THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 73

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 73 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.

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

BuzzStream: 2026-27 PR Calendar: Interactive + Downloadable for Smarter Campaigns

Connective3: Your digital PR is getting coverage. But is AI seeing that coverage?

Connective3: Beyond Backlinks: How AI is changing Digital PR

BuzzStream: AI Citations vs Mentions: What’s the Difference and What’s More Important?

BuzzStream: Email Subject Line Length: What the Data Actually Says (and a Free Tool)

BuzzStream: Why You Need to Use ‘Why Now?’ Now!

Flaunt Digital: Beyond Vanity Metrics: The PR Metrics That Actually Matter

Kaizen: Reactive PR Statistics 2026

Cision: 5 Things Journalists Wish PR Professionals Knew

Cision: How to Engage with Journalists on Social Media: Data-Backed Best Practices

MediaVision: The Importance of UGC in Retail Search & GEO

PressReacher: The PR Campaign Ideation Sweet Spot

PressReacher: The Reporting Shift That Changes How Clients See Digital PR

Studiohawk: How Digital PR Builds Your Brand in AI Overviews

James Brockbank on LinkedIn: Here are three terms that I see getting used wrong in digital PR all the time

Grace Tranter on LinkedIn: What's happening in June for PR opportunities

Saskia Fryer on LinkedIn: Key PR Dates for June

Ahrefs: Topical Authority: What It Is, How Google Measures It, and How to Build It

Ahrefs: What Is a Good Domain Rating? (With Real Data)

Search Engine Journal: Why Digital PR Fundamentals Beat AI Tactics: What Marketing Leaders Should Focus On

Press Gazette: Google regulation crackdown in UK over AI use of publisher content

TechCrunch: Google Search as you know it is over

Search Engine Land: Google May 2026 core update rollout is now complete

Google: Preferred Sources Comes to AI Overviews and AI Mode

The Digital PR Podcast: GenAI, Fake Experts and the Fight to Keep PR Human w/ Alex Cassidy

BuzzStream Podcast: PR in the Beauty Industry - A Journalist’s Perspective w/ Claire Coleman

BuzzStream Podcast: What Can Digital PRs Learn From Journalists? W/ Jade Denby and Sam Forrester

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

1️⃣ Tools that check if content is AI written are notoriously unreliable. This post showing that one flags THE BIBLE as 98.8% AI written is a great example of that. If your manager or client accuses you of using AI to write content you’ve spent hours writing just show them this post because these 👏 tools 👏 are 👏 not 👏 reliable.

2️⃣ If you’re worried that expert comments you’ve received are AI written, focus on the points being made not the words since so many AI checker tools flag human content as AI written. Instead, replicate the questions you asked the expert and run them through ChatGPT, etc, to see how much they match the insights provided by AI tools.

3️⃣ Do not rely on AI tools like ChatGPT with data collection for PR campaigns. I’ve tested data I’ve collected manually vs what ChatGPT gives me and at least 80% of the time it doesn’t match. If you are going to use it then manually check that the data matches the original source.

4️⃣ A big reason why AI tools are bad for data collection, especially for data sources that are regularly updated, is that they generally cite content from indexed versions of pages. This means that the data they’re citing is often more outdated than the data on the live page.

5️⃣ AI tools are much better for data analysis of PR campaigns however. But again, manually review all of the insights that you are given as all of these tools are notoriously unreliable and require human verification before being used as part of a PR campaign that you’re attaching a brand’s credibility to..

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 Employee Metrics by Business Sectors in the U.S.

This is a really interesting dataset that combines finance and employee metrics for American businesses in different sectors across nearly 6,000 companies. The data includes the number of employees per sector, as well as the revenue and market cap weighted by per employee.

2️⃣ Profit Margins by Business Sectors in the U.S.

From the same site, this dataset covers more finance based metrics such as gross and net profit margins, pre-tax margins, and EBITDA as a percentage of sales. Again, these are all categorised by a broad range of sectors and get updated multiple times per year.

3️⃣ American Student Loan Debt Statistics

This regularly updated page from the Education Data Initiative has tons of useful data points around student loan debt in America, with most dating back years to show trends over time. Some great data points here to use as part of a study or as the basis for expert commentary.

4️⃣ U.S. Colleges Ranked by Return on Investment

Staying on the topic of U.S. education, CollegeNPV is a great resource for data on colleges and degrees in America. This page ranks the top colleges based on the expected return on investment of studying there, and covers the average completion vs dropout rate, median student debt, and median graduate income.

5️⃣ U.S. College Degrees Ranked by Return on Investment

CollegeNPV also has the same ranking but for specific degrees at each college, again ranked by the expected return on investment for graduates. You can read more about how the ROI methodology is formed here. This could be a good metric for localised index campaigns on relevant topics.

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 The Burger King Stevenage Challenge

Back in 2019, Burger King became unlikely sponsors of Stevenage Football Club. Given that Stevenage were only in League Two of the English Football League at the time, the partnership seemed a bit unusual. But unusual can actually be a great trigger for a very effective PR campaign, as this one definitely was.

The aim of the sponsorship differed to your standard shirt sponsorship. Instead, the strategy was actually tied to getting Football fans to play as Stevenage on the FIFA video game. Burger King launched the 'Stevenage Challenge', encouraging people to play as Stevenage on FIFA and upload their goals to social media to win food prizes.

The campaign turned into a massive hit giving Burger King a huge influx of favourable brand impressions, with Stevenage becoming the most-played with team on the game's career mode and more than 25,000 goals in the club's kit were shared online during the two week campaign.

While choosing a lower league club in England like Stevenage may seem an odd choice, it was actually rooted in clever strategic thinking and understanding of the psychology of Football fans. Burger King’s Global Chief Marketing Office explained it in this quote - “If you're a crazy soccer fan that loves playing Fifa, it doesn't bother you to play with Stevenage, even if you're not a Stevenage fan, because we all cheer for the underdog and it's an underdog club. It's one of the reasons why we went with a relatively small club rather than a big club.”

2️⃣ Bank a Bake with Greggs x Monzo

Brand partnerships can be super impactful tactics for PR campaigns and this is a fun example of it coming via Greggs and Monzo who a couple of years ago partnered together to open the first ever sausage roll dispensing ATM (or ATMmm as they cleverly called it). Stunts like this work well because they’re unusual and they don’t take a lot of context to grab your attention - just the headline or even the image on its own is enough.

The campaign is also rooted in more layers than just an eye-catching stunt however. Monzo do lots of great work using their internal data to translate customer insights into PR stories and this comes off the back of them revealing that 2.3 million customers together spent over £70m on Greggs in the previous year.

Obviously having a big name brand helps with brand partnership campaigns like this, but if the story is strong enough, particularly if there’s a positive cause/message behind it, smaller companies can also use the brand equity of bigger brands to their benefit.

3️⃣ Twists ‘n’ Sets Black Hair Salon by Gymshark

And this campaign is a perfect example of exactly that, albeit in this one it’s the big brand partnering with a smaller brand rather than vice versa. In 2024 Gymshark opened a new pop-up hair supply store and salon in East London called “Twists ‘n’ Sets”.

The aim of this campaign which was strategically launched during Black History Month was to help raise awareness and break down barriers for black women avoiding the gym, with Gymshark’s research revealing that 45% of black women avoid the gym due to concerns about hair maintenance. This is a great case study as well of how survey stats can be used as part of PR campaigns that help to promote a good cause and raise awareness of important social issues that may go under the radar.

For the pop-up salon they partnered with Ruka Hair who create hair products designed specifically for black women, which gives fantastic synergy for both sides while also providing brand benefits in each direction - in positioning and perception terms for Gymshark, and brand awareness for the smaller name brand.

This is another example as well of the power of doing something a bit more out of left field for what your audience is familiar with and expecting from you as a brand. Hair salons and Gymshark isn’t a natural topic association, but the relevance lands from a audience point of view, showing the value of looking at relevancy in broader terms than just topical relevancy.

4️⃣ Wimbledon Balls Turned Into Bluetooth Speakers by hearO

I love campaigns that find clever ways to make creative products. This is a great example of a genuine product created by a brand called hearO who turn used Tennis balls from Wimbledon into bluetooth speakers.

As well as being a very cool innovation, there’s a nice recycling and sustainability angle to it as well. They also turn the balls into different colours and have incorporated used balls signed by famous Tennis players such as Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic.

I’m a big believer that if you create cool shit it will find a way to land you media coverage. And while this is a legit business, the learnings can still be applied to Product PR campaigns, as evidenced by the bluetooth speakers picking up media coverage and backlinks from top tier sites all around the world, including The Guardian, Daily Mail, Business Insider, and GQ.

5️⃣ Cereal Line That’s Best Eaten At Night by Post

This is another clever example of creative Product PR. Here, Post Consumer Brands who produce a wide range of popular cereals, flipped the classic narrative around cereal on its head to create cereal to help you sleep at night called “Sweet Dreams”.

Relevancy is always a hot topic in the Digital PR space and while not steering too far outside your lane is important, doing something unusual that wouldn’t be expected of your brand can work very well for a PR campaign, with the requirement that it still has some connection to the core brand values and messaging.

Again this is a PR stunt that benefits from the unusual factor that helps it to capture the attention of their target audience. The cereal was infused with a herbal blend of lavender, chamomile, Zinc, Folic Acid, and B vitamins to amp up melatonin production and came in two flavours, Blueberry Midnight and Honey Moonglow.

The product page 404s now which is unfortunate given that the page peaked at 85 referring domains and still has nearly 200 backlinks from sites such as Everyday Health, Taste of Home, and Food Dive. Looking at the archived version of the page however it does look as though it was a legit product that customers could buy at least for a limited period.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 73. 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 🙂