THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 49
Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 49 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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The latest guest contribution on the Digital PR Tips blog comes from Laura Bamford, Account Director at Motive PR
The Product PR Revival
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Here is the latest Digital PR news and resources from the last week that you might have missed.
BuzzStream: Can AI Mode Find Email Addresses? (A Study of 500 Journalists)
Lem-uhn: 85.5% of AI Search Results Reference Earned Media: Here’s What That Means for Your Brand
Motive PR: Best Halloween digital PR and marketing campaigns
PRmoment: 'My perfect boss would...' PR pros reveal their ideal leaders
Kapwing: The Most-Used Prompts For AI Videos and Images
Cision: PR Planning Guide: 4 Expert Tips for 2026
Grace Tranter on LinkedIn: If I was starting my career in pr, these are the Google Chrome extensions I'd download instantly
Jade Denby on LinkedIn: The Digital PR Download - A summary of the latest news and trends for Digital PR professionals
Bekki Ramsay on LinkedIn: Backlink gaps are only worth their weight in gold if they're analysed strategically...
Saskia Fryer on LinkedIn: Here are a few of the resources I use to keep my knowledge fresh and my campaigns performing
Press Gazette: Google promotes fake content to millions on Discover news platform
Ahrefs: 67% of ChatGPT’s Top 1,000 Citations Are Off-Limits to Marketers (+ More Findings)
OpenAI: New ChatGPT Web Browser Launches
The Digital PR Podcast: Is Link Building Dead? with Vince Nero
Manchester DM #9 - Thursday, November 20 · 5:45 - 9pm GMT
Five quick fire Digital PR tips to help make you better and more efficient at getting SEO results via Digital PR:
1️⃣ Adding real life case studies that are related to your data can be a great way of boosting your chances of securing coverage. For example, if you have data about popular home improvement trends, try and find a real life case study around your most popular trend to add to your release.
2️⃣ When it comes to subject lines and headlines, trust your gut more than what any tool tells you.
3️⃣ Try not to overload your outreach email with links. Generally speaking, more than 2-3 could increase your chances of ending up in a spam folder.
4️⃣ Reactive ideas don't have to be new campaigns. Finding a way to tie an existing campaign into a reactive angle can be just as, if not sometimes more effective.
5️⃣ Don't focus too hard on getting a huge numbers of ideas from brainstorms. At the end of the day, 1 great idea > 50 decent ideas.
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 GWI Gen Alpha Unfiltered Report
Audience insights reports are incredibly useful for understanding how your target audience behave, what stories will connect with them, and how to get their interest and turn them into customers. Insights for how kids behave are much harder to find, but this annual report that GWI do is a fantastic resource for understanding how Gen Alpha (8-15 year olds) behave. I shared a quick summary on LinkedIn of some of the most interesting insights which you can find here. As well as the report summary there’s also a data dashboard with a more thorough breakdown of the data.
2️⃣ Nielsen: The Gauge - TV Viewing Trends in the U.S.
When it comes to tracking TV ratings, Nielsen is the go to resource in America. As well as the weekly ratings for TV shows which we’ll come to next, they also produce a lot of really interesting reports into audience viewing habits, including this one called The Gauge which uncovers how U.S. audiences spend their time watching TV across platforms and media distributors each month. It’s a great way of seeing the comparative market share of streaming, cable, and broadcast channels, and how each have changed over the past couple of years.
3️⃣ Nielsen: Top 10
What Nielsen is more commonly used for however is their weekly TV ratings. On this page you can find the top 10 shows each week on streaming services and linear TV (they’re measured in different ways so comparing Netflix shows vs NBC for example isn’t perfect). This page also includes the top 10 companies running the most TV advertising each month.
A word of caution when using Nielsen TV ratings moving forward as a data source however, they’ve recently completely changed how they measure TV ratings, moving to a new methodology that is based on a larger sample size of viewers. The downside of this is that you can’t compare TV ratings from September 22nd 2025 to ratings before this date due to the major change in methodology used.
4️⃣ U.S. Television Database
Staying on the topic of U.S. TV ratings data, if you’re searching for historical TV ratings data, USTVDB is a great site for finding such information. As well as finding ratings and demo data for pretty much any show, the site is also a great source for creating seed lists of American TV shows.
5️⃣ Global Innovation Index 2025
The Global Innovation Index is a yearly report published by The World Intellectual Property Organization which measures innovation performance across 140 economies. The report is nearly 300 pages long and includes a massive amount of data for each country covering seven categories - institutions, human capital and research, infrastructure, market sophistication, business sophistication, knowledge and technology outputs, and creative outputs. The report has been running for 18 years which also provide lots of nice comparison points to previous years.
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 Visualizing the History of Pandemics by Visual Capitalist
📊 1,327 RDs, 559 DR 50+
Visual Capitalist is one of my favourite sources for data-led campaign inspo. As well as publishing a lot of data campaigns that brands produce with the addition of their own fabulous infographics, they also publish their own data stories. Between the two there’s a fantastic volume of amazing stories that are published, with some of the best ones shared in their daily newsletter too.
This is a really great example of a visual data-led story they produced themselves, showing how valuable content like this can be when it’s launched at the right time with a topical hook. The page originally went live in February 2020 at the start of the Covid pandemic, giving them a content asset that was about to generate a huge amount of audience interest due to the topical nature of the story, which also lends itself to being updated to provide fresh new content. I also love examples of content from sites like this that aren’t produced as PR campaigns, as it shows how great content that is genuinely interesting and helpful will get shared and earn backlinks organically.
2️⃣ Inspired by Disney Baby Names by Play Like Mum
📊 10 RDs, 10 DR 50+
Baby name campaigns aren’t exactly a unique format for a PR campaign these days, but the reality is that not every campaign we produce has to be this super innovative never been done before piece of content. Stories like this pick up coverage every single year and will continue to do so as long as Journalists and their readers engage with them (which they still do!).
I really like this example of a baby names campaign that Play Like Mum produced in 2019. The landing page is very well put together with some great graphics to make the data easy to digest, and some super insightful analysis of the data that is great inspo for anyone looking to launch their own baby names campaign.
I particularly like how they’ve looked at baby name trends over a 20 year period rather than just the most recent year, allowing them to highlight which Disney inspired names are more evergreen vs the ones trending as a result of modern releases. “Just three of the 35 names were those of villains” is a really interesting data point too.
3️⃣ Billions of Birds Migrate. Where Do They Go? by National Geographic
📊 132 RDs, 66 DR 50+
Obviously most of us won’t have the resources to create campaign pages as wonderful as this one created by National Geographic, but similar to Visual Capitalist, it’s another great example of how looking at some of the top performing pages on publications that create their own data viz stories can reveal some unique stories that serve as fantastic content inspo.
Bird migration isn’t a topic that I’ve ever really thought about much, but it becomes a very interesting one as you read the page and see the incredible interactive visuals that are a real best in class case study on how to use data viz to enhance the storytelling aspect of your campaigns.
The page currently shows as having just 10 referring domains in Ahrefs, which makes it a good example of why not taking backlink numbers as gospel is important. Also look at the timeline of referring domains to see if a page had a lot of links that are no longer listed in the current Ahrefs report.
In this example, you’ll see that the page previously had over 100 referring domains before a big drop off. By clicking on show history in the referring domains report to reveal the lost backlinks, you’ll see that they haven’t actually been lost. The page changed url and for whatever reason, many of the links to the original url before it was redirected aren’t showing for the new url in Ahrefs.
There’s a lot of skills that make up a great data analyst. For me, one of the very best ones is scepticism. Make a habit of questioning data to assess how valid and reliable it is, but also to help you find more angles to create stories around.
4️⃣ The cost of dying across the world by SunLife
📊 18 RDs, 14 DR 50+
Campaigns that genuinely grab your attention just from a page title or a headline are pretty rare but this is definitely one for me. The idea is cool, the way it’s presented makes it even more intriguing, and the execution on the campaign page is really well done from a data angle too. For this campaign in 2020, SunLife researched the cost of a funeral in 35 countries around the world to reveal that Japan is the most expensive to die in, with the average funeral costing a whopping £22,320 - 68% of the average annual salary.
As well as researching the total cost of a funeral, they’ve also analysed what percentage of the nation’s average salary that cost amounts to. I love campaigns that go a step further like this with their data analysis as it not only paints a more accurate picture of the story you’re trying to tell, but it also gives you another top 10 list which may open up a new angle to pitch with your outreach.
Thanks to the global nature of the ranking, the campaign earned links from news sites in Japan, Russia, South Africa, and New Zealand, along with coverage on Business Insider and Bloomberg three years after the campaign launched as a result of the news that Beijing was encouraging digital funerals, a great example of how old campaigns can also be repitched as a newsjacking tactic in future years.
5️⃣ Introvert Industries: Best Jobs for Introverts by Merchant Machine
📊 29 RDs, 19 DR 50+
While the landing page for this campaign is very basic, as an idea it’s an interesting concept that is built around some strong data points. In 2020, Merchant Machine revealed the best-suited jobs for introverts, and the best countries for them to live in. The ranking for the best jobs is based on a social contact score that they’ve created alongside the average annual salary and remote working capability of the job. Then the ranking for best places to live covers the number of people per sq km, wifi speed, annual salary, and monthly rent for a one bedroom apartment.
While I do like the campaign, and especially the graphics, there are some parts of the campaign that I think could be improved. Firstly, I feel that the metrics are a little bit too heavily weighted towards the idea that introverts want to be on their own all of the time (just some of the time!), and the methodology could definitely be clearer as far as how the final ranking is calculated based on the weighting of each metric. That aside however, I like this campaign and it’s a good example of how “best places to…” type campaigns can be strong performers even when you base them around a more niche topic.
And that’s a wrap for Issue 49. 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 🙂
29 October 2025
