the years.

2️⃣ Countries with the most mafia style groups

This Organized Crime Index ranking of the countries and regions with the most mafia style groups is an interesting ranking that could be of good use as a data source for ranking the safest/most dangerous countries to live in. The index analyses 32 different metrics which look at crime factors such as drug trade and financial crimes, along with resilience indicators such as law enforcement and national policies which also factor in how well equipped each country is to deal with mafia style crime activity.

3️⃣ 2024 TikTok Music Impact Report

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of years you’ll be aware of the massive impact TikTok has on trending music. This report produced by TikTok and Luminate is a really interesting data driven deep dive into TikTok’s impact on music trends, with lots of audience insights into how music fans behave and discover music via the app. Whether you’re using it to spark ideas, create expert quotes based around the stats, or using the audience insights to better understand user behaviours, there’s a lot of valuable info in this report (which granted has been self commissioned by TikTok so probably involves a small degree of self bias).

4️⃣ The Fortune Global 500

Each year Fortune publishes their list of the world’s top 500 companies with the largest revenue, and the 2025 list was released just last week. As well as providing lots of reactive opportunities, the list is also great to use from a data pov as it provides plenty of different filtering options within the site, which makes it very easy to quickly produce your own analysis of the results. The lists now go back to 1995 so you have 30 years of comparison points, and you can also filter the data by metrics such as companies with a female CEO, how long companies have been on the list, and their number of employees.

5️⃣ The Fortune 500

As well as the global 500 list, Fortune also list the top 500 companies in the U.S. This list has been going since 1996, and likewise has lots of great data points to analyse by.

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 Shazam reveals most searched-for songs of all time

I love clever examples of internal data being used for PR campaigns, and this was a particularly good one from Shazam, who back in 2020 shared with the world what their most searched for songs of all time on their app were. Obviously not every brand will be able to put out a story with this type of data that has such a big global mainstream audience, but most of the time that doesn’t actually matter. The beauty of internal data is that the audience that it will be most interesting to when used effectively in a PR campaign are who your potential customers are. If you’re a small business, or operating in a smaller niche, you don’t need coverage on sites with a huge mainstream audience reach in order to see results - everything is relative.

Unfortunately Shazam don’t tend to create landing pages for their data campaigns, which isn’t a big issue given it’s an app. As well as this story they’ve also done other similar ones over the years making valuable use of their internal data, for example this story revealing Drake to be the most Shazamed artist of all time (as of 2022). Another great thing about internal data campaigns is that they’re essentially brand stories, and can sometimes end up with essentially an advertorial like at the end of the BBC News coverage linked above.

2️⃣ Side Hustle Economies by Canva

📊 26 RDs, 9 DR 50+

This next campaign that was produced by Canva back in 2021, is an industry report on the side hustle economy. As part of the data, Canva revealed most popular and most lucrative side hustles for part time freelancers. The data is based on Fiverr listings which, from someone who is a freelancer, isn’t the most reliable data source for this, but it does the job.

What I really like about this campaign is that Canva knows who their target audience for this is. They know why people use Canva, and what they use it for. Which is a really good starting point for any brand when creating PR campaigns. Rather than thinking about a topic that you want to create content around, research and analyse who your target audience is, what type of content they’re interested in reading about, and what publications they find those stories on.

3️⃣ The most popular celebrity style inspirations worldwide by Money.co.uk

📊 24 RDs, 16 DR 50+

Our next campaign is from Money.co.uk, who in 2020 used Google search data to reveal the most popular fashion brands around the world, and the most popular celebrity style inspirations. Personally, I don’t really like using search volume data to rank anything as the most “popular”. It’s not really popularity that search data gives you insight into. The example I always go to is that Lance Armstrong is maybe the most searched for cyclist, but he definitely isn’t the most “popular”. So the first part ranking the most popular brands just based on their search volume figures I don’t love all that much.

What I do like a lot better however is the second part of the data that analyses searches for celebs followed by the word outfit, which I think is a much better use of search data, purely because of the search intent. Just searching the name of something can have so many different intents from the person searching it. But when you go more long tail with your searches, the search intent becomes a bit less ambiguous, as is the case with adding the word outfit after the name (I think style might have worked better but that’s nitpicking). Now it’s a lot clearer that the people are searching for outfit inspo, and ranking the celebs with the most searches in each country from people wanting to look up and probably copy their fashion style makes for a much more interesting story too in my opinion.

4️⃣ What Dinner Will Look Like in the Next 100 Years, According to Scientists (and Sci-Fi Authors) by Bon Appétit

📊 54 RDs, 19 DR 50+

Most of the time we focus on brands for sources of content inspo that turn into effective link building assets. Publications publish their own original content too, and a lot of it can be really great sources of creative inspo to spark content ideas. This is one from 2022 that I thought was a really clever concept.

Bon Appétit created an article with futuristic imagery that (with a bit of a tongue in cheek approach) predicted what popular meals will look like in 10, 20 and 100 years time. It’s a fun and creative bit of content, and the images give it a high share-ability factor, which is always key to any type of PR campaign. And just because it’s published on a magazine type publication, doesn’t mean that other news publications won’t share and link to the piece, as has been done with this piece via New York Times, Mashed, and Quartz.

5️⃣ No, you choose by Currys

📊 7 RDs, 5 DR 50+

This final campaign produced by Currys has one of the best looking landing pages that I’ve ever seen for a campaign. There’s definitely an argument to be made that it’s more style over substance, but regardless, props to whoever designed and built the campaign page.

The campaign itself explores the topic of choice paralysis when picking a film or TV show to watch, with some good uses of survey data to reveal insights into audience behaviour. The fact that on average people decide on whether to give up on a TV show after just 34 minutes is kinda crazy to me, but I guess not every pilot episode can be as good as the first 10 minutes of Friday Night Lights. Unfortunately someone copied the wrong text into the methodology section, but I think we get the gist of it from the rest of the page 😂.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 37. 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 🙂