THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 72

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 72 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.

Finchling: Trending PR Campaigns

PressReacher: Why PR Teams That Can’t Show Revenue Impact Won’t Last (by meeeee!)

Cision: 2026 State of the Media Report

Propellernet: Is Your Digital PR Already Influencing AI Search?

Impression: Search has moved on. Has Digital PR?

Get Featured: Bringing your old ideas back to life

Press Gazette: Telegraph recorded most Editors’ Code breaches in 2025

Press Gazette: Prolific finance journalists facing questions over identities

Press Gazette: Health coverage is getting killed by Google AI Overviews

James Roach on LinkedIn: 3 simple things that got us 12 links in no time at all

BuzzStream Webinar: International PR: Pitching in the US and European Markets w/ Connective3

Digital PR Explained Podcast: I Read Cision’s 2026 State of the Media Report So You Don’t Have To

Everything Digital Podcast: What Journalists Want - PR tips from HuffPost UK’s Dayna McAlpine

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

1️⃣ https://www.datawrapper.de/ is a brilliant site that requires no design skills to create really good looking data vis charts and maps with lots of customisation options that can be either static or interactive.

2️⃣ When you're doing sentiment analysis of comments/posts, try to look out for instances where certain words are used with differing intents. For example if you're scraping reviews that include "funny" to find the funniest ___, you could also be picking up comments such as "almost funny how bad it is".

3️⃣ UK is not the same as GB. Great Britain is England, Scotland and Wales. UK also includes Northern Ireland. If you've collected data for just Great Britain and then refer to it as the UK, you're technically using the term wrong.

4️⃣ Journalists will link to product/category pages but it's got to be relevant. Is the content about the money page (product PR)? Is it related to the content (a link to the Europe flights page for content about top European destinations)? The key is relevance to the reader.

5️⃣ Low DR sites can rank above high DR sites. Rankings are based on page level as well as domain level. A well crafted genuinely useful post on a low-mid authority domain can and will outrank an inferior post on a higher authority domain.

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 ATP Tennis Results 2000 - 2026

I love Kaggle for finding amazing datasets in any industry but I think sports has to be the industry where Kaggle is most valuable. This is another example of how much time can be saved from doing your own data collection by just downloading most of what you need in one go from Kaggle. This dataset covers every men’s Tennis match on the ATP tour including Grand Slams dating back to the start of 2000 and gets updated fairly frequently with the most recent tournaments too. As well as the results, the dataset also includes info on the court surface, player rankings at the time, and pre-match odds.

2️⃣ WTA Tennis Results 2007 - 2026

And here’s a corresponding dataset for the women’s tour. This one only dates back to the start of 2007 however, but once again is regularly updated with new tournament results.

3️⃣ England and Wales Football-related Arrests and Banning Orders

After each Football season, data is released on the number of arrests and banning orders made during the season. This is a fantastic dataset that has been updated each season since the 2010/11 season and includes stats on the number of arrests, the type of incident, the severity of the incident, and the number of banning orders for every club from the Premier League down to the National League.

4️⃣ Dataset of World Refugee and Asylum Policies

This is a fantastic resource from The World Bank which is a handy overview and ranking of each country’s refugee and asylum policies, which are then conceptualised as an amalgam of policy provisions regulating a range of dimensions from the ease of entrance and security of status (access) to welfare provision (services), the ability to work and own property (livelihoods), encampment policies (movement), and citizenship and political rights (participation).

5️⃣ Equaldex

And speaking of equality policies around the world, here is another brilliant dataset, this time on LGBTQ+ rights in each country. This site is super comprehensive and provides an index score out of 100 based on equality, laws, and public opinion. It also lists recent LGBTQ+ law changes around the world which could be very useful for spotting Reactive opportunities.

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 Drivers are the Smartest? by Scrap Car Comparison

📊 133 RDs, 64 DR 50+

I think survey campaigns get a bad rep sometimes, and I reckon it’s largely down to surveys people have done that are missing a key ingredient - creativity. This is a great example of how creative you can be with survey campaigns to create headlines that really capture people’s attention.

For this campaign conducted in 2023 by Scrap Car Comparison, they did a simple twenty question IQ test with 2,000 drivers in the UK. The creative part of it however comes from the profiling questions rather than the survey questions themselves. They also asked respondents the brand and colour of the car they currently drive, in addition to whether they owned a personalised number plate or not.

Doing this allowed them to answer the question of which drivers are most intelligent based on the car that they drive. Obviously there’s an tongue in cheek element to it, but it does a great job of allowing them to create fantastic headlines such as “MINI Drivers Have The Highest IQ” and “BMW Drivers Are 1 of the Most Stupid and Psychopathic in Studies”. Also asking respondents if they had a personalised number plate helped them to produce this outstanding headline - “Drivers With Vanity License Plates Are Dumber With Lower IQ in Study”.

2️⃣ The most translated books in the world by Preply

📊 90 RDs, 32 DR 50+

From one brand that is regularly producing best in class PR campaigns to another one in Preply. This is a campaign that they produced in 2021 which revealed the books in each country that have been translated the highest number of times from their native language. The answer apparently is The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry which was published in English and French in 1943 and has since been translated into more than 382 different languages.

Obviously for an online language tutors brand, a campaign based around translations is perfect for them, and allows the brand to earn far more benefits from the campaign than what a brand with less relevance to the topic would get. That’s also reflected in the wide range of countries that the campaign earned coverage in, perfect for a brand that targets customers around the world (I believe I counted 14 unique international domain extensions).

3️⃣ Which Singers Have the Biggest Vocabularies? by WordTips

📊 102 RDs, 46 DR 50+

Many of my favourite campaigns produced by Digital PR teams are data-led studies on entertainment topics that have really unique and creative methodologies. This is one of the best examples from back in 2021 where WordTips analysed the lyrics of popular artists to reveal which singers have the biggest vocabularies based on the highest number of unique words they use per 1,000 words in their lyrics.

With the campaigns that I share in this newsletter, I think it’s important to note that just because you see a campaign which you thought was really cool doesn’t mean that you can’t produce your own version of the core concept. This is a good example of how two campaigns produced around a similar methodology can both produce fantastic results.

This campaign follows a very similar methodology to The Pudding’s famous piece on Rappers with the Largest Vocabulary In Hip Hop which was released two years earlier. This one however focuses the data on a different context to provide fresh and original insights. Both campaigns were a big hit. Don’t be afraid to replicate someone else’s campaign as long as you ensure that you have an element that is unique to your campaign (obviously don’t blatantly copy someone else’s work!).

4️⃣ Luxury dog beds that match your own sofa by Made.com

Speaking of campaigns that can be constantly replicated in a different market, industry, topic, etc, matching products for humans and pets is a prolific concept that produces brilliant results for so many brands year after year. I wrote about it on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago when Adidas released special edition World Cup shirts for dogs, and this is a much older example from 2021 when Made.com released luxury dog beds that matched up with their sofas collection.

Product PR when done right can be a very rewarding campaign format for brands. In a post I wrote for PressReacher last week I shared some of my tips for how PR teams can go about showing the commercial impact of their PR campaigns through increases in keywords rankings and website traffic. The great thing about Product PR if it’s for products that actually exist and customers can buy is you can connect the performance of your campaign directly to revenue via product sales, as was the case with these dog sofas from Made.com.

5️⃣ Glowing Billboards Offer Passerbys Boost Of Serotonin On Bluest Day Of The Year by Solgar

This next campaign is a really clever bit of OOH advertising from vitamin company Solgar who in 2023 produced glowing billboards design to emulate the sun the help brighten up the bluest day of the year - Blue Monday.

This is another one of those examples of clever creativity that doesn’t have to break the bank in order to execute. The effectiveness of the campaign comes from the impactful storytelling which is a lovely bit of PR to position the brand in a positive way.

I think there’s also a bit of a myth that more Traditional PR style campaigns like this can’t earn backlinks and contribute towards SEO success. Any online coverage will be a net positive in SEO terms, and sometimes all PR teams need for a campaign like this to earn backlinks is an educational piece that sits on the blog which supports the messaging of the OOH advertising.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 72. 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 🙂