THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 66

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 66 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 is my round up of How the Digital PR Industry is Using AI

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

Press.: PR tools that save you hours every week - Syndication Finder and Journalist Extractor

Muck Rack: The State of Journalism 2026

BuzzStream: How Do Journalist Relationships Impact Email Performance?

Get Featured: You can't please all journalists...

PRmoment: GEO is just strategy led by FOMO

PressReacher: Tom Chapman Interview - What UNILAD Tech Wants

Flaunt Digital: Why Trust is the Travel Industry’s Most Valuable Currency and How PR Builds It

Jasmine Maguire on LinkedIn: Two Digital PR lessons from Reuters: who do young people actually trust?

Matt Black on LinkedIn: Digital PR tip for better AI visibility

Press Gazette: Daily Star became a hit on MSN by tailoring content to robot editor

Press Gazette: The SEO parasites buying, exploiting and ultimately killing online newsbrands

BuzzStream Podcast: Mastering Media Pitches with Joni Sweet

BuzzStream Podcast: Why LLM Volatility Shouldn’t Change Your Digital PR Strategy with Amanda Milligan

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

1️⃣ If you're doing a "most searched for in each country" campaign then you need to be translating your list of search terms into the native language for each country for the most accurate data. Otherwise your results might not reflect the true search landscape in that country if you just cover searches made in English rather than in the native language too.

2️⃣ https://datavizcatalogue.com/ is a good resource for learning about the correct charts to use to present your data in the best and clearest way.

3️⃣ Treat discovering, digesting and analysing other Digital PR campaigns like a hobby. The more you do this the easier coming up with your own ideas will become, as well as the more knowledge you'll have of what content really works.

4️⃣ There are a lot of interesting data vis tips and guidance on this page from BBC on how to design infographics - https://www.bbc.co.uk/gel/guidelines/how-to-design-infographics

5️⃣ Cool design led pieces will struggle to pick up coverage unless you have a strong story attached to the designs. Cool designs alone are usually not strong enough. Make sure they also tell a story.

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 UK Weekly Road Fuel Prices

A topical one at the moment with the rising cost of fuel. This dataset is updated weekly and covers the cost of fuel in the UK dating all the way back to 2003 for both petrol and diesel. Could be a great dataset for a data campaign or for adding an extra bit of unique content and trust to your expert commentary reacting to trending news stories.

2️⃣ Parental Care Policies by Country

The International Labour Organization has some some really fantastic datasets that nicely round up global data broken down by country. This one covers different parental leave topics such as maternity leave, paternity leave, parental leave, and paid nursing breaks for breastfeeding. The page is really user friendly too with the data for each topic in a table you can easily copy, and is also visualised on a map so you can quickly spot potential regional trends with the data.

3️⃣ Government Expenditure on Education as % of GDP

World Bank Group is another great source for global datasets on a wide range of topics. This dataset covers how much each country’s government spends on education as a percentage of their GDP, with figures dating back to 1970 to allow you to track changes in investment over the years.

4️⃣ UNICEF Immunisation Data

This page from UNICEF is a super breakdown of immunisation data for a massive range of diseases broken down by country. Could be a great dataset for best/healthiest/etc places to live indexes.

5️⃣ Number of Farms in America by State

When you’ve got a client in a very niche industry it can be difficult sometimes to find relevant datasets that you can create interesting data-led campaigns out of. I firmly believe that if you dig hard enough you can always find a gem of a dataset to do something with. This is a good example of that. This dataset from the United States Department of Agriculture has loads of stats on farms in America, including the number of farms, land in farms, and average farm size in each state.

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 Which Colleges and Universities Have the Most Alumni Who Are CEOs of Fortune 500 Companies? by Academic Influence

📊 69 RDs, 24 DR 50+

This is a really cool campaign that was launched in 2021 by Academic Influence who researched which colleges and universities have produced the most CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. To do so they searched the company bios of all of the Fortune 500 CEOs to find the colleges and universities they graduated from as well as the subject(s) they earned a degree in. If this data isn’t available via company websites then you could also produce a similar campaign using data from LinkedIn profiles.

The data analysis is very well done here and I’m a big fan of how they’ve presented it on the landing page, with nice infographics showing the ranking of the top colleges and universities, along with the top degrees that they studied. I also really like how they’ve listed each of the individual CEOs that graduated from each college or university to turn the landing page into a great resource for people researching topics related to their data.

Studies around colleges and universities can be a great way to earn some very high value links from .edu or .ac.uk sites like this one achieved, earning links from Penn State, and Grand Canyon University, along with publications such as Bloomberg, Fast Company, and The Ringer.

2️⃣ The Rage Yard by Scrap Car Comparison

📊 67 RDs, 52 DR 50+

Finding ways to consistently create campaigns that have a really high relevance to your brand is not at all easy, especially when you’re in a quite niche industry like car scrapping. Scrap Car Comparison however are a brand that for years have done a great job of producing clever creative campaigns that are also very effective at promoting what their core service is.

This campaign from 2020 is a great example of that. Here, they launched a competition for their new Rage Yard experience where the winners could use Scrap Car Comparison’s scrapped cars for their own personal destruction therapy, involving shooting the cars with shotguns and driving a souped-up 56 tonne Chieftain battle tank over an old scrap car.

The campaign also fit very nice culturally coming at the end of 2020, a very stressful year for many during the era of Covid and lockdowns. This no doubt played a big part in earning them a regional news syndication, along with international coverage on Fox News.

3️⃣ The World’s Black Billionaires by Visual Capitalist

📊 31 RDs, 6 DR 50+

Visual Capitalist is one of my favourite inspo sites for creative data stories. They publish a lot of data-led campaigns that brands produce and could be a great site to pitch a relevant data story to that you’ve produced, but they also release a lot of their own studies. This is one example from 2021 where they analysed the Forbes Billionaires list to highlight the most financially successful Black people, and the source(s) of their wealth.

This is a great example of finding an engaging story within a frequently used dataset. Rather than looking at the whole of the list of billionaires or categorising it by more common metrics like country and gender, they instead looked at race. Part of the reason why the story works so well is that at the time of the post black billionaires made up fewer than 1% of all billionaires worldwide, just 15 in total. This piece is a great analysis of those billionaires and how they amassed their wealth. Visual Capitalist stories are always great inspo too for how to present clear and effective data vis to easily and concisely illustrate the key stories from your data.

4️⃣ Who Has The Right of Way Game by Veygo

📊 57 RDs, 46 DR 50+

Quizzes can be an underused but when done right very effective format for Digital PR campaigns. This one produced by car insurance brand Veygo is a very fun example of how well a quiz can work as a link building asset. This quiz is a set of six scenarios that test users on their knowledge of who should have the right of way in each situation.

Why I think this earned a lovely regional syndication across the National World network is that it feeds into a topic that the majority of the population can relate to and is also one that people that have strong opinions on and causes debates. Topics like this have organic engagement built into them which makes them appealing stories for Journalists. The quiz also ranks first in the U.S. for “right of way quiz” (100 MSV).

5️⃣ How are you doing? by The Pudding

📊 71 RDs, 17 DR 50+

Our final campaign this week is another fantastic story produced by The Pudding. For those of you not aware of The Pudding yet, make some time to have a browse through their archive of data-led stories - they truly are best in class for engaging data studies with incredible data vis.

This is less of a data study and more of a excellent interactive piece of content that explores emotions and how we’re feeling. I very much implore people to check the page out and go through the story because it’s very educational and extremely well produced.

I think sometimes brands have a tendency to stay away from content like this, probably in the belief that it’s too big of an investment for the returns they feel it’s likely to get. And there may be something to that. Something like this won’t be cheap to produce, and the 71 linking domains are no doubt boosted by the brand equity that The Pudding has. But 166 links 71 referring domains shows that content like this does work as a very effective link building asset, and could be a great story for a wellness brand.

The picture has nothing to do with the story, I’m just a silly billy that’s on the internet too much.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 66. 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 🙂