THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 52
Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 52 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.
Unpacked is a monthly newsletter from NeoMam Studios that covers campaigns, methodologies, and approaches to creativity. Presented as a conversation between two of our team members, it's designed for anyone looking to strengthen their outreach and ideation skills, whether working in an agency, in-house, or as a freelancer.
This week we had two posts from myself on the Digital PR Tips blog, and a secret spreadsheet of 250 PR campaigns.
The first blog is 250 Data Sources That Can Be Used for PR Campaigns
And the second one is a 2025 update to my Christmas PR campaigns round up that I originally posted last year - 28 of My Favourite Christmas PR Campaigns
Finally, I also put together all 250 campaigns that I’ve shared and analysed so far in this newsletter into a spreadsheet which you can access here
Want to contribute a post of your own to the Digital PR Tips blog? If you have an idea for a topic that you want to write about, please fill in this quick form here.
Here is the latest Digital PR news and resources from the last week that you might have missed.
Propellernet: The 360° Travel Search Experience
Off The Record: How to Write Email Subject Lines Journalists Actually Open
Cision: How to Build Trust and Strengthen Brand Reputation: A Guide for PR
Cedarwood Digital: How to Turn One Piece of Content into Several Marketing Assets
Prosperity Media: Australia’s Guide to Reactive Digital PR: What Is It and How to Do It Right
Bubblegum Search: 6 Benefits of Digital PR That Actually Drive Real Growth
Press Gazette: Express offers compensation after freelancers say work was stolen
Press Gazette: Keyword search dying, video search is future says Sky News boss
Connective3: Stay ahead of the curve: How to track LLM traffic in GA4
Moz: 2026 SEO Trends: Top Predictions from 20 Industry Experts
Ahrefs: How to Compare Your AI Visibility Against Your Competitors
Alex Wright on LinkedIn: How similar are ChatGPT's responses for different people? (About 20% similar)
Google Search Console: Adding context to your Search Console data with custom annotations
Google: Major AI Shopping Update to AI Mode
Search Engine Land: EU investigating Google over site reputation abuse policy
BuzzStream Podcast: Building Brands in the AI Era: Insights from The Telegraph’s SEO Director
Five quick fire Digital PR tips to help make you better and more efficient at getting SEO results via Digital PR:
1️⃣ When to newsjack:
2️⃣ If you're struggling to find a Journalist's email, try finding the email of another writer at that publication so you get an idea of what email format they use. Chances are the Journalist you're looking to pitch has an email in the same format.
3️⃣ Many sites have author pages that list their emails on. If you're trying to find the email of a Journo at a certain publication, Google that url with "site:" in front of the url and then remove the last part. Now check these pages for the email format used that you can copy.
4️⃣ If you're doing Spotify playlist campaigns based on keywords, check that the playlists being analysed are actually relevant to your topic. E.g, playlists containing the keyword "shower" could also return baby shower playlists that wouldn't be relevant for 🚿 songs.
5️⃣ When creating an index that includes the worst at something, consider the wider impact of this story you're putting out there. Is there a reason why this place/person/thing doesn’t perform well. Putting out this story may offend people associated with the "worst" ranking if there's a fair reason they can't rank higher.
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 U.S. Highway Statistics
The Federal Highway Administration has an abundance of datasets which are great if you’re looking to create campaigns around motor topics. This page is a great curation of all of the different datasets available. The most recent data does seem to be from 2023, but as you can see if you change the year in the url string, they create these pages for each year so keep an eye out for 2024, or also use it to see historical versions of the same datasets.
2️⃣ Caffeine Informer
Caffeine Informer is an interesting site that has a number of caffeine related tools which could be great for brands in the health or food & drink sectors. The standout tool for me is the Caffeine Database which lists the caffeine amounts in over 1,000 drinks, including a breakdown of drinks from popular chains such as Starbucks in the U.S. and UK.
3️⃣ Women, Peace and Security Index
Last week the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security launched the 2025/26 edition of their bi-annual Women, Peace and Security Index. The index ranks 181 countries on women’s wellbeing across 13 indictors of women’s status covering inclusion, justice, and security. Interestingly, all of the top five, topped by Denmark, are in the Scandinavia/Nordic region, with the UK in 23rd and the U.S. at 31. This is the fifth edition of the report which means there’s also some great comparison points. This could be great as a ranking factor in index campaigns around the safest countries for example.
4️⃣ U.S. Women, Peace and Security Index
As well as the global Women, Peace and Security Index, the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security also has the same index ranking the top states in America. All of the data is also available to download in an Excel file which makes it nice and easy to use individual data points for each state in your own campaign.
5️⃣ AlleCijfers.nl - Crime Statistics in the Netherlands
Bit of a niche one to end with, this site has lots of crime data for the Netherlands broken down by month, year, and type of offence. When you’re doing a campaign ranking countries against other each, ideally you’ll be able to find a global dataset, but sometimes you might have to source them individually. Most of the time you’ll be able to find what you need for each country, you just might have to find them individually.
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 Which UK locations are the most likely to spot Santa this year? by Outdoor Toys
📊 1 RDs, 1 DR 50+
This is a really cool example of using data from formal sources such as climate data and light pollution, and turning it into a fun festive story. Here, Outdoor Toys revealed which places in the UK are most likely to spot Santa's sleigh in the sky based on the average number of rainy days in December, and the amount of light pollution.
The campaign also analysed which places had the most Santa's Grotto's per 100,000 people to reveal where kids are most likely to get to meet Santa in person. Interestingly, Reading ranks in the top three for both. The Grotto's ranking is another good example of using credible data such as event listings and turning it into a softer story that works really well from an emotional storytelling point of view. It's also a great example of the importance of weighting your results, in this case by the population of the city/town, to produce more interesting results, and avoiding the predictable story of London having the most of anything because it's the biggest city.
2️⃣ Wasteful Brits throw away £23bn worth of Christmas lights by Warninks Advocaat
This is a good example of a festive campaign that takes a basic survey and then builds on it to create a much more well rounded story. Warninks Advocaat polled Brits to reveal how much the average person spends on Christmas lights, and how many lights are chucked away each year. Quite basic if you just stop here.
They've then worked out the average spend per person and multiplied it by the population of Great Britain to reveal the total cost of the whole nation. This is a great data analysis trick that takes literally just seconds to do but makes a huge difference to the impact of your story. The average person spends £429 on Christmas lights - sounds kinda big. £23 billion across the whole population? Ok that sounds massive and has a much bigger impact on how both the Journalist and their readers will react when they see that figure in a headline.
But they haven't stopped there. They've also gone a step further and launched a nice little stunt based on the results of the survey, launching an initiative to get Brits to “swap and recycle” their Christmas lights. Granted, it's only available in a small number of places, and the connection to a liqueur brand feels a tad forced, but it's a really good example of how to keep building on the presentation of survey results to go from a nice data point to a more fleshed out PR campaign.
3️⃣ Europe’s Hidden Gems for a White Christmas by DFDS
📊 15 RDs, 7 DR 50+
This next campaign is a nice twist on the traditional "best places for..." type campaigns. DFDS revealed the hidden gem destinations in Europe that are most likely to have a white Christmas. To reveal the top destinations they used historical weather data to analyse which destinations had the highest probability of snowfall on Christmas Day, along with the longer winter period.
This is another example of how pushing forward one extra step with your data and storytelling can help to create more unique and therefore more interesting headlines. The cities most likely to have snow on Christmas Day is a good campaign in itself. It would get covered, but there's also a good chance another brand might also have the same idea and beat you to the punch. Instead, DFDS then looked at search volume data for the top cities to reveal which had low search volume for travel related terms, taking the list from the top cities, to the best hidden gem destinations. The unique angle paid off, with links on sites such as TimeOut, Travel + Leisure, and The Manual.
4️⃣ Spike in online dating as 86% were lonely at Christmas by Pure Dating App
I’m not sure if the headline used by everyone's favourite Journalist Neil Shaw is a tad misleading as it suggests that the app saw an increase of some kind but there's no actual mention of it in the article. If it is a Reactive based on a spike in sign ups to the app that's a really cool idea, or one another dating app could look out for this year.
Even if it's not, it's still a clever way of earning coverage for a Christmas campaign in the New Year, evidence of some of Amelia Evans' advice in her post on How to get the most out of your Christmas PR campaigns. The stats come from a survey campaign launched by Pure Dating App which is a cool deep dive into sex and relationships during the festive season. Here, they've revisited their stat on single people feeling lonely over the Christmas season to produce a nice little bit of New Year coverage, all from what would have been a relatively simple pivot to reframe an existing piece of content by changing the wording of a sentence here and there in a press release.
5️⃣ The UK Airports Most Likely to Cancel Your Flight Home for Christmas by Civil Aviation Authority
This is another cool example of how to turn non-festive data into a festive story. It's not totally clear whether the campaign is by the Civil Aviation Authority or if it's a brand using their data that hasn't been mentioned in the article. Interestingly, there's a note at the bottom of the article that mentions the article originally "incorrectly stated that Leeds Bradford Airport was the riskiest to fly from with the most cancellations, as a result of data from the CAA being inaccurately interpreted by a third party", which explains why the url has Leeds Bradford in rather than Aberdeen. Ooops! This is one of the reasons why I feel strongly about data-led campaigns having on-site content from the brand that produced the story as publications won't cover everything about the campaign, particularly relating to the methodology.
The data analysis here however is a nice creative story that takes a standard data point around cancelled flights and turns it into an actual PR story by reframing the data as the riskiest airports for flying home at Christmas. The airports with the most cancelled flights? A good data point and a nice PR story. The airports most likely to cancel your flight home for Christmas? Now we have not just a good data point but a more relatable storytelling plot that creates a headline which packs more of a punch!
And that’s a wrap for Issue 52. 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 🙂
19 November 2025
