THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 59
Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 59 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
The latest guest contribution on Digital PR Tips comes from Chioma Anunobi
How Stories in Content Help You Earn Quality Links, Brand Mentions, and Citations
We also had our roundup of the best learning resources from January
Digital PR Learning Resources You May Have Missed From January
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.
Press Gazette: PR bodies launch campaign against fake experts after Press Gazette investigation
Get Featured: What pitching will look like in 2026
Saskia Fryer on LinkedIn: Key PR Dates for February
Grace Tranter on LinkedIn: What's happening in February for PR opportunities?
Gajendra Singh Rathore on LinkedIn: Unlinked Mentions Are a Real KPI Now. Good Luck Explaining That to Clients
Honcho: PR in the Age of Agentic Commerce, What Still Wins When AI Recommends the Products?
Wolfenden: 3 tips to make authentic PR stand out in a sea of AI noise
Studiohawk: A Recipe for a Phenomenal Digital PR Campaign
Yahoo: Introducing Yahoo Scout, a New AI Answer Engine
PPC Land: Nearly half of marketers encounter AI errors weekly as study exposes trust gap
Search Engine Land: Google may give sites a way to opt out of AI search generative features
Google: The new era of browsing: Putting Gemini to work in Chrome
BuzzStream Podcast: How Audience Research Drives Great Content Ideas w/ Paxton Gray
Five quick fire Digital PR tips to help make you better and more efficient at getting SEO results via Digital PR:
1️⃣ Digital PR, just like anything form of marketing is all about problem solving. Start every brief with your target audience, what their problem is, and then work out how you’re going to create solutions to solve their problems.
2️⃣ Reddit is great for content inspo but it's also super for fact checking data with the most knowledgeable fans on a topic. Soft launch your content in a relevant reddit and if there's errors in the data they'll be picked out here before you start outreaching on a bigger scale.
3️⃣ If your client's target audience are based in one country, focus any map campaigns on the regions within that country rather than comparing every country in the world. Regional data gives you far more relevant data in terms of both quality and quantity to work with.
4️⃣ Struggling to find an expert for your campaign? Search on Twitter for "#journorequest [keyword] expert" to see similar requests from Journalists. Then search on Twitter and Google for the Journalist making the request followed by "[keyword] expert" and you might find the expert they used in their article that you could reach out to and see if they can contribute towards your campaign.
5️⃣ If you can't find an author's name on an article, try pasting the url into Twitter/Bluesky/etc, go to "latest" and scroll to the very bottom to see which accounts shared the article first. Often the first person to share the article will be the person who wrote it. Check the first few shares and see if any of them work at the same publication.
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 PLAYBOARD - YouTube Channels Analysis
PLAYBOARD is a fantastic site for analysing data on YouTube channels. There’s a ton of different data points you can collect data for but some of the most interesting ones to me are the number of views and subscribers by channel, the number of live viewers for a specific day, week, or month, how much channels earn via super chats, and the top growing channels, all of which you can filter by the category and country of the channel.
2️⃣ U.S. National Center for Education Statistics
The NCES is a great resource for data points that can be used for campaigns around U.S. education topics. The site has loads of different data tools that have user-friendly data vis which makes them very easy to use on-site, covering topics such as revenue per pupil by state, and demographic data of children in education. There’s also lots of great surveys that are done with teachers which are fab for revealing different types of insights which are usually broken down by state to help with regional stories.
3️⃣ U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics
While most UK government sources datasets are available in one place via ONS, in the U.S. they are split across a wider array of government department websites. Here on the BJS website you’ll find lots of great datasets on criminal justice topics. There’s over 2,000 reports available, so the new releases page is a good one to keep bookmarked to keep on top of the most recently released publications.
4️⃣ Ipsos Education Monitor 2025 Report
Ipsos is a great source for industry reports that covers different countries on an international scale. This one on the education industry covers data from 30 countries on topics such as mental health challenges with school children and the percentage of children with poor mental health by country, which countries most support a social media ban for under 14s, and children’s favourite subjects at school and how they differ by gender.
5️⃣ Average Health Insurance Premium in the U.S.
This data collected by the KFF offers great insight into how health insurance premiums differ by state. The figures are also broken down by bronze, silver, and gold tier premiums. A great dataset for index campaigns ranking the cost of living in different states as one example.
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 Ann Summers launches on-demand sex toy service with Deliveroo 'in time for Valentine's Day'
This week I’m publishing a post on some of my favourite Valentine’s Day themed PR campaigns so here’s a sneak peek of some of them. Valentine’s Day is a great opportunity for brands to show their personality in a more fun way than they maybe usually can while still making headlines. This is a fun example that works as a clever Valentine’s Day story that people will share, but also has a lot of value from a brand point of view.
In 2024, Ann Summers launched a partnership with Deliveroo that could see customers get lingerie and sex toys delivered to their homes 'within minutes'. Pairings that you don’t expect to see often work great for landing PR coverage, and Ann Summers teaming up with Deliveroo is a great example of that in action.
What I really like about this is how it’s a clever tactic to position Ann Summers as the go to brand for sexy gifts in the lead up to Valentine’s Day by using Deliveroo’s brand power to their advantage, in addition to the smart storytelling that evokes a reaction and gets people talking about the story, and thus Ann Summers, a good example of how the brand CAN be the story while still being newsworthy. All this is evidenced by loads of top tier coverage on sites such as Daily Mail, Mirror, The Independent, City AM, and a segment on This Morning (which you can see in the coverage linked above).
Stunts like this are clever because they always seem like a bigger production than they actually are. The delivery service is only actually available in four locations, with just 15 products to choose from, which I bet had very limited supply before showing as sold out on the app (and thus making people think they were super popular and that sales must have gone sky high!).
2️⃣ Florist offers thorn-free Valentine's Day roses - for those who've been hurt by 'pricks' by Arena Flowers
This is another great example of how brands can use Valentine’s Day to produce cheekier stories than they usually would. In 2024, Arena Flowers were offering thorn-free roses to the victims of cheaters so that jilted singletons will not have to endure any more “pricks”.
Stories like this are a great way for brands to showcase their personality in a way that helps not just with positive brand perceptions, but likely with better brand recognition too from a story like this which can be quite memorable. The quotes from brand representatives in these type of stories are also a great opportunity to shape a brand’s personality, as Arena Flowers have done a masterful job of in this story, with their spokesperson being quoted saying “There are enough pricks in the world without having them in your home this month”.
Again, the stunt isn’t as big as it would appear at first glance. There were only 100 available in total during a one week period. Campaigns like this don’t seem to be that common with the digital side of PR, but I’d love to see more Digital PR teams producing campaigns like this! While they may seem like big projects, the executions don’t have to be on a big scale in order to earn great coverage like this.
3️⃣ Clothes retailer offers customers ‘sex guarantee’ by Foul Fashion
This time we’re going all the way back to 2013 for another cheeky Valentine’s Day PR campaign. Here, Scottish clothes retailer Foul Fashion offered shoppers a ‘sex guarantee’, stating they’ll give customers a full refund if their particularly garish clothes don’t attract the opposite sex. It’s obviously incredibly tongue in cheek but it’s a good reminder of how PR can sometimes just be a bit silly and fun.
They also produced a very fun video which you can watch from the link above that does a great job of capturing the essence of the stunt with a fittingly low budget production. Something similar may have been done again since but I think this is long enough ago now that it’s fair game to be inspired by it and put your own creative twist on the idea.
4️⃣ World's most expensive Valentine's day bouquet by Endura Roses
The “world’s most expensive…” is a stunt campaign that I haven’t seen done a great deal recently but is always a good format for earning some quality PR coverage. This is an example that Endura Roses did in 2022 where they created “The Cullinan bouquet”, costing an eye-watering £20,000, filled with 24-carat gold roses and diamonds.
Stunts like this are great in particular for brands that want to position themselves as premium brands as they not only work for creating an outlandish story, but they can actually earn you customers if people that love to display their wealth go as far as getting in touch to order the ridiculous product, especially if you stick the classic “out of stock” and “limited supply only” on the product page (even if it’s fake if someone actually wants to buy it the brand can probably create it and make a nice profit).
Endura Roses also did a similar campaign where Katie Price was “gifted” a £5,000 bespoke bouquets of flowers by her boyfriend for Valentine’s Day, complete with front door pictures of her looking shocked and showing off the flowers with the brand name on the box conveniently facing the camera.
5️⃣ Brits set to spend £787 million on ‘virtual’ Valentine’s Day by Barclaycard
Valentine’s Day campaigns don’t all have to be fun tongue in cheek stories. It can also be a good opportunity for brands to showcase their expertise as Barclaycard did here, conducting a survey to reveal how Brits would be celebrating Valentine’s Day during lockdown.
Surveys like this can work extra well when tied together with Valentine’s as the event helps to grow the audience interest of topics bigger than they usually would be. Data around dating trends will always have an audience and be newsworthy, but Valentine’s helps to make these topics even more relevant and topical, helping them to land more PR coverage as a result.
What I also like about this survey is that it covers a topic that had a lot of uncertainty to it, something that I feel is a good starting point when deciding if a survey is a good solution to the problem you want to address. Surveys are designed to reveal how reveal how audiences feel about topics, and the more uncertain we are about those topics, the more new information that the survey reveals to us, and thus the more newsworthy it will be.
And that’s a wrap for Issue 59. 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 🙂
4 February 2026
