THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 58

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 58 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.

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

Go Fish Digital: How We Test Digital PR Pitches to Increase Opens, Clicks, and Coverage

Cision: Inside PR 2026: Trends, Challenges, and What’s Next

Off The Record: How PRs Can Help Reporters Get Stories Past Editors

Rosie Taylor on LinkedIn: Here's what I look for in "exclusives" pitched to me

Trending Campaigns Newsletter (New): The Weekly Briefing on PR Campaigns and Coverage Opportunities by Aleyda Solis

Moz: How To Build Site Authority and Multi-Channel Relevance in the Age of AI

Ahrefs: How to Track AI Overviews: Mentions, Citations, Click Loss, and the Traffic Google Won’t Show You

PR Daily: How to craft data AI search loves

PR Newswire: Best Practices for International Press Releases

Go Fish Digital: Why Journalists Ignore Your Content (And How to Fix It)

BuzzStream: Do Americans Use AI for News?

Cedarwood Digital: Save this for your next DPR campaign inspiration

PRmoment: 2016 to 2026: what has changed in PR

Press Gazette: Future plans 45 editorial redundancies at titles including Techradar and Tom’s Guide

BuzzStream Podcast: Data Has a Reputation Problem, And Six Chillies is Here to Solve It w/ Thierry Ngutegure and George Sinnott

The Digital PR Podcast: Future-Proofing PR - The PESO Model & Structured Trust w/ Gini Dietrich

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

1️⃣ How to find duplicates in Excel/Sheets

This is a very useful tip that I use on a weekly basis, whether it be analysing data for campaigns and audits, or to spot duplicates in a media list I'm building.

In Excel it's nice and straight forward. Highlight the column you want to find duplicates in and then click on "Conditional Formatting" in the menu bar > "Highlight Cells Rules" > "Duplicate Values"

It's a bit more complicated in Sheets as it doesn't have this as a built in function. However, here's a formula that will highlight duplicates for you:

=COUNTIF($A$2:$A$100, A2)>1

To use it, select your column > click on the fill colour button and then "Conditional Formatting". Then under "Format cells if", select "Custom Formula is" at the bottom and type the above formula in. The A2:A100 part is your range to look for duplicates in, and then A2 is the first cell of your range. Click done and then any duplicates in your data will be highlighted (you can also change the formatting of any duplicate cells if the default formatting isn't to your liking)

2️⃣ Once you've highlighted duplicates using the method above you likely want to quickly find them, especially if you're working with a big dataset that takes a lot of scrolling to spot the formatted cells. Here's a quicker way of doing it:

Create a filter on your data > "Filter by color" > and then filter by the fill color (cell colour in Excel) of your duplicate cells. Now you can just see all of the duplicates together which is ideal for when you want to analyse the duplicates rather than just using the "remove duplicates" option.

3️⃣ If you find yourself using the above formula a lot in Sheets to highlight duplicates (or any formula!) but can't remember what it is each time, create a text replacement shortcut on your device for the formula. Then you can just type something easier to remember like "dupesformula", and that will make the formula appear for you!

4️⃣ If you're looking to run a survey campaign in the UK, two of the best survey providers to talk to are The Leadership Factor or Censuswide who both have a lot of experience working with PRs on survey campaigns and are fairly reasonably priced.

5️⃣ Optimise your campaign's landing page to rank for key search terms after you've launched it (especially for evergreen content). If you can get the page ranking for relevant keywords you'll pick up additional coverage from Journalists finding your content via Google and then referencing it as a source in their article.

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 Opta Football Stats

Bad news if you’re someone that likes using football stats from Fbref. Last week they lost access to a lot of their data that is provided via Opta. You can read all about it here. Fbref still has a lot of player, team, and match stats available but some are now no longer available (both future games and historical), maybe most notably of which is xG data. However, you can still get it from Opta’s sites including lots of other great data points. You can get match stats that are updated in real time during matches from Opta Stats Perform, as well as from the Opta Analyst site, which is also great for data-led Football stories.

2️⃣ Netflix What We Watched the Second Half of 2025

As well as the weekly Top 10 charts, Netflix also releases data every six months with viewing figures for every show. Last week they released the report on the most watched films and shows with the number of views for the last six months of 2025. Lots of great insights here as to what people all around the world are watching.

3️⃣ Luminate 2025 Year-End Film & TV Report

I’m a big of Luminate’s entertainment industry reports, and last week they released another great report. This one has loads of data and audience insights around the movie and TV industry and serves as a great addition to the Netflix “What We Watched” report as it covers all streaming platforms. Insights include the most watched streaming shows and genres, and total viewing hours by streaming service, with a focus on U.S productions as well as global figures.

4️⃣ 2026 Military Strength Ranking

The Global Firepower ranking measures the strength of every country’s military based on over 60 metrics to produce a final PowerIndex ranking. As well as the overall ranking, you can also get data for each individual ranking factor, making it a great resource for lots of potential index campaigns.

5️⃣ Microsoft Global AI Adoption in 2025 Report

This is another super insightful report that has recently been published. In this report Microsoft have revealed the rates of AI adoption around the world, showing where in the world has seen the biggest increases from H1 of 2025 to H2.

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 Each State’s Favorite Ride at Disney World by Upgraded Points

📊 37 RDs, 20 DR 50+

In this survey campaign from 2021, Upgraded Points surveyed over 5,000 Americans to reveal what the most popular Disney World ride was in each state. An important factor with survey campaigns to consider if you want to use any state vs state analysis is the sample size of respondents that your survey is based on. A survey size of 2,000 or fewer doesn’t really suffice if you want to compare states as you’re looking at an average of 40 respondents across 50 states which is very small. It’s still small with 5,000 to be fair but at least 100 per state starts to feel more significant and within the feasible range of budget.

This is a good example of how surveys can work well by revealing audience insights that aren’t entirely predictable, and focus on a topic that has both niche and mainstream attention with a strong emotional attachment. As a result, the campaign earned coverage on lots of regional news sites, particularly in the Orlando area, along with national coverage on sites such as Business Insider and FOX Business.

2️⃣ Employee Surveillance Report by Surfshark

📊 18 RDs, 10 DR 50+

This campaign that Surfshark launched back in 2021 is a really good example of producing campaigns based around topics at the early growth stage of their popularity. Finding these topics can be difficult, and predicting the future always involves an element of good fortune, but there’s also a lot of skill and educated judgement that goes into it.

Surfshark’s employee surveillance report came at a time when working from home was really taking off during lockdown era. This helps to make it a topical piece of content at the time which Journalists can cite as a source when they are writing about working from home related topics, along with it also working as an evergreen piece of content that can remain relevant, and thus earn links long after it was originally launched.

I also really like how the campaign has multiple layers to it, with some great data insights to reveal the countries with the most search interest in “bossware-curious” topics per million people, which is perfectly complimented with helpful advice in the form of infographics to help workers understand what employee surveillance software does and doesn’t monitor, along with a breakdown of what popular apps like Slack and Zoom allow your boss to see that people may assume is private. Even now 5 years later it still works as a helpful resource and is being cited in relevant news articles.

3️⃣ Canine Critics by Canine Cottages

📊 88 RDs, 63 DR 50+

Canine Cottages’ Canine Critics campaign is a great example of how well the dream job format can work when it’s attached to an emotional trigger. In this dream job they’ve hired dogs to review their dog-friendly holidays, which of course works great for creating that emotional attachment which helps to make stories newsworthy, but it’s also an extremely effective way of getting in front of their true target audience - dog owners.

I love campaigns that brands bring back each year and from what I can see Canine Cottages have ran this competition in different forms from 2018 to 2025, earning links on lots of top regional news sites in addition to Metro and Country Living.

4️⃣ How many high school stars make it in the NBA? by The Pudding

📊 32 RDs, 8 DR 50+

The newsletter has had a lovely influx of new subscribers in the past couple of months so here’s your semi-regular reminder to check out The Pudding for inspiration on how to create best in class data stories. This is a story they published in 2019 analysing the career success of the top 100 high school Basketball recruits of the past 20 years.

While many campaigns we work on won’t have the budget to replicate the level of the research or developer builds in The Pudding’s posts, there’s so much that can be learned from them and then applied on a smaller scale, in particular their approach to using data vis to enhance the storytelling element of their data analysis. In addition to that, pay attention to how they present their data as an analysis of the whole dataset to begin with, and then work through the data to just look at specific groups within the data. This is a great way of creating further angles and stories that have extra relevance to key news sectors that you might want to pitch to.

5️⃣ Duolingo is offering to check and fix mistranslated tattoos for free

This week’s final campaign is a really cool Reactive campaign that Duolingo did in 2022 around World Tattoo Day. Now tattoos and a language learning app isn’t the most obvious connection that people would make, but often that’s where the most creative campaigns come from when we’re able to combine two topics people wouldn’t expect in a way that actually makes total sense.

Here, Duolingo offered a free service to check and fix mistranslated tattoos, with the campaign launching just in time for World Tattoo Day which served as a great way of using days of the year to help make your campaign more topically relevant in the short-term. Duolingo of course are one of the best brands at using social media to their advantage and this campaign is also a great example of how PR campaigns can work for multiple channels when done well. In this case they prompted people to post pictures of mistranslated tattoos with the hashtag #TattooDuoOver to help ensure that the stunt not only worked on a PR level, but for brand awareness across social media channels too.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 58. 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 🙂