THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 57

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 57 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 on Digital PR Tips

The latest guest contribution on Digital PR Tips comes from Sheridan Okey, Head of PR at Tribera

Why PR Is The Power Source For Brand Growth

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

NeoMam: NeoMam Jealousy List 2025: 17 projects that inspired us

Ahrefs: How to Rank in AI Overviews: What Actually Works (Based on Data, Not Speculation)

Tank: Digital PR and GEO are more interlinked than you think

BuzzStream: News Publishers with AI Partnerships in 2026

Cision: 5 Biggest PR Opportunities in 2026

Rise at Seven: What is Digital PR? (And Why US Brands Are STILL Missing Out)

SEO Works: Why Digital PR Isn’t a Quick Fix – And Why That’s a Good Thing

Ellie Sumner on LinkedIn: Reactive campaigns in Australia DO NOT have the same success as in the UK

Sophie Rhone on LinkedIn: A syndication finder for the Ippen Digital / Mediengruppe Ippen network in Germany

Press Gazette: Independent set to take over running Standard website

Reuters Institute: Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2026

Press Gazette: Top 50 English-language news sites in the world

Google Trends: An easier way to explore Search trends with Gemini

The Search Session Podcast: What Comes Next for News SEO and Publishers w/ John Shehata

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

1️⃣ Annoyed by clients not getting comments for Journo Requests over to you in time? Work with them on building up a bank of quotes in response to topics that are likely to regularly occur or scheduled events that you can anticipate ahead of time that you can send straight over to a Journalist to reduce that waiting time and risk of missing out.

2️⃣ If you're running a campaign around the topic of a TV series while its airing, try to launch during the season rather than at the end. Once the season is finished it falls out of what sites want to talk about very quickly - much safer to launch during the season when the news cycle can last all week.

3️⃣ The number of links you need to rank higher is different for literally every search term. For certain searches you only need a couple of relevant high authority links to make big gains, but for high competition searches what you need to make a difference becomes much greater.

4️⃣ Gathering audience insights data is one of the most impactful research tasks you can undertake. The better you know both your existing audience and your target audience (which may differ), the more relevant your campaigns will be to the people your client wants to target.

5️⃣ Journos are super pressed for time. Give them everything they need at once so they don't even have to respond to you before they can publish your story. Make their jobs as quick and stress free as possible. If you don't, someone else will.

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 Violation Tracker - Database of Corporate Fines

If you read my own entry at the end of the “Digital PRs Share Their Favourite Campaigns From 2025” post, you will have seen the campaign I produced last year all around corporate fines. This is the tool that I used which is a fantastic database of (likely) every recorded corporate violation in America since the year 2000. It includes lots of data points such as the type of violation, the cost of the fine, the company and parent company, the company HQ location, and lots more. The advanced search tool makes it very easy to find specific information and with a paid subscription starting as low as $25 you can download the results directly. There is also a database for the UK corporate fines and a global database too.

2️⃣ UK Unclaimed Estates List

When someone dies in the UK without making a will or having a next of kin, the Government holds their estate in a trust pending someone claiming it. You can download a list of all of the unclaimed estates in England and Wales from the Government website here. Potentially some interesting stories with this data around the different surnames in the list.

3️⃣ Health Insurance Coverage in the United States

This dataset covers the percentage of Americans that have public health insurance, private health insurance, or no health insurance at all, broken down by selected demographics such as age, marital status, education level, and disability status. At the bottom of the page you can also find historical data dating back to 2008.

4️⃣ CIA Country Comparison Pages

The CIA World Factbook is an amazing resource for information about companies on topics such as society, economy, and transport. Finding datasets that cover all countries in one place can be difficult so this is a great source in particular for global index campaigns. This page has a list of all of the different data points available to compare countries against.

5️⃣ UK Grocery Price Index

The Trolley.co.uk Grocery Price Index is a live index that highlights price changes for over 50,000 popular groceries in the UK across 12 different supermarkets. You can track price changes over the last 12 months by product category, brand, or the average price in each supermarket. A potentially great tool for spotting price change trends to incorporate into Reactive stories.

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 Self-Made vs. Inherited Billionaires by DataPulse

📊 43 RDs, 24 DR 50+

DataPulse is a really cool site that I’ve come across recently that publishes some very interesting data stories. It’s a German site but there’s an English version too. This is one of the stories that they published last year that analyses the ratio of billionaires in different countries that are self-made vs those that inherited their wealth.

As well as being a really good idea for a data story, it’s also a great example of how effective a good bit of data vis can be in making your data easy to understand. The bars either side of the country name is a really effective way of showing not just which is more prominent in each country but also the scale of the ratio and how it compares vs other countries. Charts and infographics like this are a great way of not just presenting your data but also quickly and concisely showcasing some of the key storytelling components of your campaign.

2️⃣ The Countries and States Where Visitors Outnumber Locals by Go2Africa

📊 45 RDs, 16 DR 50+

In this campaign, Go2Africa analysed the number of tourists that visited each country in the past year and then compared it against the local population to reveal the ratio of annual tourists to locals. I really like this as a great example of how much more interesting you can make data campaigns by comparing two datasets against each other to help develop your campaign from a nice data point to an engaging story. Remember, data is interesting but it’s only newsworthy once you find a way to use it to create a story.

A lot of the time people talk about Reactive vs Hero campaigns as an either or scenario but you can absolutely create campaigns that work on both levels, and I think data campaigns are a great way of doing that. This campaign for example works well as a fairly evergreen piece that can work at any time of the year and be updated each year to create a long-term link building asset.

But it also works great as a newsjacking asset because the data is around a topic in “overtourism” and destinations implementing measures to restrict or manage tourism that is not only topical now (as in when the campaign was launched last year) but will also stay in the news cycle with regular newsjacking opportunities for the data to become relevant again, and therefore a potentially valuable asset to Journalists.

3️⃣ The Most Harassed Athlete League Online Ranked by CryptoManiaks

📊 22 RDs, 12 DR 50+

This next campaign is a good example of a campaign that I’ve seen done a number of times by different brands but always seems to land some great coverage every single year. Here, CryptoManiaks have used sentiment analysis of over 4 million social media posts to reveal which athletes have the highest percentage of negative posts created about them. From a methodology point of view, campaigns like this are a great alternative to surveys in that they’re much cheaper to produce and can be based on a far greater sample size to create much more reliable results.

A campaign like this by a crypto brand might jump out to some and prompt some arguments about relevance. Personally, I don’t like judging the relevance of campaigns like this from brands in sectors like crypto, gambling, etc (not having the authority to talk about finance and health topics for example is a different matter). Yes you can look at it from a topical relevance point of view and there’s a case to be made there. But relevance is far more complex than just “crypto brands can only create campaigns on crypto topics”.

You also have to factor in audience relevance. And that’s usually based on information that the average person doesn’t know. CryptoManiaks could very well have done some audience research and found out that a lot of their target audience are big sports fans. In which case there would be a strong audience relevance. Something to think about when we use examples of campaigns that appear to lack relevance. I’m not letting them off the hook for the butchering of “Kylian Mbappe” in the table below though.

4️⃣ Road safety campaign uses XL ladder to highlight speed risks by Virginia’s Department of Motor Vehicles

In this section I’ll frequently talk about taking data you’ve collected for your campaign and finding ways to turn it into a story. This is a cool example of how it can be done via more Traditional PR tactics such as an outdoor activation/stunt. Virginia’s Department of Motor Vehicles came up with a very creative way of demonstrating the impact of hitting someone with your car while speeding by comparing it to how high of a fall of a ladder the equivalent damage would be.

I imagine this has come from some form of research to determine the fall from different heights that matches with the corresponding car speed when hitting someone. Done as a blog post and a press release it would likely work well. But people are visual learners as showing us a comparison rather than just explaining it is so much more powerful on an emotional level.

“Hitting someone at 40mph is the equivalent of falling 54 feet” sounds big, but most people can’t visualise exactly how high 54 feet is. By creating this activation that very literally visualises the comparison point, they’ve turned a strong data point into a very powerful storytelling device with an important message behind it.

5️⃣ Skincare experts warn against salt water tanning TikTok trend by SpaSeekers

A lot of the campaigns that I share in this section are geared towards data campaigns that are primarily Hero or evergreen type content. This is a great example of a newsjacking campaign from last year that makes really good use of internal experts where SpaSeekers reacted to a viral “salt water tanning” trend that had potentially dangerous effects on our skin.

In the last 12 months according to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer there’s been over 6,000 news articles published with headlines about warnings delivered by experts. These type of stories always work well and there’s the data to prove it. And the reason that Journalists like them is that they create engagement. Warnings, especially from people cited as experts in their field, create a strong emotional response with readers, whether it be fear, anger, intrigue, etc, and this is what creates engagements on news articles.

TikTok trends can be a great starting point for finding these type of newsjacking opportunities that you can get your experts to react to, especially if they are trends that could be doing more harm than the supposed benefits that are being claimed. As well as helping Journalists to create articles that get the engagements which they are KPI’d against, these type of stories are extremely valuable in positioning your experts and the brand as voices of authority in their industry.

In SEO terms we talk about the value of things like E-E-A-T and topical authority, but lets also talk about how stories like this can be genuinely helpful for a brand’s target audience. Whether it be a friend or a brand, anyone that genuinely helps us with something we’ll inevitably have more positive associations with. And that really is the name of the game when it comes to brand building through PR activity.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 57. 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 🙂