THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 82

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 82 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.

The latest post on Digital PR Tips Is our monthly resources roundup - Digital PR Learning Resources You May Have Missed From August

Want to contribute a post of your own to the Digital PR Tips blog?

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 that you might have missed since the last newsletter.

Six Chillies: Brand Logo Generator

Moz: How To Build Site Authority and Multi-Channel Relevance in the Age of AI

Cedarwood Digital: How to Use AI and Custom GPTs to Take Your Digital PR Strategy to the Next Level

PressReacher: Nicole Franco - All Great PRs Are Journalists First

PressReacher: Marilize Jacobs - The Quietest Skill in PR Is Also the Most Valuable

Bottle: The domains your PR plan is ghosting (but LLMs are citing)

Off The Record: How PRs Can Get Pictures Into the News

Rise at Seven: How to master Digital PR in Germany

Kaizen: GEO Statistics 2026

The HOTH: Why Your AI Visibility Number Is Wrong

Reporter Outreach: How to Choose a Digital PR Agency: 12 Questions to Ask

Resourcera: 64+ Digital PR Statistics for 2026: Trends, ROI & Insights

Siege Media: How To Measure GEO ROI: The Three-Point Attribution Framework

Similarweb: Is AI Replacing Search? What The 2026 Numbers Actually Reveal

Search Engine Roundtable: Google Search Rolling Out google.com/goto Tracking Parameters

Google: Google’s Site Reputation Policy manual actions will not apply in the EEA​

Courtney Cole on LinkedIn: Five things I’ve learned from submitting hundreds of FOI requests

Thierry Ngutegure on LinkedIn: How to do due diligence and checking for a FOI campaign

Eirini Theodoridou on LinkedIn: How long it takes Journalists to to publish a story in European markets

Search with Sean: Digital PR Panel w/ Pat Ahern, Thomas Chivers & James Roach

The Digital PR Podcast: Bridging Data and Creativity in Digital PR w/ Thierry Ngutegure

BuzzStream Podcast: How to Find and Pitch Real Case Studies for Digital PR with Becca Peel

Online Webinar: Inside the newsroom: How to get your story noticed - Thu 1 Oct 2026 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM BST

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

1️⃣ Google Trends has recently added a new feature which allows you to filter your searches by categories. This is a really useful addition that helps you to get more accurate and reliable results for keywords that can have multiple meanings. It also gives you the ability to see Trends data for a category as a whole, giving you a broader overview of the top rising and overall trends within a category.

2️⃣ If you’re looking for a quick and free way to check how much AI visibility your brand has, Ahrefs has a free AI Visibility Checker which covers AI search results from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews. If you have a premium subscription you can also explore the results in more detail on the app. This is a useful free resource for viewing basic visibility figures however.

3️⃣ Picked up a lot of traffic from new users as a result of a Digital PR campaign? Now’s a good time to look at a remarketing campaign for further brand visibility to a potential customer and to help turn them into a returning visitor.

4️⃣ A method to find data campaigns created by brands in your industry - search "methodology" AND "[your topic]" AND "[study, data shows, etc]" to discover campaign pages that have a methodology listed. This can also be a good way of finding relevant data sources you can use for your own campaigns.

5️⃣ There's now a lot of different AI chatbots to choose between, with different ones being better suited for different tasks. The general consensus is that Perplexity AI is the best option when it comes researching and fact checking data.

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 U.S. Consumer Price Index

A Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a statistical measure that tracks the average change over time in the prices that people pay for various products. These datasets are essentially an effective way of measuring inflation/deflation relative to specific products. The U.S. CPI data is published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and covers a wide range of products and industries including food and drink, clothing, transport, hospitality, and many more.

2️⃣ UK Consumer Price Index

You’ll be able to find CPI data for most countries from their national statistics office. Here is the UK CPI data which also covers a similar array of products and industries.

3️⃣ 2025 Natixis Global Retirement Index

The annual global retirement index produced by Natixis is a great resource that could be used as a ranking factor for index campaigns that cover topics such as the best countries to retire in, for pensioners to live in, etc. The reports ranks 25 major countries against a number of retirement data points including health and quality of life scores, material wellbeing, and financial security. The 2025 edition was released in September last year so keep your eyes peeled for a 2026 issue potentially soon.

4️⃣ Fbref Big 5 European Leagues Player Stats

There are a number of fantastic sites out there for Football stats and FBref is one of the leading ones. Sports statistics can be a real minefield of data sometimes so pages like this that provide overviews of potential data stories you might want to use are well worth keeping bookmarked. This page on FBref ranks players in the big 5 European leagues by a number of performance stats and is great for quickly showing you potentially surprising leaders throughout the season that could be used as part of a PR campaign.

5️⃣ WhoScored.com

Another site that I really like using for Football stats is WhoScored.com. You can get similar data to what FBref provides but I like the UX on WhoScored and the site tends to be a bit quicker and smoother to use.

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 World’s Best Street Food Cities by Radical Storage

📊 38 RDs, 17 DR 50+

This week’s first campaign comes via Radical Storage who ranked the best world’s best cities for street food. To do so they analysed 6,897 street food eateries across the world’s top 100 most visited cities by comparing the number of vendors with a TripAdvisor rating of 4 starts or higher.

With data-led hero campaigns like this it’s always vital that you aim to ensure your data produces plenty of unique angles/rankings that you can create separate stories from. This campaign does a really good job of that by not just ranking the cities by a single metric but turning it into an index based on metrics such as the percentage of vendors rated 4*+, the highest density per km², budget-friendly options and variety of options. That gives your overall index more depth by also giving you a unique ranking for each individual ranking factor if they’re strong enough for a standalone story.

Data alone will only get your campaign so far however. Tying the study into a popular and growing cultural trend in street food helps to make the story more topical, along with working as something that easily translates to different countries and their unique media sectors.

This campaign was originally created in 2023 and did well. However, a 2026 update has quickly taken the page from 13 referring domains to 38 in the space of a couple of months, with new links on sites such as Forbes, Euronews, and Paris ZigZag. Another very successful example of how much value there can be in updating and relaunching old campaigns.

2️⃣ GRWM Retreat by InterContinental New York Barclay

📊 4 RDs, 2 DR 50+

On the surface, a campaign with just four referring domains may not sound like a huge success, but numbers on their own only tell a fraction of the story. The four linking sites include TimeOut and Global Traveler, and due to the nature of the story, they provide coverage that create extremely positive brand signals for the InterContinental New York Barclay hotel.

To land that coverage they created a GRWM Retreat, capitalising on the “get ready with me” social media trend. The retreat is described as “a thoughtfully curated collection of luxury beauty essentials, indulgent experiences, and premium accommodations designed to help you look and feel your best”. Execution wise it’s probably pretty straightforward, the value comes in the storytelling component tying it into a social media trend.

Stunt campaigns like this which create unique hotel rooms, retreats, tours, experiences, etc aren’t original by any means, but what they do a great job at is prompting coverage that talks about how great a brand’s product/service is.

Coverage of the GRWM Retreat for example is essentially talking about what a great idea the retreat is, giving the hotel not just valuable coverage and backlinks, but coverage that will no doubt positively impact brand perceptions. In Digital PR we’re mainly focused on links and rankings but it’s well worth also factoring in how tactics such as Product PR and stunts can also go beyond links and influencing how customers feel about a brand and their intent to purchase from them.

3️⃣ The Least Expensive Cars to Maintain by CarEdge

📊 164 RDs, 53 DR 50+

This next campaign from CarEdge ranks the most and least expensive car brands and models to maintain based on maintenance costs over a five and ten year period. It’s a really interesting idea for a data story but sadly there isn’t a clear methodology on the campaign page outlining how the maintenance costs are calculated.

The campaign has been a huge success earning close to 3,000 backlinks from 164 referring domains. This is again yet another example of the compound results that can be earned from campaigns that are updated each year. The campaign was originally launched in late 2020 and looks to have been updated as an annual report based on Wayback Machine archives of the page. In the past year they’ve added 25 linking domains, and almost doubling the figure that the page had four years in.

As well as fantastic links from publications such as Yahoo, The Street, and Motor1, the page also currently drives around 1,700 monthly organic sessions, and peaked as high as 5,700. As a result the brand has valuable SERP visibility in America for searches such as “car repair costs by brand” (2,100 MSV pos. 3), “best low maintenance cars” (400 MSV, pos. 2), and “least expensive cars to maintain” (250 MSV, pos. 1). Once again, this campaign shows how PRs can drive value for brands with audience and commercial metrics that go beyond just coverage and backlinks.

4️⃣ Harry and Meghan waxworks pose with suitcases by Madame Tussauds London

Moving now towards a recent example of a very clever newsjacking story that Madame Tussauds London produced. In response to Harry and Meghan announcing their return to the UK, they came up with a cheeky but clever stunt by relocating their waxworks next to a Royal Guard with a pair of suitcases in front of them.

It’s not the first time that Madame Tussauds have made the news with cheeky stories like this. They’ve also previously separated Harry and Meghan from the rest of the royal family in 2020 when the couple announced they would step back as senior royals, and moved Meghan away from Harry to alongside the Beckhams so the duchess could spend more time with her A-list friends. This repetition goes a long way to making brands more likely to be remembered by potential customers.

As a result of these reoccurring stunts, Madame Tussauds consistently earn themselves great PR coverage with a story format that also focuses on their core brand offerings - their celebrity waxworks. Every story features their waxworks front and centre, making the coverage look close to an advertorial without being one. Not all coverage is equal and brand focused stories like this are another super example of tactics PRs can utilise to earn coverage well shaped to influence audience perceptions.

5️⃣ Clubs Pet Collection by Adidas

This week’s final campaign combines two of the key themes across the campaigns featured in this issue - brand focuses stunts and repeating successful stories. Ahead of this summer’s World Cup, Adidas created limited edition Football kits designed for dogs. The campaign was a hit earning them some great coverage, so naturally, they’ve revisited the concept ahead of the start of the new club season, releasing new Clubs Pet Collection - dedicated kits for pets in the colours of Arsenal, Club América, Benfica, Bayern Munich, Liverpool, Manchester United and Real Madrid.

Any human product redesigned for pets is a pretty instant hit as a PR story, both in terms of landing coverage and making your target audience smile, making this another example of landing really impactful coverage as a brand, while also building on a campaign that worked well previously. No doubt they’ll also be releasing similar pet kits for other sports such as Basketball if they haven’t already. The kits are genuinely available to buy too. If you’re in the UK then you can purchase one for £30.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 82. Same time again next week ✌️

Found this useful? You can sign up to receive The Digital PR Observer Newsletter in your inbox each week for free by clicking the button below.

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 🙂