THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 41
Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 41 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 Digital PR Podcast: How AI is Changing Journalism: PR, Ethics & Fake Experts with Rob Waugh
Harriet Scott on LinkedIn: 25 lessons from 25 years working in national media
Bekki Ramsay on LinkedIn: Tips to uncover hidden PR coverage
Saskia Fryer on LinkedIn: Key PR dates for September
David White on LinkedIn: The easiest way to unlock Reddit data at scale to fuel your PR, social, and onsite content ideas
PR.co: How to Improve your visibility in Google AI Overviews
PRmoment: What are PRs using AI for, exactly?
Connective3: A guide to Digital PR in Germany
Bottle: The 10 Best Halloween Marketing Campaigns & Why They Work
Hunter: 4 Steps To Great AI-Crafted Emails In Hunter
City AM: Mass hallucinations: How I caught a rogue AI reporter
Ahrefs: Google AI Mode: All You Need to Know
Ahrefs: 81 AI SEO Statistics for 2025
Search Engine Roundtable: Google August 2025 Spam Update Impact Felt Quickly
Crawling Mondays: Digital PR & Authority Building in the Age of AI Search w/ Mark Rofe and Gareth Hoyle
Propellernet Webinar: AI Without The Gimmicks: Strategic Use in Brand Building & Immersive Media
Five quick fire Digital PR tips to help make you better and more efficient at getting SEO results via Digital PR:
1️⃣ The average person these days has an attention span of 8 seconds. Design your outreach emails so that the Journalist can get your key points within these 8 seconds, otherwise there's a good chance they'll stop caring and move on.
2️⃣ Realistically, a lot of us won’t always have time to hyper-personalise every single pitch. Instead pick out your strongest and/or most desired publications and split what extra time you have into more in-depth research and construction of those pitches.
3️⃣ You can't hyper personalise your outreach in just one way for all of the U.S. There are many differences between states - time zone, slangs, regional press opportunities, attitudes, culture and much more. Keep these in mind if you're heavily targeting U.S. coverage.
4️⃣ Most news sites have a morning briefing to discuss articles with their editors. If you want to get your pitch in beforehand ask them what time they have these meetings and/or what time they start work at. This can work well after you've just sent them a campaign they covered.
5️⃣ Search for topics rather than terms in Google Trends where possible. Terms will will show you results for that exact search whereas topics will combine results in other languages and spelling variations/mistakes for a wider overview.
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 Life expectancy for local areas of Great Britain
This ONS dataset details the average life expectancy for every local area in England, Scotland, and Wales, and is the type of dataset that could be used in so many different campaigns, especially any relating to health and the best places to live. The data is broken down by gender and also includes 20 years of data allowing you to also analyse the places where life expectancy is increasing the most and least.
2️⃣ Sickness absence in the UK labour market
Another very interesting ONS dataset, this one is data all around absence rates of UK workers due to sickness. The data includes number of work days lost, by country and region, sex and age group, and employment type, as well as data on certain specific illnesses. The regional data makes for some really interesting localised data insights, and again there’s a large range of data for previous years allowing you to spotlight trends over time.
3️⃣ Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) involving UK companies
This next ONS dataset is a very useful data source for tracking mergers and acquisitions involving UK companies. The data is updated every three months and provides a breakdown of the total number of acquisitions by year and quarter, the value of the acquisitions, how many involved foreign companies with a breakdown by continent, along with data specifically for sales of one UK company to another UK company. The data dates all the way back to 2003.
4️⃣ Australian National Health Survey
The National Health Survey by the Australian Bureau of Statistics is a really thorough breakdown of different health conditions in Australia, with data available on a state and territory level as well as national, great for producing those localised angles. This survey is great for finding insights such as the volume of smokers and vapers, alcohol consumption, the average weight of the local population, and much much more.
5️⃣ Light Pollution Map
Light pollution is an interesting metric that could be used for a number of different index campaigns, particularly travel related. This tool provides you with light pollution data for locations around the world, and also has a handy breakdown of light pollution stats by country.
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 Barbie Reimagined As Her Actual Age For Her 60th Birthday by Lumen
This campaign by Lumen is such a good example of how effective creative PR formats can be when done right. I think campaigns like this are a big opportunity for Digital PRs to adopt more frequently rather than always focusing almost exclusively on data campaigns and expert commentary. They don’t always have to be big budget campaigns that involve massive activations in the middle of town or at a train station either. Although I do wonder how this worked for Lumen from a copyright angle.
Here, Lumen have created reimagined designs of what Barbie would look like as she celebrates her 60th birthday. As well as the designs themselves looking amazing, there’s also a great story behind the campaign with Lumen celebrating the beauty of natural ageing and being empowered in your own skin, while also fighting unhealthy beauty standards in marketing and advertising.
2️⃣ The Most Popular Beer In Every Country by VinePair
📊 125 RDs, 72 DR 50+
This campaign by VinePair is now over a decade old, but it still holds strong as a really great example of how to execute a map campaign. When I first opened this campaign from my archive I expected it to be a search volume campaign (half thinking it was the campaign that had Corona as the most popular beer based on search volume right in the middle of the pandemic), but I was pleasantly surprised to find that the map is actually based on the beer brand with the most market share in each country, sourced by a number of different localised reports.
The campaign was produced as a follow up to VinePair’s ranking of the most popular beers in America, which I really love as an example of taking a successful idea and making it work harder to generate even more results. Great ideas that connect with people are hard to come up with, so when you do have one, do everything you can to keep getting more juice out of it.
One of the big benefits of map campaigns is their ability to earn coverage around the world, but not all map campaigns actually achieve this. This one however earned links from major U.S. and UK sites such as HuffPost, Daily Mail, and The Economist, as well as top news publications in countries such as France, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Japan, and many more.
3️⃣ The most name-dropped cars in music by Uswitch
📊 7 RDs, 4 DR 50+
I love finding campaigns with creative uses of data sources which is why I really like this campaign that Uswitch put together in 2021. They analysed song lyrics to reveal which car brands are most frequently mentioned in songs, revealing that the most name-dropped car brand is Mercedes (could be skewed by it also being used as a person’s name potentially), followed by Lamborghini, Bentley, Ferrari, and Porsche.
They also analysed which artists name-dropped the most car brands, but I think there’s scope for a lot more analysis of lyrics data in campaigns like this, for example, looking at the top brands by genre, trends over time, the most on one album, etc.
Performance wise it doesn’t look as though the campaign was a huge hit, although based on Ahrefs data it did have 19 referring domains at its peak, many of which have dropped off now. This can happen in Ahrefs for a number of reasons, sometimes because the page gets removed/redirected, or sometimes Ahrefs just drops it from their index (usually with low quality pages). I do love music campaigns from a data and creativity pov, but they can be notoriously difficult to earn links at scale with.
4️⃣ Wine Travel Index by lastminute.com
📊 24 RDs, 8 DR 50+
The beauty of index campaigns is that there are so many directions you can take them, and this is a really good example of one that hyper focuses on a specific topic to create a really well tailored index. Here, lastminute.com created an index ranking the best wine countries in the world for wine lovers to explore on their travels. The index doesn’t get overcomplicated, focusing on three key metrics that nicely cover both quality and quantity angles - the number of vineyeards open to the public, the number of wine tasting experiences, and the number of wine related awards won.
Unfortunately the campaign page is no longer live and Wayback Machine isn’t always great for loading interactive functionality but it definitely looks like a well executed landing page. I particularly like the ease with which you can re-sort the ranking by each specific metric, and the layout of the breakdown for each of the top ranking countries. The campaign found Italy to be the best destination for wine lovers, followed by France and Spain.
5️⃣ Chief Dipping Officer by Birds Eye
📊 8 RDs, 7 DR 50+
I’m not sure if a campaign like this would work these days but I do have a soft spot for some dream job campaigns that just rely purely on brand power and harmless fun. In 2021, Birds Eye set out to hire a “Chief Dipping Officer”, paying someone £1,000 to test chicken dippers with a range of different sauces.
It’s very simple and formulaic but I do really like the added touches that turn it into a very fun brand story. For example, adding a year’s supply of chicken dippers to the perks, the chosen candidate leading the “dedicated dipping department”, and applying via a cover letter detailing your “experience and passion for Chicken Dippers”.
They’ve also included some nice survey stats finding that 84% reckon dipping sauce is absolutely necessary when it comes to enjoying chicken dippers, 42% say it's unacceptable to double-dip, and 60% rank tomato ketchup as the best dipping sauce. Sometimes PR can touch on some serious topics in a really impactful way, and sometimes it can be childish fun like this.
And that’s a wrap for Issue 41. 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 🙂
3 September 2025
