THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 71

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 71 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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Here is the latest Digital PR news and resources from the last week that you might have missed.

BuzzStream: How to Tell If a Journalist Is a F.I.T. For Your Story

Energy PR: Our Six Tips for Entering a New International Market (Based on 30 Years’ Experience)

PressReacher: Interview with Jeff LeBlanc - How to Pitch Business Media Like Fast Company & Forbes

PressReacher: UK vs US Press, Expert Voices & Always-On Digital PR

PressReacher: Making Experts Easy to Trust in a World of Fake Voices

Muck Rack: Earned media still drives 84% of AI citations. Here's what that means for PR.

Cision: 12 Bingeworthy PR Podcasts to Follow in 2026

PR Daily: A smarter way to approach Reddit in PR

Libby Windle on LinkedIn: If you want to push your PR campaigns internationally, you don’t always have to create something new for each market

Thierry Ngutegure on LinkedIn: Most reports don’t fail because of bad data. They fail because no one knows what to do next.

Bekki Ramsey on LinkedIn: An affiliate marketing approach to link rec

Digital PR Explained Podcast: A PR Case Study in Using AI to Find the Story Faster

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

1️⃣ At the ideation stage, try to think like a Journalist would. What stories are they covering at the moment, what are they likely to cover, how is the story topical, what content will help them to achieve their objectives such as page views and social engagement. That will help you to understand what things a Journalist will be looking for when deciding if to use your story or not.

2️⃣ Earning great coverage from your PR stories is amazing but it'll only have the full impact with your clients/bosses if you can show the commercial value that coverage is contributing towards. At some point whoever is in charge of your PR budget is going to ask you to show them what kind of return they are getting on their PR investment.

3️⃣ To help show the commercial impact of PR activity, look at rankings growth and how that translates into increases in website traffic and then sales using data either from Google Analytics or the website's CMS.

4️⃣ Don't have access to Google Analytics or the CMS? You can estimate traffic gains using tools like Ahrefs to track rankings growth and the corresponding growth in estimated organic traffic.

5️⃣ Now you have an estimated increase in organic traffic you can request an average conversion rate and order value from the client to also estimate how many extra sales and revenue that increase in organic traffic is likely to produce.

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 Daily UK Flights

This ONS dataset on the number of flights to, from, and within the UK has just been updated in the past week with data now as current as of May 4th 2026. The data shows the number of flights per day going back to 2nd January 2019, with figures also available as seasonally adjusted totals and a seven day rolling average. This could be a great dataset for a travel brand to analyse the most popular dates for flights and related trends.

2️⃣ A Comprehensive Database on the FIFA World Cup

For the newer subscribers here, one of my first ports of call when ideating for a topic is Kaggle to find what data sources are already listed on there that I could create a story out of. Kaggle is kinda like a search engine for datasets and there are some absolute gems on there that lovely people on the internet have uploaded and made available to everyone.

This is an amazing example of what you can find on Kaggle and is perfect if you’re planning a World Cup themed campaign for this summer. This dataset has data on almost every football related metric you could think of for every World Cup up to 2018, and covers way more than just the results of every game. Across the 27 datasets in the collection there’s also detailed data on bookings, substitutes, managers, penalties, referees, squad selections, and stadiums.

3️⃣ FIFA World Cup, 1930 - 2022

Fear not though, this Kaggle database has you covered for data from the 2022 World Cup. It doesn’t cover all of the data covered in the above dataset, particularly some of the more niche ones like squads, referees, and stadiums, but it does have very comprehensive match stats, including xG data for each match from the 2022 World Cup. I also love that this one includes attendance figures for each match. Combine the two datasets together and you’ve unlocked a massive supply of golden data ahead of this summer’s tournament.

4️⃣ UEFA Champions League All Knockout Games (1992-2026)

The World Cup isn’t the only upcoming major Football tournament. In a couple of weeks time there’s the Champions League Final too. Another Kaggle gem here which covers the results of every knockout game from the 1992/93 season right up to last week’s Semi Finals. There’s also data on referees, stadiums, and attendances. The attendances data could be super valuable when analysed for teams over the years, possibly relative to their stadium capacity perhaps? 👀

5️⃣ Fly-Tipping Statistics for England

A great resource for an eco-friendly brand. This dataset covers the number of fly-tipping incidents reported by local authorities in England from 2012/13 to 2024/25. The data in this file is super detailed covering the number of incidents categorised by land type, waste type, and size and costs, as well as the actions taken and fines issued for each local authority. A great dataset for discovering regional trends too.

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 2025 Year in Review by Letterboxd

📊 58 RDs, 25 DR 50+

I love a year in review campaign, especially when it’s based on internal data, and I’ve seen very few better produced than Letterboxd’s year in review. Letterboxd is a site for movie fans to rate movies and create lists with films on so they naturally have access to a fountain of user data that is guaranteed to be of interest to not just their current audience, but also their target audience that aren’t currently using their site.

What really separates this campaign from others like it for me is the incredible production of the campaign page. It’s one of the best campaign pages I’ve seen from a design point of view, and it doesn’t just look flippin gorgeous, it’s super on brand for the campaign too. The level of detail in the report is also incredible. It’s absolutely massive and is the type of report that you have to read through in multiple sittings.

I love how they’ve also partnered with NEON to produce last year’s report which is very cool from a brand perspective. Something like that doesn’t just happen the first year you produce a report. The beauty of these campaigns is the compound impact that they build up over the years. Letterboxd have been releasing their year in reviews since 2012 and the reports in the past 4-5 years do roughly double the number of backlinks that the original reports did. Every year now they get over 100 backlinks from around 50-100 unique sites. By comparison it looks like the original 2012 report peaked at 28 referring domains. Report campaigns definitely produce short-term results but they should also be a long-term play!

2️⃣ The Hottest U.S. ZIP Codes of 2025 by MovingPlace

📊 91 RDs, 19 DR 50+

This next campaign produced by MovingPlace is a great example of the value of going very micro with your level of regional data analysis. For this campaign they analysed internal data of 6.3 million moves between January 2025 and May 31st, 2025 to identify the number of movers to each ZIP code in the U.S. and which were seeing the biggest increase.

Most campaigns like this would likely focus on a state or a city level. The great thing about being able to go as granular as zip code areas is that the data, and thus the story, becomes extra localised - perfect for making regional comparisons that readers can understand on a very local level. This also helps to play into the competitive nature of hyper-localised stories that regional publications like to publish.

From an outreach point of view, the extra data then means you have a localised story for every regional publication across America, not just the ones that cover local news at more of a state level, or the areas that rank highest or lowest in the study. This allows you to earn coverage with headlines like “This is Florida’s most popular ZIP code, new study shows” at a regional level, along with “Texas scores 2 of the hottest zip codes of 2025. Here's where” as a regional story with a more national overview of the data.

3️⃣ The most authentic cities in the world for travellers by InsureandGo

📊 65 RDs, 34 DR 50+

I’ve recently shared a few examples of successful campaigns using text analysis of online reviews as the data source for their story and this is another really well produced version of that format. In this one that was released in December, travel insurance brand InsurenandGo revealed the most and least authentic tourist cities by analysing 1.3 million reviews of restaurants, attractions, shops, museums, and cultural venues for mentions of them being either “authentic” and “traditional”, or “tourist traps” and “inauthentic”.

The data covers 144 popular tourist cities which is a great sample size to use for the study. I also really like how they’ve produced different variations of the ranking to create a wider range of stories to use, for example, the top European cities as well as globally, and the top cities specifically for authentic restaurants.

This helped them to earn coverage on French sites such as Secret Marseille, Vogue, and Le Bonbon for Marseille ranking as the most authentic city in Europe, despite not ranking in the top 10 overall which is dominated by cities in South America. The campaign also earned coverage on top travel sites such as TimeOut and Travel + Leisure.

4️⃣ The Cities That Produce the Most Billionaires by PlayersTime

📊 63 RDs, 16 DR 50+

This campaign produced by PlayersTime is a good example of how combining two datasets together can create a unique data-led PR story. Here they analysed Forbes’ billionaires list and combined it with the birthplaces of each billionaire to reveal which countries have the most billionaires in 2026.

This is another good example of the value of having more than one main angle for your campaign. As well as looking at the top countries where billionaires currently live, they also revealed the top countries, cities, and U.S. states where the most were born, weighted by per 1 million people to allow for even comparisons. This helped them to earn links on major publications such as Inc., Mental Floss, and Visual Capitalist, along with coverage in countries such as France, Germany, Ukraine, and Hungary.

5️⃣ Chocolate Olympic Medals by Hershey’s

With a big summer of sport upcoming, brands are going to be looking for creative ways to join those conversations and earn some nice PR coverage off the back of major sporting events. While the benefits of creating stories around the World Cup for example are clear, my advice would be to not do a World Cup campaign just for the sake of doing so. Cutting through the very loud noise of other World Cup stories will be difficult, and most sports reporters spend all their time covering the games as a 24/7 news cycle.

I do think there’s great opportunities however for non-sports brands to newsjack sporting events with stories that combine sports with their core topic, and therefore isn’t exclusively relevant to sports audiences. This is a good example of how a non-sports brand can use major sporting events as the topic for a effective PR story where Hershey’s Chocolate created limited-edition chocolate medals to celebrate Team USA’s success at this year’s Winter Olympics.

Obviously being an official sponsor of Team USA and a household brand help Hershey’s with this story, but it’s a good case study to learn from in terms of how simple a great PR story can be, and the importance of staying true to your core topics and values as a brand when newsjacking a story from a different industry. As well as some clever photoshoots with the athletes, they also made them available for customers to buy to help link the campaign to commercial goals.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 71. 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 🙂