THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 78

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 78 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.

Entrepreneur: Your Cold Outreach Keeps Getting Deleted for These 5 Reasons

Get Featured: Your guide to Silly Season pitching

BuzzStream: How to Increase Email Open Rate (For PRs and Link Builders)

Prosperity Media: Digital PR Statistics 2026: What the Data Shows About SEO, GEO and AI Search

TAL Agency: Measuring digital PR beyond backlinks: what actually matters

TAL Agency: Brand consistency: Why it matters before any PR campaign begins

Moz: I Tested 15 of the Best Brand Monitoring Tools: Here Are My Top 8 Picks

Semrush: Digital PR for AI visibility: 5 tactics + how to measure

Propellernet: AI Citations Explained: How ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini Choose Sources

Hatch: Why PR Relationships Matter More Than Ever in the Age of AI

PRmoment: Seismic news for PR practitioners as Court of Appeal requires fairness of the press

Brandinc PR Podcast: Andy Barr Invented Digital PR — Here’s What He Thinks You’re Getting Wrong

Search with Sean: Digital PR Panel - With Natalie Trice, James Brockbank, Amanda Walls, Vince Nero & Chloe Meadows

BuzzStream Podcast: Inside the Newsroom with Mike Fahey

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

1️⃣ Struggling to find a Journalist’s email? Search for their handle on Twitter (or BlueSky as a lot of Journos still seem to be on there) along with “email” and it will show you tweets where they might have included their email. Make sure you also double check it still relates to their current role and not an old position.

2️⃣ Just because a media database lists an email for a Journalist doesn't mean it's correct, especially for ones that have multiple emails listed. Check that the domain on the email address matches the domain you'd expect for a Journalist at that publication.

3️⃣ When pitching expert comment pieces, use your pitch as a way of securing future coverage beyond just the story you’re currently pitching. Include details about your spokesperson such as a bio, profile picture, and what topics their expertise cover, while ensuring both the text and the image file names are optimised for relevant keywords the Journo may search for in their inbox.

4️⃣ Struggling to find someone's email? Rocket Reach is a good site for finding emails that gives you 5 searches for free each month and is pretty good for finding emails not listed on media databases or their profile pages.

5️⃣ If you think your product/service is boring then look at producing content beyond just your core offering. What do people use your product for? What topics are your target audience interested in? What trending stories can you comment on?

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 Netflix - What We Watched the First Half of 2026

A couple of weeks ago Netflix released their latest What We Watched report which they release every six months. The report expands on their weekly Top 10 lists and provides the number of views for every title in every country, making it a great resource for more in-depth and detailed analysis of Netflix viewing figures to better understand what people have been watching this year.

2️⃣ ONS - Permanent Dwellings Started and Completed by UK Local Authority

Last week ONS released the latest data up to March 2026 on the number of permanent dwellings started and completed (new build homes in more relatable terms). The dataset covers every local authority in the UK for every financial year dating back to 2009/10, making it a really useful resource for regional insights, as well as analysis of trends over the last 17 years.

3️⃣ BTS - State Highway Travel Data

This dataset from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics provides data on the number of miles travelled on highways in America. The data is split by each state which is great for regional comparisons, along with timeline comparisons from 2010 to 2024. This dataset also includes the number of licensed drivers and vehicles in each state which are great metrics for normalising the miles travelled and fatalities figures.

4️⃣ LivingCost

LivingCost is a similar site to Numbeo that provides cost of living data for cities around the world. Like Numbeo, the figures are crowdsourced rather than coming via official government datasets, but they provide a useful alternative if Numbeo data is missing or doesn’t look reliable. The LivingCost data also has great breakdowns of costs per category such as rent and utilities, food, and transport, along with other valubale metrics such as quality of life.

5️⃣ UFC Stats

If you’re creating a data-led campaign on MMA or UFC topics, UFC Stats is a great resource for getting access to results and fight stats of every UFC event dating back to it’s inception. As well as the results for every fight card, the fight stats are super detailed and include stats such as significant strikes % and head strikes. If you click on any fighter you can also get their full fight history along with career statistics.

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 Common Dream in Every Country by Zoma

📊 124 RDs, 65 DR 50+

This week’s first campaign is a clever use of search data used by Zoma in 2024 to reveal the most common dream in every country around the world. To reveal the top dreams they used one of my favourite Ahrefs features which is the ability to get partial match keywords via their Keyword Explorer tool. Usually I would rely on Google Keyword Planner for search volume campaigns but it can be tricky when you don’t have a list of keywords ready to search for.

The great thing about Ahrefs is you can do what Zoma did here and just search for one word and then get a big list of searches that include that keyword. Zoma used the word dream and then importantly translated it into the native language of each country to reveal the most common dreams that people around the world were turning to Google to help them understand. Translating your keywords into the country’s native language is an important step to ensure you’re getting the most reliable data.

I really like how their study has built on the findings from the search data to also help explain the meanings behind the most common dreams via DreamMoods, for example why you dream about snakes and your teeth falling out. The global nature of the research helped Zoma to earn backlinks from domains all over the world including the U.S., Canada, France, Brazil, Germany, and more.

2️⃣ The Music Artists That Make You Run Faster Revealed by Pour Moi

📊 78 RDs, 23 DR 50+

I love campaigns that find creative ways to do a data-led story and this is a super example of data and creativity blending together in a really productive way. In 2021, Pour Moi set out to discover if songs by certain artists help you to run faster or slower. To do so, they analysed the running data of 60 runs, where the runners were listening to a different artist for each run, so they could reveal the artists improving our speed the most. The research found that Beyonce and Harry Styles songs make you run faster, whereas Drake and BTS are the artists that slow you down the most.

This campaign was clearly aimed at improving rankings for Pour Moi’s sportswear range based on the internal link (don’t forget about internal linking, it can be super effective when you have a successful campaign like this), and the topical tie in with running and fitness is clear. But what helps to make the campaign such a big hit with relevant links on sites such as NME, Sporting News, and HotNewHipHop that probably don’t link much to Pour Moi is the music angle.

Pour Moi doing a campaign exclusively on a music topic would probably miss the mark, even if it might land a link on a site like NME. But when you can combine an adjacent topic, and therefore new publications to target, with your core products, your campaigns can start doing bigger numbers and earn links from new referring domains you might usually struggle to add to your backlink profile.

3️⃣ The Big [Censored] Theory by The Pudding

📊 92 RDs, 25 DR 50+

This next study by The Pudding is a good example of how interesting content that is engaging and shareable can earn links at scale even without it being outreached as a traditional PR/link building campaign.

The Pudding’s team are some of the best data storytellers out there with their studies often featured in the campaign inspo section of this newsletter. This is another great example of how they blend creative research and insights with incredible data vis to help aid the storytelling aspect of their posts. This post revealed some of the stark differences in how The Big Bang Theory aired in China compared to America.

The study reviewed 100 episodes of the show to understand what was cut out and decipher the logic behind the decision, producing a really interesting piece of research around censorship in China. Most of the censorship decisions are based around references to sex, the LGBTQ+ community, and disrespect towards China, adding up to nearly three full episodes of purely censored content. As always with studies by The Pudding, this is a great example to study for anyone creating landing pages for data studies their team are creating.

4️⃣ How much time do we spend looking at screens? by Vision Direct

📊 70 RDs, 30 DR 50+

Surveys when they don’t land well can be big losers. It’s not just the time investment into the campaign that you’ve spent with little to show in return, but it’s also the financial investment in conducting the survey. Surveys when they’re done well however can be great assets for campaigns, like this one for Vision Direct was.

This campaign was focused on screen time, which makes a lot of topical sense for a brand like Vision Direct, and used a survey of 2,000 adults in the UK and the U.S. to reveal how many hours per day adults spend looking at different digital screens. Surveys like this usually work well when they’re a combination of a topic that appeals to a mainstream audience, focuses on highlight the extent of a problem that people face, and reveals insights that are genuinely not easy to find existing research for.

As a result, the study has earned over 100 links on 70 linking domains including Business Insider and HuffPost. The campaign also earned some amazing links from sites such as Harvard Business Review, Patient.info, and Medical Daily citing their research as a trusted resource to add context to their guide posts. This is where having a survey that provides audience insights which fill a research gap online can become worth their weight in gold as publications start citing them in articles they are publishing on the same topic.

5️⃣ The KFC Wrapuette by KFC

📊 36 RDs, 22 DR 50+

The final campaign this week is a quirky one via KFC who in 2022 launched the KFC Wrapuette Handbag, described as “the perfect (and only) way to carry your Twister Wrap”. The handbag was available to buy for an eye watering £198, with customers invited to “join the waitlist to snap up the most exclusive bag on the market”. Which is basically code for this is a fake product you can’t actually buy but sign up to join our mailing list here.

The handbag was a hit though, earning some great coverage for KFC with linking sites including Harper’s BAZAAR (another example of combining topics to earn links on new referring domains), Women’s Health Mag, Evening Standard, and Liverpool Echo. The campaign page now redirects to the KFC Shop homepage but Ahrefs shows that at its peak the page had nearly 100 linking domains, showing the impact that fake products with the unusual factor can have for brands.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 78. 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 🙂