THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 53

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 53 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.

This week’s post is our monthly roundup of the best learning resources from November

Digital PR Learning Resources You May Have Missed From November

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Here is the latest Digital PR news and resources from the last week that you might have missed.

Root Digital: How to Measure Digital PR (and What to Stop Tracking)

Green Flag Digital: Does Digital PR Matter in an AEO (or AIO or GEO) World? Yes, Maybe More Than Ever

Flaunt Digital: Why PR is No Longer Optional in the Age of AI-Search

Wolfenden: Beyond the peak: Why off-season PR matters more than ever

BuzzStream: When is the Best Time to Send Emails in PR? (A Study of 4.5M Emails)

BuzzStream: 9 Small Business PR Tactics That Get Links, Coverage (and AI Exposure)

Reboot: The GEO Playbook

Rise at Seven: How people search in 2026... (a study of 1.5bn searches)

Performance Marketing World: Demystifying the AI gap: closing the GEO divide in brand content

Embryo: 10 data-driven digital PR ideas for Christmas 2025

Muck Rack: How to win PR budget conversations in 2026

Axicom: 10 Rules for Press Releases That Rank in AI Answer Engines

Seer Interactive: Study: How do stadium sponsorships impact localized AI visibility?

Elise Hopkins on LinkedIn: How to Make It Through the Festive Season as a PR

Saskia Fryer on LinkedIn: Key PR dates for December

Motive PR on LinkedIn: 26 newsletters every PR should sign up to in 2026

Katheryn Watson on LinkedIn: UK PR Landscape Learnings from 2025

Connective3: Digital Bites November 2025 wrap up

Ahrefs: Do AI Assistants Link When Mentioning Brands? For Ahrefs, Only 28% of the Time

OpenAI: Introducing shopping research in ChatGPT

Adobe: Adobe to Acquire Semrush

Distinctly Webinar: Why Digital PR is crucial in the age of AI search - Tuesday, 9th December 2025

The Digital PR Podcast: Building and Selling a Digital PR Agency w/ Lisa Paasche

BuzzStream Podcast: How to Pitch Like a Pro with Muck Rack’s Linda Zebian

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

1️⃣ Don't lose sight of the fact that you should be building links that your target audience actually want to click on, not just for SEO purposes.

2️⃣ News sites with a DA/DR under 30 aren’t useless if they’re relevant and have a shared audience.

3️⃣ Journalists aren’t checking the DR of your site before deciding whether to link to you or not. As long as it isn't giving off huge red flags and your story is good you'll be fine.

4️⃣ There are some great AI tools that are very useful for making processes quicker. However, no AI can replicate human creativity and understanding of things like clients, target audiences and human psychology. Use tools wisely and understand what they can do, but more importantly, what they can't do.

5️⃣ Emotion should be at the centre of every idea you pitch. How will this story make the reader feel. Strong emotions such as anger, shock, nostalgia, are what create engagement and is what Journalists are looking for when deciding whether to cover your 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 Google Maps Listings within a Set Radius

Google Maps can be a real goldmine of data for PR campaigns, especially once you understand all of the different features it has. Here’s how to find the number of places within your chosen distance of any location using Google Maps:

Load up Google Maps on Desktop

Right click on your starting point and then select "measure distance" (it changes to "distance to here" once you get started)

Drag the dots to measure out the distance from your starting point (it only does straight lines rather than a circle sadly)

Now that you've created your search box (I know mine in the screenshot isn't perfect haha) you can zoom in and start counting the number of places such as restaurants, hotels, attractions, etc within your chosen distance from the location you're measuring around.

This could be great for campaigns analysing the best places with the most X within a X distance, for example the Universities with the most restaurants within a 5 mile radius of the campus.

2️⃣ NHS 2024/25 National Cost Collection Data

Each year the NHS publishes this incredible dataset which lists the total activity for every NHS service and department, the total spend per service and the average unit cost of each service. This is a fantastic dataset for so many different possible health campaigns around how the NHS spends money on different treatments. Previous versions of the same dataset are also available which is great to spot where spending on different services is increasing and decreasing over time.

3️⃣ UK Waiting Times for Driving Tests by Test Centre

Waiting times data isn’t publicly released from what I can see but it is made available via Freedom of Information Requests which can be a great resource to add to your dataset searches if you’re struggling to find the exact thing you’re looking for. Here BBC News have done their own FOI to reveal the data with a lovely map which makes it nice and easy to find the average waiting time for a driving test around the UK as of March 2025.

4️⃣ RepCore® Nations 2025 Study - Which Countries Have The Best Reputation

This is a really interesting study conducted by Reputation Lab that ranks the reputation of the 60 countries with the highest GDP as perceived by citizens of the G7 nations (United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Canada). Although the data isn’t available to download it’s pretty easy to take it from the graphic at the bottom of the page. This could be a good ranking factor for variations of indexes ranking the best countries to live in for example.

5️⃣ Fast Company’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2025

Each year Fast Company publishes their list of the 50 most innovative companies around the world. The list dates back to 2010 so there’s plenty of previous datasets to compare against. This could be interesting when paired with a second data point such as the sectors the companies operate in, where they are based, the gender of the founders, the company’s financial data, or how their market cap has changed after being featured in the top 50.

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 2024 Year in Review by Pornhub (SFW)

📊 586 RDs, 164 DR 50+

As 2025 comes to an end we’ll be seeing an influx of year in review campaigns. These are such a great use of internal data where it’s available to create a PR story that literally puts the brand front and centre. One of the best brands at doing this is Pornhub (don’t worry the link is safe to click on, hopefully it doesn’t result in this issue landing in everyone’s spam box). Sex isn’t a taboo topic when it comes to media coverage and the volume of links that these reports earn each year are evidence of that.

Pornhub have been releasing these year in review reports, along with other clever reports that use their internal data for newsjacking stories, and every year they earn the site hundreds of new backlinks. And it’s not just backlinks that they drive, the pages drive organic traffic and have people searching directly for them. For example, “pornhub stats” has 1,000 global searches a month, and 620 a month for “pornhub year in review”.

A big part of the success of the annual report comes from how well put together it is. The report is massive and covers so many different angles, including regional angles which are perfect for giving different countries and regions their own data specific to their readers to talk about. Another great benefit of running reports like these annually, is that over time you also create natural comparison points so you can start to spotlight trends in how your customers’ behaviour is changing over the years.

2️⃣ The World's First Mulled Wine Spa Day by SpaSeekers

📊 88 RDs, 53 DR 50+

Product PR can be such a powerful tactic when done right, but especially so when it’s combined with a clever touch of creativity. This is a really good example of just how effective creative Product PR can be from SpaSeekers who in 2020 created the world’s first ever mulled wine spa day.

Sure it’s a tad weird, but often PR stories that combine two popular topics in a way that you wouldn’t naturally associate together work really well because they are able to elicit those stronger emotions from readers when they see headlines such as “Visit the world's first mulled wine spa this Christmas - with hot tub full of festive plonk”. The campaign was covered on sites such as TimeOut, The Sun, Metro, and Lonely Planet.

3️⃣ 'Sexmas' advent calendar by Nasty Gal

This is another cool example of creative Product PR in action showing the benefits once again of combining two topics that aren’t a natural connection but can work great together for a PR story. Here, Nasty Gal launched a “sexmas” advent calendar as a clever way of getting their brand talked about in the press during the festive season.

With campaigns like this I think it’s important to have fun with them which Nasty Gal did with sexy puns for the different days on the advent calendar. The product page now goes to a 404 page though. Ideally, they’d be redirecting that page to a related page if available to maintain the link value earned from the PR coverage linking to the product page.

4️⃣ The UK’s Most Endangered Names by My Nametags

📊 18 RDs, 16 DR 50+

We’ve probably all either come across a baby name campaign at some point, or possibly even worked on one. They’re not exactly unique, but I do like this one done by My Nametags in 2021 that didn’t just look at the most popular names around a certain topic, but analysed which names were growing and declining in popularity at the fastest rate.

The wording that you use for the key parts of your story’s angles can sometimes be the difference between a Journalist feeling your campaign is rather bland vs convincing them it can be one that will engage their readers. I really like how they’ve gone with the names most at risk of extinction for the declining names rather than just calling them the fastest declining names in popularity. All of a sudden the word extinction makes your subject line and headlines far more eye-catching and gets engagement from people with those names posting about there being no more Kieran’s in however many years, as evidenced by a Reach PLC syndication with the headline of “The 20 baby names most at risk of 'extinction' in the UK”.

5️⃣ Smart Studies: How AI is Changing The Way We Study by Currys

📊 15 RDs, 6 DR 50+

This week’s final campaign is a really good survey campaign done by Currys exploring the use of AI in education, covering topics such as which Uni’s have the most enrolments in AI courses, what students are using AI to help them with, and how they feel about the future of AI.

As well as the student survey, the campaign also uses HESA data to cover angles that are better sourced from existing data sources rather than relying on survey questions to cover every angle that you want your campaign to cover. See if you can find the data yourself first, and then go to surveys as an alternative option for audience insights that haven’t already been covered elsewhere. The HESA data ranking Universities against each other was also a great addition as it helped them to earn regional news coverage, as well as a fantastic link on the Bradford University website.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 53. 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 🙂