THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 55

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 55 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.

The Latest on Digital PR Tips

This weeks blog is my round up of some of the best Digital PR blogs from this year that you should read if you haven’t already.

25 Blogs From 2025 That Digital PRs Should Read

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.

Mail Metro Media: Moments That Matter 2026 Calendar

Sourcee: Percentage Calculator

BuzzStream: Should You Pitch Journalists From an Agency or Brand Email Address? [Data from 5M Emails]

Get Featured: Why good pitches don't get used

Off The Record: What 5 Journalists Want In 2026 — and What Should Stay in 2025

Prosperity Media: The Relationship between Journalism and Digital PR

Motive PR: Four essential PR tools and plugins to boost your results in 2026

SEO Works: Digital PR in 2025: Industry Review

Cision: 5 New Year’s Resolutions for PR Pros to Make in 2026

PR Daily: AI email summaries are rewriting your message – here’s what to do about it

Stan Ventures: 7 Proven Tips to Increase Brand Mentions for Higher AI Search Rankings

Famous Campaigns: The 40 best billboards of 2025

Famous Campaigns: The 40 best outdoor brand activations of 2025

AdAge: Campaigns Year in Review 2025

Ahrefs: Do Self-Promotional “Best” Lists Boost ChatGPT Visibility? Study of 26,283 Source URLs

Ahrefs: I Ran an AI Misinformation Experiment. Every Marketer Should See the Results

Ahrefs: Top Brand Visibility Factors in ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews (75k Brands Studied)

Ahrefs: Are AI Mode and AI Overviews Just Different Versions of the Same Answer? (730K Responses Studied)

Search Engine Journal: Google Releases December 2025 Core Update

CNBC: Google hit with EU antitrust investigation over use of online content for AI

The PR Hotline: How to Build Authority as a Freelance PR, Set Boundaries and Earn Respect (Without Changing Who You Are) w/ Saskia Fryer

BuzzStream Podcast: How to Start a Digital PR Client (Step-by-Step Audit Guide) w/ Chloe Osunsami

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

1️⃣ Digital PR is a super stressful job full of factors affecting the results our work produces, a lot of them out of our own control. We're all doing this job because we chose to and we all want to do well. Sometimes results aren't going to be what we want. Keep this in mind when you talk about the performance of campaigns with other people in your team.

2️⃣ Optimise your do not disturb settings on your phone. Set exception rules for certain people that you need to be notified for if they get in touch. Then block everything else out during tasks that need your complete focus. If it's urgent someone will call, or they'll be on your exemptions list.

3️⃣ SEO takes time to produce results but Digital PR can be a great way of showing something more tangible to new clients before they start to see ranking improvements.

4️⃣ Not every site needs to be earning links from news and magazine publications on a regular basis. Sometimes a few links from suppliers, some local businesses and a great local gov link here and there are enough to make an impact on rankings. Everything is relative.

5️⃣ Tying your data in with a topical news story is a great way of superhcarging your link building potential. This is where evergreen data works even harder for you, it can always be re-outreached again in the future as it becomes more topical again.

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 Marriages and civil partnerships in England and Wales

The latest ONS report on the number of marriages and civil partnerships in England and Wales was released last month covering data from 2023. This is a great dataset which covers the number of opposite and same sex marriages by age and type of ceremony with some data points going all the way back to 1837. Other data points also include the average age at which both men and women get married or remarried, and the percentage of each age group that has ever been married.

2️⃣ Corporate Tax Haven Index

This dataset from the Tax Justice Network is a great breakdown of the world’s biggest enablers of corporate tax abuse which has just been updated this month, ranking the British Virgin Islands as the top tax haven in the world. This could be an interesting metric to use part of index campaigns with the index covering 70 different countries.

3️⃣ UBS Global Wealth Report 2025

The UBS Global Wealth Report is an annual report that covers a lot of useful data points on financial topics for 25 major countries. Some of the top data points include the average wealth per adult, wealth growth and decline in the last five years, the number of millionaires per country, and wealth inequality scores.

4️⃣ OECD Pensions at a Glance 2025

The OECD Pensions at a Glance report is the leading report out there when it comes to global data on pensions. The report is 248 pages long and includes a tremendous amount of data split by major countries worldwide.

5️⃣ Euromonitor Top 100 City Destinations Index

Putting together a list of which cities you want to include in a travel themed index can be more challenging than it sometimes appears on the surface. Choosing the biggest cities by population often works but you end up with a bias towards certain countries and will be excluding some popular tourist destinations that might not have a big local population but are popular tourism spots. I like using Euromonitor’s City Destinations Index for selecting cities for a tourism index as it has a nice mix of popular tourist spots in different countries. You have to pay for the full Euromonitor report but this Forbes article very nicely lists out the top 100 cities.

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 Year in Monzo

📊 102 RDs, 56 DR 50+

Spotify Wrapped is undoubtedly the leading example of how valuable internal data can be for end of year campaigns, but it’s far from the only great example of brands leveraging their customer data for marketing wins. Monzo’s year in review is another excellent example of the format, and one that they’re earning SEO value from too.

Banking data that shows what people spend their money on is a naturally great PR story because it’s simple to understand and it’s easy for everyone to relate to. Monzo do a great job of going the extra mile marketing it though, and although the campaign is far bigger than just backlinks, by having a landing page for people to link to they’ve earned over 100 backlinks in the last couple of years.

Annual reports and internal data are two of my favourite formats for Digital PR campaigns so of course I adore these types of campaigns that combine the two together. And while not everyone will have the luxury of working with a brand like Spotify or Monzo, it’s a format that can work well for so many different industries, especially consumer facing and retail sectors. And of course, the simple addition of having on-site content for these campaigns can make a huge difference to the share of coverage that includes backlinks and adds even more value from the content you create.

2️⃣ 2025 FBref Year In Review

This is another great example of internal data being used to create year in review campaigns that spark engagement. FBref is a great resource for Football stats and while their year in review posts aren’t a huge hit in terms of backlinks built, they always get tons of visibility on socials and do a fantastic job of brand building for FBref.

Every year you can guarantee that football fans will pick out the inevitable surprising outlier on the maps produced and the posts will do big numbers on social media. Why? Because it’s the type of content that sparks engagement and creates discussions. Even though this campaign is largely built for social more so than PR and SEO, the same principles of what makes effective content apply.

The landing pages themselves aren’t overly great. They’re pretty basic but they do the job, and again, they give people a relevant page to link to if they do write an article covering the data. This is another good example of what I’m always banging on about which is revisiting successful campaigns. FBref have done this same campaign for multiple years now, and the parent company Sports Reference create the same campaign across each of their different sports domains. If something works, milk it for all that you can!

3️⃣ The 2025 “American Dream” Now Costs More Than $5 Million by Investopedia

📊 68 RDs, 28 DR 50+

This next campaign by Investopedia is another great example of getting everything you can out of a good idea. Here they’ve conducted some great in-depth analysis and calculations to work out how much the “American Dream” costs in 2025, finding it now costs over $5 million (that really is “hard times”!). The analysis covers the lifetime costs needed to pay for a home, retirement, kids, a wedding, new cars, healthcare, and owning pets.

This isn’t the first time Investopedia have done this campaign. They did the same study in 2024, earning 110 referring domains to that page. Data campaigns often naturally lend themselves to refreshes as data points are constantly changing so campaigns that uses multiple data points will often produce new results and new stories each year. This one showing that the cost of the “American Dream” is more expensive is a fairly predictable outcome because everything gets more expensive over time but it still produces a good headline, either in isolation or compared to the previous study.

I would have personally kept the 2025 campaign on the original url used and move the old data to a new url to keep things consistent and all of the link equity and ranking power in one place. That said however, the keywords the 2024 page was ranking for seem to have quickly shifted over to the 2025 page which ranks 1st for “american dream cost” (90 MSV) and 2nd for “how much does the average american make in their lifetime” (400 MSV). Another great benefit of refreshing campaigns is that over time their ability to rank for relevant keywords that drive organic traffic to your website also becomes easier, and starts producing a much higher quality metric to report on that shows the value of the content you’re producing.

4️⃣ The Evolution of the Oval Office Decor by American Home Shield

📊 65 RDs, 22 DR 50+

I’m often wary of doing campaigns that are heavily based on designs and drawings that are resource heavy in terms of time and/or money to produce as they can become quite expensive, which obviously means the results you need to produce to justify the campaign budget also get higher. But as a piece of content from an artistic point of view some of these campaigns are absolutely stunning and it’s a shame (but understandable) that we see less of them these days.

One of the keys to campaigns that require a big budget being a success is ensuring that they have a good degree of longevity so you’re not relying on them producing loads of pieces of coverage in a short timeframe, something that is much harder than I think we make it out to be sometimes. This campaign by American Home Shield is a great example of picking a topic that is both sustainable and evergreen enough to earn links, firstly, when it’s originally produced, and secondly, over time as the topic becomes newsworthy again.

By picking a topic like the Oval Office, they can be reasonably confident that this could be a campaign that could be revisited in future years and become a truly evergreen piece of content. Which it has! The campaign was first launched in 2021 and is still earning new coverage in 2025, boosted by the developments of The White House which is currently undergoing its biggest overhaul in decades.

Something to look out for when analysing backlink figures in Ahrefs is to not just take a drop in backlinks/referring domains at face value but actually look into why. The campaign page has recently had a url change which has resulted in the Ahrefs reports showing a drop off in links, but further analysis will show that it’s just Ahrefs not picking up the redirected url on some coverage yet rather than them being actually “lost”. If anyone wants to improve their data analysis skills in 2026, one of my top pieces of advice is to stop taking data points at face value as they’re presented and question everything.

5️⃣ Tail Orchestra by Pedigree

For the final campaign that I’ll be sharing in 2025, I wanted to pick one that ended the year on a feel good note. I try to avoid oversharing really big budget campaigns like this that are likely difficult for people reading this newsletter to try and replicate, but this is a really cool stunt that Pedigree launched last year where they created a Tail Orchestra that translated the speed of a dog’s tails wagging into music.

The idea is really fun and the execution more than does the concept justice. The 90 second video produced for the campaign is super, and I love the added touches of making the music available on Spotify and Amazon Music, with Pedigree donating for every stream to the Pedigree Foundation, which aims to help dogs in need find loving homes.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 55. Same time again next week ✌️

Found this useful? You can sign up to receive The Digital PR Observer Newsletter in your inbox each week for free by clicking the button below.

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 🙂