THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 60

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 60 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 guest contribution on Digital PR Tips comes from Alex Lovesey, Digital PR Account Manager at EssenceMediacom North

How Digital PR and Affiliates Won AI Recommendations

Along with my roundup of 17 of my favourite Valentine’s Day PR campaigns

The Best Valentine's Day PR Campaigns

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

BuzzStream: 2026 State of Digital PR Report

Press Gazette: Faces of fakery: More fake and AI generated experts con their way into media

BuzzStream Webinar: The Perfect Pitch: What Millions of Emails Taught Us About Pitching Journalists

Off The Record: Inside Sky News: What It Takes to Turn a Local Story into National Headlines

Rosie Taylor on LinkedIn: Some tips I bear in mind when I'm pitching are…

Motive PR: Best Valentine’s Day digital PR and marketing campaigns

Gajendra Singh Rathore on LinkedIn: Your Client Just Got 50 Syndicated Links From One Story. Now Watch Them Count It as One.

Wolfenden: Pivot! How to get the most out of PR campaigns

Cedarwood Digital: How to track the long-term SEO impact of PR mentions

Connective3: How to create a standout PR strategy for your home interior brand in 2026

Search Engine Journal: 7 digital PR secrets behind strong SEO performance

Lily Ray: Is Google Finally Cracking Down on Self-Promotional Listicles?

Google: February 2026 Discover Core Update

Distinctly Webinar - 25th February: Future-proof PR: Strategies that work online and offline

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

1️⃣ Something that is really important to factor in when analysing AI visibility and talking about it with clients - the results that people see are HIGHLY personalised, even more so than search engine results. It's very nuanced and not having all the answers to "how much AI visibility do we have” is fine, but explaining the nuances to clients that likely don't know them is important, and is a great way to build up trust in your knowledge with the people you're working with.

2️⃣ Bad experiences make for good experience. You can't avoid bad experiences in Digital PR. Don't think of them as bad experiences but rather good learning opportunities.

3️⃣ If you're doing Digital PR then think bigger than just SEO. Think Social, think Brand, think CRO, think Remarketing, think Email. The impact of the Digital PR campaigns you create can stretch far beyond just building links and driving referral traffic.

4️⃣ In your link gap analysis, don't forget to also make a note of which relevant publications your site and none of your competitors have links to. These sites are just as important to build your strategy around as the ones that do link to at least one competitor.

5️⃣ Good hero campaigns need more than one story. Aim to have a good handful of engaging headlines you could go out with. This will help you not only build more links but also reduce the risk if the main headline flops.

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 TomTom Traffic Index

The TomTom Traffic Index is not only an amazing use of internal data but a great data source that can be used for your own campaigns too. The index ranks 492 global cities by traffic congestion, and was updated with data from 2025 a couple of weeks ago. As well as congestion figures, you can also get the YoY change, average driving speed, average distance driven in 15 minutes, and time lost during rush hour traffic per year.

2️⃣ Crime in England and Wales

Every quarter ONS releases updated crime data for England and Wales, with the latest figures accounting for data up to September 2025 released in the last couple of weeks. These reports are perfect for finding crime rates for different types of crimes by each police force area in England and Wales. Data goes back to 2009 which is great for finding trends in different crimes with are growing or declining in different areas.

3️⃣ Recorded Crime in Scotland

It would be nice if data for all of the UK was available in one place right? Unfortunately many datasets for Scotland and Northern Ireland are located on their own government websites rather than via ONS. Here is where you can find the corresponding crime rate data for Scotland, which is also released quarterly, with annual figures dating back to 2011/12.

4️⃣ Northern Ireland Crime Statistics

And here is crime statistics data for Northern Ireland from the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The vast majority of the data syncs up with England, Wales, and Scotland, albeit often across multiple datasets.

5️⃣ WIPO Global Innovation Index

This report from the World Intellectual Property Organization has some great insights into which countries are leading the way with global research and development. Some of the interesting data points include global R&D share across the leading countries, trends in R&D investment over the last five years, and how much the top 15 countries spend on R&D.

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 Name a Cockroach After Your Ex by Hemsley Conservation Centre

📊 212 RDs, 129 DR 50+

Another series of Valentine’s Day PR campaigns this week! “Name a… after your ex” is a very common format for Valentine's campaigns. Brands do it every year. Just this year name a cockroach after your ex has been done by Tropical Butterfly House and Birmingham Zoo in the UK, and in the U.S. Bronx Zoo have done it multiple years including this year. All of which proves something I’m a strong believer of - just because a campaign has been done before doesn’t mean it can’t be done again (just don’t blatantly copy it!).

I’m not certain if this version of it by Hemsley Conservation Centre which first launched in 2019 is the original one, but it may be the best version of it that I’ve seen based on the online visibility that the campaign created, with the campaign page earning links from 212 sites, including from top publications all over the world such as Daily Mail, CBS News, Fortune, NZ Herald and HuffPost in France.

What I really like about this one besides the obviously extremely effective story side of the campaign is how it’s also a charity campaign with customers able to purchase a certificate of the cockroach named after your ex for £2, and the money going as a donation to the zoo based in Kent.

There are loads of different variants of this campaign, but two others that I’ve really liked over the years are Scrap Car Comparison letting people get the name of their ex spray painted on the side of a car before it gets crushed, and toilet paper brand Who Gives A Crap’s “Flush Your Ex” campaign that lets people send in old love letters from their ex to be turned into recycled toilet paper. Both campaigns are very fun from a storytelling angle, but also fit very nicely with associating the brand with their core product to sit in the mind of customers for a later date when they may need their products or service.

2️⃣ The Love Sausage by Marks and Spencer

Valentine’s Day is a great opportunity for brands to produce campaigns that are more on the quirkier side of what they’d usually produce. Product PR is a great format for fun Valentine’s campaigns as M&S mastered with their “love sausage”, a heart shaped sausage wrapped in bacon.

Tongue in cheek products like this will often be fake products or products that are in such limited supply they may as well be fake. This one however was very real and it grew itself a cult following for the five years that customers could buy it. The beauty of it from M&S’ side is that it was a successful PR campaign that they could just roll back out each year and get coverage on the top national news publications every single time, to the extent that even announcing they stopped releasing it in 2024 earned them major coverage.

3️⃣ The Most Common Complainers on Valentine’s Day by Coupon Lawn

📊 6 RDs, 0 DR 50+

Not every great Valentine’s Day campaign has to be centred around Product PR ideas. This is a data-led idea from Coupon Lawn that while it didn’t earn masses of coverage, I really like it as an idea. To reveal which names are most likely to complain on Valentine’s Day, they researched TripAdvisor reviews of popular attractions (quickly becoming one of my favourite data sources to pull audience insights for campaigns from) to analyse the names of people leaving negative reviews for Valentine’s Day trips (based on filters you can choose and mentions of the word valentine’s in the review for added accuracy).

I like how they’ve also analysed the number of words in the reviews and not just the number of reviews to also reveal which names write the most words in their negative reviews and how many minutes they spend writing those reviews - a great example of how converting your data into a different figure by comparing it against something or putting it in terms of something else can make for a more creative, and often easier to understand headline.

Even though this campaign doesn’t look like a huge hit based on the lack of DR 50+ referring domains, it’s good to avoid falling too easily into the trap of dismissing potentially good ideas because on the surface it doesn’t look like they earned a lot of good links. For starters, the links it did earn are in fact good ones and better quality than the DR of the linking domains suggests (radio stations in the U.S. are notoriously lower DR/DA but much higher value than the flawed DR metric suggests). Also campaigns can earn great coverage without links, or the links could be pointing to a different page than the campaign page. Or it may simply be one of those campaigns that was a strong idea but didn’t land because of things like bad timing, a similar campaign launching at the same time, not enough budget, or poor outreach.

4️⃣ Live Like Romeo and Juliet this Valentine’s Day by Airbnb

Airbnb are possibly the best example of a brand that found a formula for PR campaigns that works spectacularly well on so many different fronts, and then get the absolute most out of it. Whatever season you’re thinking of, you can bet your life that Airbnb have done a “you can now stay in a …” themed campaign.

In this Valentine’s Day themed example of their classic format, Airbnb offered one lucky couple the chance to stay the night in Juliet’s House in Verona. What I really love about these campaigns is that they’re not just a “stay in…” type story, they really spruce it up into a premium experience with the opportunity to enjoy a feast cooked by a two Michelin Stars chef and read love letters written to Juliet.

Along with the great coverage that they always earn, these campaigns are also a magnificent way to position Airbnb as an industry leading brand in a way that no doubt impacts high value brand and commercial metrics.

5️⃣ World's first 'aphrodisiac popcorn' produced for Valentine's Day by Blinkbox

Going back to 2013, this next campaign is another example of the tongue in cheek fun that brands can get away with for a Valentine’s Day campaign. For this campaign video on demand service Blinkbox released a limited edition aphrodisiac popcorn. The popcorn includes three ingredients that are believed to be aphrodisiacs - ginseng, ginger and chocolate.

I love the use of the word “some” in their press release - “The popcorn will be available to some Blinkbox customers as well as selected Twitter users who tweet @blinkbox between February 7 and 12, stating who they would share the aphrodisiac snack with and why”. Again, showing that fun stunts like this don’t necessarily have to be big budget campaigns. The key is a strong (and ideally unique) storytelling hook. Something like this could have been a huge hit in the middle of the “Netflix and chill” trend!

And that’s a wrap for Issue 60. 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 🙂