THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 74
Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 74 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 Gideon Katz - How to use Digital PR to boost your brand’s LLM visibility
And we also have our roundup of Digital PR Learning Resources You May Have Missed From May
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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.
Connective3: Why traditional gifting PR is making a comeback
Kaizen: Reddit Statistics 2026
Kaizen: What AI Search Reveals About Human Search Behaviour
PRmoment: Why for PR, Reddit is less a new channel and more a new lens
Muck Rack: How to pitch profiles: Expert advice from two feature journalists
PR Daily: Time’s editor-in-chief on AI, relationships and what makes a good pitch
PR Daily: Top takeaways from the PR Daily Conference 2026
Off The Record: What Comms Pros Must Know About Pitching Global Environmental Stories
Five quick fire Digital PR tips to help make you better and more efficient at getting SEO results via Digital PR:
1️⃣ Had a Journalist come back to you with a "no thanks" response? Keep the conversation going. Ask them if there's anything you can tweak with your content to make it more relevant and/or what type of content/stories they are looking for in the future.
2️⃣ Struggling to get a response from a Journo about adding a link to your coverage? Try contacting the corrections email. This can work well if they've used your graphics without proper attribution as the corrections department are there to sweep up legal issues like that.
3️⃣ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/ is a must follow reddit for anyone working in Digital PR looking for content and data vis inspo.
4️⃣ If your data produces surprising results, go through the raw dataset to check if it's surprising but valid or surprising because of either an error, or data that has multiple meanings and is being misinterpreted.
5️⃣ Choose the format after you’ve chosen the content. Don’t think "I want to do an interactive map campaign" and then think of content to suit it afterwards. Test visualising your data in different formats, present it to people outside your work bubble, and use that feedback.
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 Tunefind
Tunefind is a fantastic site that serves as a database for songs that have been featured in TV Shows, Movies, and Video Games. The site is updated daily and also has a trending chart which makes it a great tool for newsjacking opportunities. You can search for specific TV Shows, Movies, or Video Games to find songs that have been played in them, or you can also search for artists and songs and find a list of titles they they have been played on.
2️⃣ Marvel + DC Comic Characters Database
This is another example of the unique datasets you can stumble across on Kaggle. This dataset includes comprehensive data on 23,272 comic book characters from both Marvel (16,376) and DC Comics (6,896) with data points such as if they’re a hero or a villain, eye and hair colour, gender, number of appearances, and the date of their first appearance. Could be a valuable dataset to inspire ideas on entertainment topics.
3️⃣ High Growth Businesses in the UK
This ONS dataset provides some interesting analysis of successful growing businesses based in the UK. High growth businesses are classed as businesses with an average growth in employment of greater than 20% per annum over a three-year period. This page shows both the timeline growth of high growth businesses, as well as the number of them in each local authority over a five year period.
4️⃣ USAFacts
USAFacts is a fantastic site to keep bookmarked if you’re producing any U.S. based campaigns. The site does a great job of analysing key trends from government datasets and is very useful for inspiring potential data stories for your campaigns and revealing new datasets that you could also use. Be sure to subscribe to the newsletter for a weekly fix of new insights.
5️⃣ World Press Freedom Index
The 2026 edition of the World Press Freedom Index produced by Reporters Without Borders has recently been released. The index ranks countries based on the level of freedom enjoyed by journalists and media in 180 countries and territories.
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 Most Spoken Languages in American Neighborhoods by Word Finder
📊 47 RDs, 17 DR 50+
This campaign produced by Word Finder in 2023 is a really good example of a successful campaign that can be produced through analysis of U.S. census data. Here, they analysed the languages spoken in households around America to reveal what the most prevalent languages were outside of English and Spanish.
This campaign is also a great case study in how to produce a series of strong angles from one dataset, with Word Finder going beyond just the top languages in each state and also looking at major cities to give journalist’s even more localised stories, along with the top states for specific languages. This helped them to earn headlines such as “These are the most spoken languages in NYC neighborhoods” and “Arabic is Third Most-Spoken Language in Michigan”.
2️⃣ The ‘sickest day of the year’ by Flamingo Leave Tracker
One of the hardest parts of turning your campaign idea into media coverage is making it topical and answering the “why now” question that a Journalist will ask when deciding whether to cover your story or not. One campaign format that gives you an organic built in answer to “why now” is stories that are attached to a specific day of the year.
This is a clever example of how to do that via Flamingo Leave Tracker who in 2023 revealed that August 24th was the ‘sickest day of the year’ for American workers. The data comes from their own app and shows the power of using your company’s own data for producing data-led insights similar to this. The research also revealed that the second most popular date was February 13th, which the Fortune article notes is suspiciously close to both the Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day each year.
With campaigns like this that reveal the “top dates for…”, you instantly create a timely and topical hook to your story which encourages Journalists to cover your story now rather than sitting on it for the right opportunity in the future which may never come. You also create multiple opportunities with stories like this as your top five, possibly even top 10 dates, can all be headline worthy, as well as the top months.
3️⃣ Snoop Dogg loses half a million social media followers after performing at Trump crypto ball by Viralyft
This next story is another good case study of a campaign format that gives a natural answer to the “why now” question. In January last year, Snoop Dogg came under fire for performing at the Crypto Ball, a celebratory event tied to Donald Trump’s inauguration. Viralyft managed to successfully newsjack the controversy by analysing Social Blade data to reveal that the rapper lost over 500,000 followers on Instagram over a 10 day period following the event.
Tracking changes to social media followings is a common format that is easy to rinse and repeat across different stories in any industry, especially when there’s a celebrity focus to it. The great thing about it from a press angle is that it helps to quantify audience insights around stories that publications are already covering. And the data is super easy to research, the key is the creativity behind being able to spot these opportunities in a timely fashion.
4️⃣ 7 ancient ruins around the world, reconstructed by Expedia
📊 23 RDs, 12 DR 50+
Design-led campaigns like this are a format that has become an ancient ruin of its own in the last few years. I do believe however that any campaign format when done REALLY well can always be successful, and this is one of the best examples of a campaign idea centred around a design-led story.
For this campaign, Expedia took seven famous ancient buildings such as The Parthenon and Luxor Temple, and digitally reconstructed them to help people visualise what they may have looked like in their original glory. Campaigns like this only work if the designs themselves are truly outstanding as these are, and this one is also perfect for a brand like Expedia with their aim of targeting tourists who are interested in history and sightseeing.
5️⃣ KitKat Creates a Wrapper That Blocks Phone Signals
Wrapping up this weeks newsletter (pun not originally intended haha) with a more recent campaign coming from KitKat Panama who created a limited-edition wrapper that turns the brand’s famous break into a phone-free moment. When we talk about campaigns that feel on-brand for the company behind them, KitKat are one of the very best brands out there for always nailing the brand aspect of their PR campaigns with everything that they do effortlessly focused around the “have a break” concept.
This is a bit of a goofy concept but it’s unusual and unusual means it grabs your attention and that’s a great starting point for any headline. The unique packaging uses Faraday cage technology to temporarily block smartphone signals when a device is placed inside, encouraging people to put their phones away and have a proper break, not just from work, but from their phones too.
And that’s a wrap for Issue 74. 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 🙂
10 June 2026
