THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 77

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 77 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: Does Domain Age Affect Email Open Rates? Here’s What Our Data Shows

The PR Insider: Behind the Brand: Emily Cotton on building memorable marketing at On the Beach

Off The Record: How to Pitch TV Journalists: A Day in the Life of a GB News Senior Producer

Entrepreneur: 88% of Pitches Get Deleted. The Ones That Survive All Do the Same Thing.

Cision: How PR Professionals Can Connect With Journalists

PR Daily: What happens when your audience is suspicious of everything

TAL Agency: What AI can (and can’t) do in digital PR

TAL Agency: The biggest digital PR mistakes brands still make

Propellernet: What Is AI Visibility? Why One Score Doesn’t Work Across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini

Vanessa Lima on LinkedIn: One of my favourite things about Digital PR is how one successful campaign can open the door to the next.

Richard Paul on LinkedIn: 💡 Use your own experiences to inform ideas 💡

Thomas Chivers on LinkedIn: Your in-house expert is only an asset if a journalist can actually use them. Here's a quick expert MOT to see if you're actually ready:

Finchling: A survey on news overwhelm in PR [Responses Needed]

Press Gazette: Journalist response platform plays ‘whack-a-mole’ against AI deluge of PR content

Pivotalk: Building Brands through Digital PR with James Roach

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

1️⃣ For reports that you may update in future years, keep the year out of the url. Then if you update the post in the future you can just update the copy and don't need to update the url. It's also a good idea to move the previous report to a new url so it's still findable.

2️⃣ Struggling to view coverage of your campaign behind a paywall? If you can't get around it try asking the Journalist if they can share the article with you as a pdf so you can show it to your boss/client. This has worked for me a few times in the past.

3️⃣ The pub test is one of the best ways of verifying if your campaign idea might land coverage and connect with your target audience. If you explained the key outcome of your story to friends in the pub would they genuinely care? The average person that doesn't work in PR is usually the best benchmark for the potential of a campaign idea than the people you work with.

4️⃣ The success of your campaign is determined by you, your team and your client/boss, not what other agencies are doing.

5️⃣ This might sound really obvious, but always double check that your campaign page has Google Analytics set up properly and that the developers have removed the noindex tag so it will show up on Google.

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 FOI Emails for UK City, Borough and District Councils

If you’re planning on doing a FOI campaign in the future, the FOI Directory is an essential site to keep bookmarked to help make your life easier. The site has a number of useful tools including this list of contact details for every council in the UK. Download the list and easily import it into a tool like BuzzStream for example and then you can send your FOI requests to each council all together.

2️⃣ FOI Emails for U.S. Federal Agencies

And if you’re a PR in America, fear not you’re not missing out either. The FOI Directory also has this fantastic list of contact details to send FOI requests to for every federal agency.

3️⃣ HMRC list of deliberate tax defaulters

If you have a finance client then this list of deliberate tax defaulters published by HMRC could be a valuable asset to create stories around. The list is updated multiple times per year with the most recent update coming just last month, and is a handy summary of business names, their industry, location, period of default, the tax value they defaulted on, and their corresponding penalty for doing so.

4️⃣ Eat This Much - Meal Nutrition Data

Eat This Much is a super site to explore if food and diets are a key topic you might be looking to focus on for PR campaigns. This database of nutritional information for different ingredients and meals is very handy for quickly finding information on calories, carbs, fat, and protein. Paired up with shopping prices data for example and it could unlock some interesting ideas for data stories.

5️⃣ Tallest Buildings in the World

This last one is a niche one but sometimes the niche ones produce the most interesting campaign ideas. Courtesy of Skyscraper Centre, this list ranks the top 100 tallest buildings in the world and includes data on their location, date of completion, height, number of floors, materials used to build them, and their core function (hotels vs offices for example).

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 Supermarket Chill Out Zones by Iceland

You know how for whatever reason some campaigns stay in your mind and when you’re in a very specific situation you always end up thinking about them. This Iceland campaign from 2022 always comes to mind for me when I’m in a supermarket during a heatwave and make the conscious decision to cut through the freezer aisles.

The beauty of this idea is that it’s so simple in execution but also super relatable. In response to rising temperatures an Iceland branch in London created a customer ‘chill-out zone’ in the freezer aisle that customers could enjoy as they try and escape the heat. The installation included deckchairs, a cooling spray and complimentary ice lollies.

What I really like about the campaign is that it’s more than just a fun stunt (that would have been super cheap and simple to produce by the looks of it). They’ve also conducted a survey finding that 58% of Brits have gone into a supermarket freezer aisle to cool down when the weather is too hot. The survey stat is great for adding context to the story and gives Journalists some extra audience insights to help make the story even more relatable.

And they also offered chilled water bowls for customer’s dogs and a doggy sun tent because dogs need a chill out zone to escape the heat too. That addition is a great way of improving brand perceptions beyond just the humorous side to the initial hook of the campaign.

2️⃣ OutHorse Your Email by Visit Iceland

📊 410 RDs, 205 DR 50+

From one Iceland to another, this time the Visit Iceland tourism board (the country not the supermarket this time). In 2022 they released this intriguing video of horses dancing (prancing?) over giant keyboards with the backdrop of Iceland’s picturesque nature behind them. It’s unusual, but it’s different, and different and unusual are very solid starting points for a successful campaign idea.

This campaign went viral earning nearly 2,000 backlinks from 420 referring domains, 205 of which were DR 50+. Nearly all of those referring domains were earned within the first two months of the campaign going live. I personally think “viral” PR campaigns are overrated and their SEO impact can be minimal if they aren’t followed up on. This campaign is the exception however.

It allowed Visit Iceland to earn amazing coverage and backlinks from top news publications all over the world including TIME, CNN, The Telegraph, Metro, and New Zealand Herald. This is perfect for a tourism board. Not only are they getting great backlinks to boost their SEO performance, but coverage on those sites no doubt helped to boost brand awareness in a meaningful manner. And the brand side of the campaign is further supported by the positive and easily relatable message behind work-life balance and properly switching off when you put your OOO on.

3️⃣ Amazon Dating

📊 835 RDs, 133 DR 50+

This next campaign is another viral hit, created by Atlas Acopian and Suzy Shinn around Valentine’s Day in 2020. Amazon Dating is exactly what it sounds like - what if Amazon was a dating site that sold potential partners.

It’s ridiculous and I’m amazed that Amazon haven’t had it taken down after all these years. There are so many hidden jokes within the parody site too. The links in the menu are full of silly gags (click on “Your Last Relationship” for a good laugh) and each person has their own profile which are fun to click through (there’s even a profile for the Cookie Monster who has nearly a million dating reviews).

Obviously something like this isn’t the kind of asset the vast majority of brands can create in order to earn media coverage. But there are plenty of learnings from joke content like this which does become such a successful link building asset. The site was linked to by major news publications such as Business Insider, Vice, CNET, Cosmopolitan, Refinery29, and many many others, and even more than six years later still generates 11,000 global searches for “amazon dating”.

4️⃣ Plastic in the Ocean Statistics by Condor Ferries

📊 441 RDs, 116 DR 50+

Not all campaigns have to be built around fun quirky ideas to be a major success. This statistics post by Condor Ferries on plastic in the ocean is a terrific example of the value in a strategically put together stats post.

Statistics pages often work very well for building links at scale as a long-term link building asset due to their ability to not only earn links via proactive outreach, but also their ability to rank for relevant keywords which help to drive both organic traffic and new backlinks sustainably over time.

This one by Condor Ferries also ties in very nicely from a brand point of view with the aim of the post (along with earning backlinks and organic traffic) being to raise awareness of the growing problem caused by plastic waste. Earns links. Drives traffic. Positive brand associations. Sounds like a killer trio to me!

And the results speak for themselves. Over 900 links from 441 domains including top publications such as Forbes, CNET, and Woman & Home, super relevant sustainability sites including Recycling Magazine and Sustainability Times, and a beauty of a link from Canterbury University. The page has also been earning around 400-1,000 organic sessions a month in the past year, peaking at over 6,000 a few years ago.

There is so much value in a well put together statistics post that has both media interest and search demand. The stats produced by the research can also effortlessly be used for other marketing channels such as social too.

5️⃣ How dirty are your gaming consoles? by Betway

📊 132 RDs, 93 DR 50+

This week’s final campaign is a bacteria swab test conducted by Betway in 2021 to discover which controllers were the dirtiest. I know some people may see this campaign and think why is a gambling brand doing a campaign around video games. And it could be a fair point. Or it might not?

When it comes to relevancy, especially for gambling brands, I’m far more concerned with audience relevancy than topical relevancy which is what I think a lot of the Digital PR community focus on first. If Betway have conducted audience research and found that a lot of their target audience are big gamers, then this campaign is a great way of targeting them. Remember that relevancy is a really complex topic and is far broader than just “furniture brand can only talk about furniture”.

Swab campaigns don’t seem to be as popular anymore. Part of that could be that they stopped working. I’m inclined to lean more towards it being because they are quite expensive to produce relative to other campaign formats, and with budgets getting tighter and the industry more competitive, it’s harder for teams to take risks on campaigns that could cost a lot and not produce much in return.

This campaign did achieve that however with links from USA TODAY and a nice syndication across their regional network. When analysing the backlink profiles of campaigns it’s good to look at the referring domains total over time. In Ahrefs this one currently shows as 23 referring domains but had 122 at one point. The links that it shows as “lost” actually still seem to be live. Even the ones that are genuinely lost are worth factoring into your analysis when researching the types of sites that a campaign earned links on, even if they aren’t live anymore.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 77. 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 🙂