THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 43

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 43 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: Royal cleaner stories removed by Times and Sun after authenticity questions

Get Featured: Can I pitch to journalists I don't know?

PRmoment: Are you a PR 'imposter'? You aren’t alone

Prowly: Reddit, Perplexity, and Press Releases: Where GEO Starts Today

Prowly: What is LLM Seeding: Guide to Enhancing Your AI Content Strategy

editorial.link: Relationship Link Building: How to Earn Top Backlinks

Grace Tranter on LinkedIn: If I was starting my career in pr, these are the resources I'd sign up to

Rosie Taylor on LinkedIn: The single biggest reason I won’t use a good* pitch is…

Leannne Vause on LinkedIn: How to make your experts stand out from the fake experts

Ahrefs: The Complete AI Visibility Guide for SEOs, Marketers, and Site Owners

Ahrefs: You Can’t Track AI Like Traditional Search. Here’s What to Do Instead.

BuzzStream Podcast: Redefining Link Value in the AI Era with Tamara Novitović

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

1️⃣ If your content is awesome you should be thinking far beyond just Digital PR for marketing it. Think about how you can use that content for other channels such as Social, Email, Facebook groups, Reddit, Email, Display ads, Video, OOH

2️⃣ Published a great data resource in the past that is connected to a trending topic but not currently ranking organically? Consider using PPC to give it extra short-term visibility for Journalists searching for stats around a keyword/topic.

3️⃣ Different countries have different holidays, festivities days, etc. If you're outreaching to international markets, creating a list of these days/events will help you to avoid pitching on less efficient days when the news is over saturated or people aren't working.

4️⃣ Newsjacking won’t be suitable for every client and that's ok. With new clients, establish what newsjacking resources they have and how quickly they can respond to requests to avoid using up budget on a tactic that won’t yield results.

5️⃣ "all publicity is good publicity" is bollocks.

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 Goodreads

If you’re looking for data on books and authors, Goodreads is such a good data-led resource to use thanks to its review system. For each book you can analyse the number of reviews, average star rating, and the reviews themselves which can be great for analysing the presence of certain words, sentiments, etc in book reviews. There’s also a lot of cool analysis you could do with the publication dates, book length, genres, and author, to name just a few potential content ideas using Goodreads data.

2️⃣ OldVersion.com

OldVersion.com is a really interesting site which lets you download old versions of different software (prepare for the nostalgia hit when you open the site taking you back to the good old days of chatting to your mates on MSN while you risk the future of the family computer downloading music from illegal file sharing sites like Kazaa or LimeWire). What’s also cool about the site from a data point of view is that the site lists the number of downloads for each old piece of software, which could be a cool little data-led campaign for a tech client.

3️⃣ Good Jobs First Tax Break Tracker

This Tax Break database is an archive of every disclosed tax break that states in America have issued to companies, allowing you to track how much revenue local governments forego in revenue due to tax breaks. The data dates back to 2015 and is very well tagged up which gives you plenty of analysis options. If you do use the data I would definitely read up on the way that tax breaks are disclosed (or not disclosed) as it may effect the specific type of analysis that you’re conducting.

4️⃣ Kaggle - Consumer Complaints Dataset

The Consumer Complaints Dataset is a structured collection of 14,000 complaints filed by customers in the U.S. regarding financial products and services. Definitely an interesting dataset which includes data on the bank that received the complaint, what the issue was and what product it relates to, the state the complaint was filed in, and how long it took to resolve. It’s not clear where the original data is sourced from but the great thing about Kaggle is that you can just ask any questions direct to the creators of these datasets.

5️⃣ Rephonic - Find Similar Podcasts

Rephonic collects millions of connections between podcasts from the “Listeners Also Subscribed To” data displayed in Apple Podcasts, and using that data they’ve created this tool that lets you search for a podcast and then nicely visualises podcasts with similar audiences. This could be great as a data source for a campaign but also for if you’re looking to use podcasts as an awareness channel for your brand/clients.

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 Black History Tube Map by Transport for London in partnership with Black Cultural Archives

📊 47 RDs, 27 DR 50+

I love campaigns that have a great educational hook to them, and this is a super example of that. In 2021, to honour Black History Month, Transport for London partnered with Black Cultural Archives to recreate London’s tube map with the 272 station names replaced by notable black figures from pre-Tudor times to the present day.

The campaign is really driven by the research along with the messaging behind the campaign to honour and tell the stories of influential black figures throughout British history. I think this is a really great example of how campaigns with powerful storytelling elements to them naturally lend themselves to working well across other media formats too. I’m not sure how much this was promoted beyond PR coverage, but channels like socials can be great for telling the stories of these people in a more engaging and visual format, while still making it topical enough to catch the attention of the modern reader.

2️⃣ London’s Best Commuter Towns by TotallyMoney

📊 54 RDs, 20 DR 50+

The best map campaigns are the ones that have an interesting concept from a data point of view, but also serve as a genuinely useful resource for a specific audience. This is an excellent example of a map campaign that achieves both of those things. Back in 2019, TotallyMoney created an interactive map with the aim of revealing the best places to live for people that want to live in London, but without some of the less glamorous drawbacks of actually living in London.

The map shows you the time to travel from your commuter town into London, the cost of a railway season ticket, the life satisfaction score of that town, and the average house price. The interactive elements of the map make it really user friendly and a genuinely useful resource as you can toggle the filters for each data point to find which towns are a viable option for you to relocate to. I really like how the map updates in real time as you update your search filters to quickly highlight which towns meet your criteria and where they are based on the map.

Even though the campaign is quite old now, the page still drives over 700 organic sessions a month, ranking second for “best commuter towns london” (1,000 MSV) and “commuter towns london” (500 MSV). Which is probably a good indicator of there being an opportunity for it to be replaced by a more current version with updated data. A really well crafted campaign that earned backlinks from sites such as Daily Mail, TimeOut, Metro, and Evening Standard.

3️⃣ Long commutes costing firms a week’s worth of staff productivity by VitalityHealth

📊 55 RDs, 23 DR 50+

For our next campaign the time machine is going all the way back to 2017. As PRs, our options for the number of respondents to a survey usually ranges somewhere between 500 and 2,000, so it’s pretty crazy when you spot a campaign that is based on a sample size of 34,000 workers across the UK. Here, VitalityHealth partnered with the University of Cambridge, RAND Europe and Mercer, to examine the impact of commuting, as well as flexible and home working on employee health and productivity. Yes, PRs have been doing studies on this topic since forever ago.

The survey found that employees commuting less than half an hour to get to work gain an additional seven days’ worth of productive time each year compared to those with commutes of 60 minutes or more, longer-commuting workers are 33% more likely to suffer from depression, 37% more likely to have financial concerns, and 12% more likely to report multiple dimensions of work-related stress. Workers who commuted 60 minutes or more were also 46% more likely to get less than the recommended seven hours of sleep each night, and 21% more likely to be obese.

In 2025 survey findings like that probably aren’t as newsworthy, but they definitely would have been in 2017. Despite that, the page has been consistently growing in referring domains, with nice influxes from 2019 - 2021 when the topic became a lot more newsworthy. This really shows the value of being ahead of the curve with sourcing data on topics before they start really trending, even if it is survey stats that are more than a couple of years old by that point. It’s also a good example of how, as much as we love amazing interactive landing pages, sometimes all you really need is a basic press release posted on your domain. As long as you have somewhere relevant for people to link to, that’s the main thing.

4️⃣ Does Looking at Puppies Reduce Stress? by ProDog Raw

📊 41 RDs, 14 DR 50+

Ah the good old days when PRs could just come up with a fun sounding activity and stick “get paid to” at the start of it to create a campaign almost guaranteed to help you hit your coverage goals for the month. It was hard to argue with the results though. This dream job campaign by ProDog Raw was literally just “Set an alarm to go off every hour so you will stop what you’re doing and look at a picture of a dog”, with the lucky chosen candidate earning £120 to look at puppy pics six times in a day. The study required people to wear a heart rate monitor and track if looking at pictures of dogs had a positive impact on their stress levels. Simpler times I suppose.

That said, I do like this campaign, and it does well because it hits on a strong emotional touch point, which is a key driving force behind pretty much any successful piece of content. These days that emotion most often seems to be hate and anger unfortunately rather than “aww cute puppy”. Cool data-led pieces of content are great, but don’t forget about the emotional storytelling component that any great PR campaigns needs to be able to be a hit with their target audience.

5️⃣ The Luckiest Outfits, Styles and Dances on Strictly Come Dancing by bonprix

📊 0 RDs, 0 DR 50+

So this campaign apparently didn’t get any links to the campaign page according to Ahrefs, although I have found linked coverage on Daily Express. Either way, it wasn’t a big hit, but I do think it’s a cool concept with some fun data behind it. The campaign is from 2019, when fashion brand bonprix researched what the winning combination for Strictly Come Dancing winners was (Dancing With The Stars for my U.S. subscribers). The campaign revealed the dance most likely to help the most finalists to victory (Foxtrot apparently), what dress styles and colours were luckiest for both the men and the women, and which professions had the most winning success on the show.

Even though it wasn’t a massive link earner, it’s always worth remembering that when we’re analysing campaigns based on their backlink profile, there are so many other factors to consider, such as if the page was earning unlinked coverage or links to other urls, if a similar campaign was launched at the same time and nabbed all the coverage, or if it was actually just the outreach that under-performed more so than the content idea.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 43. 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 🙂