THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 76

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 76 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 Kirsty Olczak - The UK PR Playbook for Getting Real Coverage from an Ex Journalist

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

BuzzStream: How AI Mentions and Cites Your Brand (New Study)

BuzzStream: 50 AI Statistics Digital PR and SEO Should Know (2026)

BuzzStream: What Are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC? And How to Check [Free Tool]

The PR Insider: Behind The Brand: Em Newton on Life at M&S, Brand Building and the Future of Digital PR

The PR Insider: Behind The Brand: Marissa Pysarczuk on Building an In-House PR Team, Creative Digital PR and Making Waste Newsworthy

The PR Insider: Behind the Brand: Rosie Gogoley on building an in-house PR strategy at Skipton Building Society

The PR Insider: How brands and organisations are responding to the UK’s extreme heat

Reuters: Digital News Report 2026

Get Featured: Top pitching tips from UK journalists

Off The Record: How to Pitch to a Sunday Newspaper

Sourcee: PR Calendar

Fractl: The State of Digital PR in 2026: Fractl’s Take on What’s Working and What’s Not

PressReacher: Shakira Sacks - Why Prioritisation is the Most Underrated PR Skill

JBH: We analysed 14,233 personal finance headlines – this is what households are actually afraid of

Connective3: How to do reactive PR effectively for B2B brands

Propellernet: The Digital PR Recap: Q2 2026

Propellernet: Propellernet Launches Ebb – The Tool to Track Brand Visibility in AI Search

Kaizen: PR Needs Good Data More Than Ever

Pure Digital PR: Some Stories Get Picked Up Instantly, And Others Don't: Here's Why

Prosperity Media: Digital PR campaigns for inspiration: 25 of our favourite campaigns

Prosperity Media: How to Measure the Impact of Digital PR: Beyond Coverage and Link Counts

Energy PR: What is AI Search PR? (& Why Should Your Brand Invest?)

Attention Seeker: An Annual Report for PR?

Cision: AI in Journalism: New Survey Shows Journalists Use AI More but Distrust It in PR Pitches

Cision: 20 Starter AI Prompts for PR Professionals

Cision: What Sports & Entertainment Reporters Actually Want From Your PR Pitch

Propel: How to Write Great Pitches: A Practical Guide for PR Pros (With Examples)

Propel: The Earned Media Goldmines Most PR Teams Are Still Ignoring

PRmoment: Are media relationships dead… or just different?

PRmoment: Publishers have won the right to leave Google's AI – but brands shouldn't follow

PR Daily: Why paywalled media coverage still matters — and how to maximize it

Muck Rack: What are AI citations? How PR teams can track and earn them

Moz: How to Integrate PR & SEO for Maximum Brand Visibility

The HOTH: How to Get Your Brand Featured in ChatGPT

Press Gazette: Reach moves away from ‘volume’ as traffic, revenue and share price plunge

Press Gazette: US copyright law has been weaponised to silence reporting around the world

HoldtheFrontPage: Reach places 80 jobs at risk in fresh round of cutbacks

BuzzStream Podcast: AI Citation Ranking Factors with Cyrus Shepard

BuzzStream Podcast: PR for Sensitive Health & Wellness Topics with Irina Karelina

BuzzStream Podcast: What’s Working in SEO During All the AI Chaos (with Candour)

BuzzStream Podcast: Kevin Indig on Citations vs Mentions and Proprietary Research

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

1️⃣ Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you need to constantly be creating new campaigns for clients. Many brands will have previous campaigns they’ve created that can still be used as effective assets with a quick refresh or pivot.

2️⃣ You can also use alerts tools such as Google Alerts and Talkwalker Alerts to monitor how much coverage popular campaign formats are getting. For example, set up alerts for phrases such as - “research shows” “a new study” “new data” "new survey", etc. If you want to monitor the type of data stories a specific publication covers you could also add site: followed by their domain to the alert.

3️⃣ If you're going to use a clickbait headline like "You won't believe what..." then you better have a truly shocking angle in your email, otherwise you've just annoyed the Journalist within seconds of them opening your email, if they even open it at all.

4️⃣ Don't get too wrapped up in A/B testing emails. There are so many other variables out of your control that can impact open rates, the biggest one just being luck. Give your emails time to work before changing course. You believed in it for a reason.

5️⃣ Speed is the key when responding to Journo Requests for trending news topics. Don't promise something by a deadline if you can't deliver, all it will do is damage your relationship with that Journalist for future comment requests.

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 New York Public Library Databases

This database by the New York Public Library is a fantastic resource for sourcing lots of different research assets relating to New York. There’s nearly 600 different datasets which are regularly updated including primary source materials, scholarly e-books and journals, reference materials, business resources, statistics, maps, digitized rare books and more. Perfect for New York specific stories, but also for finding potential campaign ideas that you can try and source equivalent datasets for other states/cities.

2️⃣ 2026 Best Countries Index

The 2026 Best Countries Index by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is a ranking of 85 nations based on a survey of over 15,000 people from around the world covering 10 different topics from entrepreneurship to quality of life and lot more in between. The overall ranking which this year crowned Switzerland as the best country is useful, but the report also includes global rankings for each of the 10 different ranking factors. These could be useful metrics for index campaigns on business, social and cultural topics for instance.

3️⃣ OECD Affordable Housing Database

The OECD Affordable Housing Database is a curation of datasets covering housing markets, housing conditions and affordability, and public policies towards affordable housing in OECD countries. These datasets are great for anyone that wants to research access to good-quality affordable housing in major countries. Datasets from governments in each country will likely give you expanded detail, but these are great for a top level overview and easy comparisons between nations.

4️⃣ Internet Use in EU Countries

This is another super interesting curation of different datasets, this time around internet use trends in EU countries. They cover a range of topics such as how often people use the internet, where they use it, what they use it for, and reasons for people not using the internet. As you click into the datasets you can filter results by year and demo groups, as well as finding more specific internet activities which include the percentage for each country that have done online courses in the past year, created a website, used social media, used TV streaming, and more.

5️⃣ NBA DARKO Scores

One of the great things about modern sports if you’re a data nerd is that there is now sooooo many metrics you can find online to measure just about any aspect of athlete performances. This can cause issues via an overload of data points that people become unsure of which to use and how to use them, or which metrics are actually best suited for what they want to reveal. This can be especially true with NBA stats. DARKO however is really valuable metric which evaluates a player's current on-court impact and projects their future box-score statistics and is updated with each game. It works really well as a normalised way of ranking NBA players, and also has this super cool ranking of NBA players that had the most game-level impact for each individual season since the 79/80 season.

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 Boots signs Dan ‘Won’t’ Burn to defend forgotten sunscreen spot

One of my favourite PR campaigns during the World Cup came via Boots who partnered with England Defender Dan Burn in a very fun campaign that also had great brand messaging. The aim of the campaign was for Boots to raise awareness of a forgotten sunscreen spot that can burn people, even during a walk in the park - the back of your neck.

To do so they created a very clever pun with Dan Burn, rebranding him to Dan ‘Won’t’ Burn and sponsoring the back of his neck. I love a good play on words and found “Dan ‘Won’t’ Burn” hilarious.

But this was much more than a tongue in cheek celebrity ambassador stunt. Boots partnered with Macmillan Cancer Support to reveal that that 80% of adults have burnt the back of their neck in the past, with over one in five saying that it happens every year or more, and over 80% admitting to not always applying sunscreen to their neck on a typical summer’s day.

This is a great example of how brands can use the emotional power of humour and the increased awareness that a celebrity partnership gives you to put extra spotlight on an important topic with an impactful brand message.

2️⃣ Rexona buys armpit sponsorship on World Cup officials

Speaking of World Cup campaigns, this one really stood out as a creative example of brands going against expected norms to stand out from the crowd. Yes the World Cup is a huge marketing opportunity, and brands that pay to be official sponsors probably think they’ll get great returns because of the huge audiences that games can attract on a global scale.

Here’s the thing though, how many brand sponsorships can you recall from the World Cup? I watched every game and I would probably struggle to name five official sponsors. Ironically, one of the brands I can best recall is Levis and it’s literally because they weren’t an official brand sponsor. There’s one common theme connecting the ones that do stand out - they do something unusual and unexpected.

This was the case here where Rexona were very smart about the placement of their sponsorship, opting for an unconventional approach by sponsoring the armpits of fourth officials. Normally sponsoring a part of a shirt that isn’t usually visible would be a huge own goal but this worked perfectly for two reasons.

Firstly, the main role of the fourth officials is to display the shirt numbers of players being substituted on the digital substitutions board or how many minutes of added time are to be played. They’re not on camera very often but when they are they’re lifting their arms and making the armpit sponsor visible.

Secondly, it seamlessly fits from a brand point of view for a deodorant brand to have their brand name on the armpit rather than the traditional chest or arm placements.

This is also a great example of how newsworthy stories don’t always have to come directly from PR campaigns. Other marketing channels, such as sponsorships, can create headlines when they utilise creativity in unexpected ways.

3️⃣ Limited-Edition Bottles to Celebrate the Knicks’ NBA Championship Win by Snapple

The other big sporting story of the summer was the New York Knicks winning the NBA Championship after a 53 year wait. This campaign from Snapple is a great example of brands newsjacking a major sporting event with a creative PR stunt.

To celebrate the Knicks’ victory, Snapple released 100 limited edition Knicks themed commemorative bottles, but with a catch. They weren’t available to buy, they were only available to find at a handful of mystery locations within New York City. Limited edition products? Sorta newsworthy. Limited edition products combined with a treasure hunt and a pop culture tie in? Much more likely to grab headlines.

4️⃣ The TikTok AI Slop Report by Kapwing

📊 129 RDs, 59 DR 50+

This next campaign is a follow up to Kapwing’s original AI slop report that they produced last year analysing the rise of low quality AI videos on YouTube. That campaign was a massive success, earning links from nearly 1,000 referring domains in less than a year. Far too many brands in my opinion don’t take full advantage of when they produce a successful campaign. Revisit your old campaigns that worked well! There’s still so much extra value you can get from them.

If it’s a report or a data study you’ve done that got a lot of news coverage, you can update the study again the following year and spot trends that have evolved since the original report. Or as Kapwing did here, you can recreate the campaign in a different context. Their original report focused on YouTube, whereas this one shifted the focus to TikTok. And the results speak for themselves.

The campaign is less than two months old and already has over 100 linking domains including Business Insider, Digital Trends, and Tech Times. Building your media list also becomes much easier as you have a list of titles and Journalists that covered your last campaign that give you a great starting point. You can also use the fact they covered the previous campaign as a hook in your pitch to introduce your new follow up campaign too.

If you’re working on data-led PR campaigns then I strongly recommend studying the campaign page as it’s a great case study in how to conduct a data study that gives you lots of unique angles to create headlines around, and produce an engaging landing page with really effective data vis to help readers (and Journalists!) easily digest the key findings of your report.

5️⃣ Marathon Difficulty Index: Ranking the Hardest and Easiest Marathons Worldwide by PureGym

📊 8 RDs, 4 DR 50+

From one really well done data study to another one, this time one released earlier this year by PureGym who revealed what are the most difficult and easiest marathons around the world. To rank marathons by their difficulty level they analysed over 100 popular marathons and created an index to judge them based on altitude, elevation difficulty, typical race-day temperature, average race-day wind speed, and average finishing times.

I really like this as a methodology as it shows a great understanding of what makes a route difficult to run beyond just the average finish time. This helps make it look like a far more authoritative piece when you’re trying to impress Journalists at industry publications such as Runners World who will be experts on the topic themselves.

Campaigns like this also work really well for PureGym as a brand trying to motivate people with fitness and running inspiration. With our SEO hats on we often talk about the importance of relevancy to our PR campaigns, but for me the even greater benefit of that is being able to create content that actually reaches your target audience and not just empty spaces of the internet with a decent Domain Rating.

One campaign like this on it’s own might not be enough to start crafting positive associations between the brand and potential customers. Consistently earning great coverage in relevant publications that your target audience reads over time however will start translating into more than just link numbers and real uplift for brand and commercial metrics.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 76. 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 🙂