THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 62

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 62 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 post on Digital PR Tips comes from Chloe Osunsami, Head of Digital PR at Aira

Five Key Digital PR Shifts for Travel Brands in 2026

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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.

BuzzStream: Digital PR in the US vs UK: Mapping the Differences [Data Study]

Rise at Seven: Key Differences Between Digital PR in Spain and the UK (And How to Win in Both)

Motive PR: UK Digital PR Statistics 2026: Latest data on backlinks, brand visibility and AI

Motive PR: Backlink strategy not working? This might be why

Wolfenden: Navigating the Shifting Parenting Media Landscape: What Brands Need to Know for 2026

Veronica Fletcher on LinkedIn: News flash: Reactive PR isn't limited to expert commentary

Tanya Gains on LinkedIn: Is the press release really dead? 🤔

Iona Townsley on LinkedIn: The more I work on campaigns for U.S brands, the more I realise their media landscape runs on hyper localization, especially for property and real estate stories.

Stephen Kenwright on LinkedIn: I'm judging this year's UK Content Awards and it the 30th awards I've judged, so here are 22 tips to help you win more

Studiohawk: How To Win Visibility In ChatGPT, Gemini & AI Overviews

Siege Media: Which Industries Are Losing the Most Traffic to AI?

The HOTH: The Hidden Cost of Inconsistent Brand Mentions

Search Engine Journal: Google Says Links Will Be More Visible In AI Overviews

The Digital PR Podcast: How AI Is Changing the Journalist-PR Relationship w/ Rosie Taylor

Digital PR Explained Podcast: Rejection Is Redirection w/ Shara Seigel

ICS Podcast: Everything Digital: Digital PR in Travel & Tourism w/ Grace Taylor-Clarke

BuzzStream Podcast: Is Social Media the Future of PR? With Manychat’s Mady Lanni

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

1️⃣ Aesthetically pleasing formatting for your email pitches is such an underrated factor. Lines of text isn't getting anyone excited to read the full email. Use images, use headings, use bullet points, use infographics. Get the Journalist excited when they open your pitch and eager to read on.

2️⃣ Creating your own imagery that Journalists can use in their articles is a great way of making sure you get links. Some sites will create all of their own infographics but if they do get used, that's your intellectual property that they're using so you can dictate the terms of use.

3️⃣ When choosing ranking factors for index campaigns, ask yourself if you're using metrics that measure the best or just the most. Quantity doesn't equal quality. Instead of ranking cities based on the number of something they have, consider changing the metric to the number rated above a certain threshold such as 4*+, or as a percentage that are rated above your threshold.

4️⃣ In your methodology, make sure you list when your data was collected. Especially for evergreen campaigns, Journalists might sit on your data for a few months before using it in a story. In these cases it's important for them to know how old the data is at this point.

5️⃣ Every idea is worth discussing, even those that everyone thinks is a "bad idea". It may be a bad idea in its current form but it could very well spark a discussion that leads to a better idea being built off the back of it.

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 Average Domestic Airline Itinerary Fares By Origin City

This dataset from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics provides the average airline fare cost out of 443 cities, either as an average for the year or by quarter. The data goes all the way back to 1993 so there’s loads of trends insights you can create from this data. I also like how all of the figures are also converted to a inflation adjusted price.

2️⃣ U.S. Fatal Occupational Injuries

Last week the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics released their latest data on fatal injuries in the workplace. Within the links there’s a nice PDF overview of the key findings within the data, or you can explore the data in its entirety via the different charts here. You can get data for the number of fatal injuries by employee status, race, age group, industry, and state.

3️⃣ DEFRA Datasets

Here is where you can find all of the different datasets that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the UK have published. These datasets are perfect for data and insights on recycling and sustainability topics.

4️⃣ Letterboxd

Letterboxd for those not aware of it is a site for movie fans to rate movies and create lists with films on. Audience insights data is some of the best data for creating engaging data stories with so this site is a real treasure trove of insights for movie reviews. As well as the average rating you can also see the full review each user has left for a movie which is perfect for analysing the words used in reviews too. Letterboxd is also a great site for finding data on films such as more specific genres than just “comedy”, detailed crew lists that go beyond just the acting cast, and there are some real creative uses for the user lists that add another level to categorising movies by different themes.

5️⃣ LinkedIn

For better or worse we’re probably all familiar with LinkedIn. As well as being the place where you’re constantly hounded with messages from people that will create you a Wikipedia page and sell you links, or random people offering you a career change (The Western Australia Police Force tried to recruit me to help them fight crime for some reason yesterday????), it can be a super effective data source when paired with a dash of creativity. If you have a brand in the business sector, have a look through people’s profile pages and job listing pages to see all of the different data points available that you could create some clever data stories with.

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 Are You Press Worthy?

📊 305 RDs, 148 DR 50+

Are You Press Worthy is (was?) a great project released in 2022 by the Columbia Journalism Review which calculated how much press you’d be likely to receive in America if you went missing. How effective data stories can be often comes down to the way that we present them. This is an amazing example of how to turn data points into stories that really pack a punch and have a much stronger impact on your audience.

The data on how many news stories missing people receive filtered by age, race, state, etc would be amazing presented in any format. As a table ranked by the top states and with some nice graphics comparing different races, ethnicities, gender, and age groups, it would work extremely well. But it works so much better as a calculator to work out how many news stories you specifically would get, before then hitting you with the powerful stats on reporting bias.

Unfortunately the site doesn’t work at the moment/anymore and the Wayback Machine versions aren’t great for loading interactive elements. Although you can’t see the images on the archived version, the gut punch at the very end of people who are actually missing right now (as in when this site launched) with the “These currently-missing people haven't received any press coverage at all” caption is extremely powerful, and a great example of how impactful using different visualisation techniques can be in making your data points trigger a more emotional reaction, and therefore become more newsworthy.

2️⃣ The most visited websites globally by Hostinger

📊 144 RDs, 50 DR 50+

This next campaign comes from web hosting service Hostinger, and uses SimilarWeb data to reveal the most visited websites globally and in select countries. It’s a fairly simple idea in my opinion but as you’ll see from the results, not all ideas have to be super creative ideas that produce surprising outcomes to get fantastic results.

The results of the study are what you’d expect, but what’s more valuable to people is being able to put a figure on the estimated traffic that these sites get, and where they sit relative to one another, especially as it’s a topic with a lot of search interest. “most visited websites” gets 108,000 global searches a month, and it’s very evergreen interest too. Hostinger’s page ranks in the top 10 in lots of countries around the world, usually around position 6-9. Even without being the top result, the page is estimated to earn over 3,000 monthly organic sessions just from that one keyword, and nearly 5,000 a month from the 500+ keywords that the page ranks for.

It’s a lot easier said than done, but when you create content with a combination of evergreen search interest and popularity, you can unlock an amazing metric to show the value of your work to clients/stakeholders. Getting credit as Digital PRs for commercial metrics going up can be a tricky one sometimes. After all, rankings, traffic, and hopefully sales going up isn’t exclusively down to the campaigns we’ve created. That happens when lots of different SEO disciplines are working well together. But if you create a campaign and it starts earning thousands of organic sessions on repeat each month? That’s a lot easier for you to take maximum credit for, and it’s a much stronger metric than the number of follow links to show the real life impact the work that you’re producing is having.

3️⃣ Your lifetime in screen time by Unplugged

📊 41 RDs, 4 DR 50+

I talked about how effective calculator tools can be in my analysis of the Are You Press Worthy? campaign, and this campaign, found via Sophie Barker on LinkedIn, is another fab example of how calculators can be a great device for turning data points into stories. First things first, I love how perfect a screen time calculator is for a digital detox cabins brand like Unplugged. It’s a great tool for anyone to use, but it works so much better when it’s created by a brand that is specifically targeting people that want to manage/cut down on their screen time.

One of my best tips for making your data more newsworthy is to change the way you’re presenting it. Convert it, compare it, or as Unplugged have done here, extrapolate it. 5 hours a day screen time doesn’t really mean a whole lot. Converting it to 76 days a year, and 9.8 years of the rest of your life, helps to make the exact same figure significantly more powerful and impactful. I also love the inclusion of the sign up form to their newsletter at the bottom of the calculator. The brand connection makes this fit in perfectly and is a great example of how PR campaigns can be used to also increase metrics for other channels such as email.

Although the page has 54 links from 41 referring domains, that is a tad misleading as just 4 of them are DR 50+, and only 6 are above DR 30. That is enough though to be earning nearly 400 organic sessions a month from keywords such as “screen time calculator” (150 MSV ranking #1 in U.S.) and “average phone screen time” (880 MSV ranking #3 in the UK). And I love how you can see both referring domains and organic traffic growing consistently over time, and in line with one another:

May 2024 - 3 RDs and 127 organic sessions

May 2025 - 13 RDs and 248 organic sessions

Feb 2026 - 41 RDs and 362 organic sessions

4️⃣ Natural Light Unveils ‘Treadmower’ for Those Who Miss Mowing in Winter

What I love about PR campaigns is that there are so many different approaches that can be taken to create a successful campaign. PR can be used for genuine good to highlight social issues and make a real change, and sometimes it can be goofy nonsense like a brand creating a treadmill to simulate mowing the lawn, which lands on sites such as Mens Journal, Parade, and Foodbeast.

Campaigns like this won’t work for every brand, but if a quirkier tone fits with your brand personality, tongue-in-cheek ideas can land great media coverage when done well. The “treadmower” is the creation of Natural Light Beer, and is a number of similar product stunts the brand has done to shape their brand personality through the media. It’s also a super example of understanding your target audience and what will connect with them on an emotional level.

If you rely purely on relevancy tools to determine if you should do a campaign idea, I’m sure most tools will tell you that a fake gardening-fitness combo product for a beer brand lacks relevancy. And it does, on a topical level at least. Instead the relevancy comes from their target audience connecting all the topics together as a shared interest. The combination of mowing the lawn, cracking open a cold beer and having a laugh is perfect for shaping their brand as someone (rather than something) that a person who has these things in common will want to be friends with. And that’s where really powerful brands are formed, when people start subconsciously treating them like people they have emotional connections to instead of as a marketing tactic.

5️⃣ Tesco launch ‘reverse supermarket’ to support food banks

Speaking of PR campaigns that help to humanise brands and influence brand metrics, this is an example of the same principle but achieved via a very different tone. In 2022 Tesco opened its first-ever ‘reverse supermarket’ in a partnership with FareShare and the Trussell Trust to help promote and support food banks.

‘The Give Back Express’ was a pop up store opened in London which invited shoppers to buy and donate the 25 most needed goods and essentials such as tinned food, tea, and toiletries identified by both charities. Tesco then matched the value of items bought as charitable donations to FareShare and the Trussell Trust.

Creative stunts like this can be a great way to get extra media coverage for the charity and CSR work that your brand is doing by creating a story that is more newsworthy than just “brand donates to charity”. This campaign got covered on sites such as Metro, Stylist, Retail Gazette, LBC, and across regional news sites. All that coverage is obviously great for influencing brand perceptions with a story like this, but it also is a huge help for promoting the good causes, and showing how PR can be used to encourage social change.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 62. 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 🙂