THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 88

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 88 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.

Off The Record: How to Get Stories on News Brands’ TikTok and Instagram

BuzzStream: What Does Google’s AI Email Summaries Expansion Mean for PR?

Kaizen: How to Get Ahead of the News Cycle and win Christmas

Bottle: Not all visibility is created equal

Influence Online: Are your digital PR campaigns underdelivering? 5 things you might have missed

Reflect Digital: 8 Digital PR Trends To Watch in 2026

Searchable: The AI Restaurant Recommendations Report: United States

Ahrefs: AI Share of Voice: What It Is, How to Measure It, and What It Actually Tells You

Press Gazette: Telegraph cuts up to 100 jobs as it targets being ‘global, AI-powered’ business

HoldTheFrontPage: Ex-Reach staff go head to head with former employer in new launch

BuzzStream Podcast: What Tech Journalists Actually Want from PR with Jasper Hamill (Machine)

The Unscripted SEO Podcast: Chris Panteli - Digital PR, Brand Signals and the Zero-Risk Link

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

1️⃣ If you have a new client that has a strong existing backlink profile, look at what sites are driving referral traffic. These are the sites your audience read and engage with and should be your priority to build links on.

2️⃣ Christmas can be a great time for repurposing old content that performed well. Look for blog posts and guides that gained a lot of traffic/links during previous Christmas seasons and update/repush.

3️⃣ If you’re creating how to guides, look at YouTube search volume as well as Google. This will help show you what content is well suited to video as well as text.

4️⃣ You don't need to be good at everything in Digital PR. Being great at one thing will make you more attractive to companies that are hiring than just being good at everything.

5️⃣ Digital PR has to be one of the easiest disciplines to be self taught at. There are so many great resources that share a crazy amount of knowledge and inspiration to learn from. Nothing is an industry secret and nothing needs to be. Your greatest weapon is creativity and decision making and nobody can teach that.

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 Population Estimates for the UK, England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland

Earlier this month ONS released their latest population estimates for all of the UK. Per capita weightings are a great way of making data more credible with fairer comparisons between local areas. This dataset provides you with the latest data for per capita weightings.

2️⃣ UK Time Use Survey

A couple of issues ago I shared the American Time Use Survey that is published each year with amazing insights into how Americans spend their time. I noted that it’s been a couple of years since the UK’s own Time Use Survey was updated. Good news! A new dataset was released just last week that covers both 2025 and 2026 surveys. The data includes the average daily time that people spend doing a massive variety of activities such as sleeping, working from home and away from home, studying, looking after children, doing housework, exercising, using computer devices and loads more, all which are split by demo groups such as gender, age group, and employment status.

3️⃣ Suicides in England and Wales

This is a sensitive one but it’s a dataset that could be a great resource for a cause marketing or an awareness campaign around suicide. This ONS data which has been released this month covers the number of suicides in every local authority for England and Wales from 1981 to 2025. You can also find quarterly figures for England here.

4️⃣ UNESCO World Heritage List

The World Heritage List from UNESCO includes 1,273 properties forming part of the cultural and natural heritage which the World Heritage Committee considers as having outstanding universal value. This page has a list of all of them, which country they’re located in, and if they’re a cultural, natural, or mixed property. Could be a good resource for travel campaigns with a culture angle.

5️⃣ U.S. National Center for Education Statistics

Looking for U.S. data on education topics? The National Center for Education Statistics is your go to resource with loads of surveys and datasets to explore.

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 Dead NFTs: The Evolving Landscape of the NFT Market by dappGambl

📊 1,280 RDs, 379 DR 50+

Crypto has to be one of the hardest sectors that I’ve ever had to come up with campaign ideas for. No matter how challenging the sector may seem however, there’s always a gem of a campaign idea to be unearthed somewhere. This is a fantastic example of a massively successful crypto campaign that dappGambl released in 2023 revealing that 95% of NFTs had become worthless (who saw that coming! 🙈).

This is also a great example of a campaign that produces genuinely surprising news capable of earning headlines that will catch people’s attention. As a result the campaign earned a huge amount of coverage with over 1,000 linking domains including New York Times, Digiday, and even a Wikipedia citation. The campaign page now 404s however which probably isn’t ideal for them.

2️⃣ The rudest U.S. cities by Preply

📊 188 RDs, 39 DR 50+

I’ve featured quite a few Preply campaigns in this newsletter over the years and this is another really productive campaign that they created. Here Preply surveyed Americans in 46 cities regarding rude behaviours that they have witnessed in their city such as lack of self-awareness and talking on speaker in public. Their study found that Miami has the rudest residents while Omaha has the least rude locals.

I really like how Preply conducted this survey by breaking rudeness down into 15 behaviours and then asking people if they had witnessed it or not, and then applying scores to responses that indicated a higher frequency of rudeness.

Preply originally did this study in 2022 and it was a big hit as a link building asset for them - 147 referring domains including Inquirer, Mental Floss and the Houston Chronicle. So naturally they did what we should all be looking to do with a campaign that was a success and they repeated the study in 2024 but this time with more cities surveyed and the benefit of learning what worked well (and not so well) from the original 2022 study. The second version of the campaign earned even more links, ranks position 1 for “rudest city in america” (150 MSV) and brings in hundreds of monthly organic traffic sessions to the website.

3️⃣ The Paris Syndrome Report 2025: Which Cities Underwhelm Tourists the Most? by Radical Storage

📊 101 RDs, 62 DR 50+

Next up is another brand that produces a lot of really good data-led PR campaigns. In 2024 Radical Storage analysed over 97,000 Google reviews from the ten most-reviewed tourist attractions in 100 global cities to reveal which cities are the most overrated.

They did this by reviewing the ratio of how often words associated with “overrated” versus “underrated” were being used to rank the destinations, finding that Cancún in Mexico is the most underwhelming tourist city, and Guangzhou, China is the most pleasantly surprising. Reviews are a terrific data source for audience insights and this is a really well produced example of the type of interesting stories that can be formed using text analysis data from reviews.

Like with the Preply campaign above, this was another campaign that was originally published years earlier and has been updated with new data. Another benefit of updating data studies is that you have built in comparison points and this campaign does a good job of utilising them. This one doesn’t look as though it performed as well in prior years but with the 2024 update had a giant jump from four referring domains to over 100 less than a year later. Now the campaign has links from top news publications all over the world.

4️⃣ The World’s Happiest Beaches by CV Villas

📊 3 RDs, 2 DR 50+

CV Villas is another brand that I’ve seen produce a number of well done data campaigns with interesting methodologies. For this campaign they used over 1,000 Instagram photos from 103 beaches around the world and analysed how happy people’s facial expressions were in those photos using AWS Rekognition software. This created an average smile score for each beach, allowing CV Villas to rank them from highest to lowest to uncover the world’s happiest beaches. Sitges Beach in Barcelona topped the rankings with a near perfect happiness score of 98.42 out of a possible 100.

The backlink totals for the campaign page are very misleading because this campaign did perform very well and earned a lot of backlinks. Most of them were linking to category pages rather than the campaign page, fittingly the Barcelona destination page in some cases.

This is a really good example of choosing a relevant commercial page to build links to from a data campaign while also still having a landing page for your campaign. I think it’s really important for data campaigns to have some form of on-site content where people can verify the legitimacy from coverage of the study and to learn more about the methodology because that isn’t something that Journalists will usually cover.

5️⃣ Dog Theft Hotspots by Money.co.uk

📊 38 RDs, 36 DR 50+

This week’s final campaign carries on the theme of brands that produce a lot of interesting data studies. This particular Money.co.uk campaign is from 2021 where they used FOI requests to ask local police forces in the UK to provide the number of reported dog thefts from the last five years.

FOI campaigns when done well can be fantastic for producing unique data stories like this one did. I really like how they requested five years worth of data from the FOI to give them comparison points for added data angles, and created multiple rankings (and thus multiple stories) by not only ranking the worst cities but also the worst London boroughs, and the number of thefts ranked by dog breed. All of which creates an engaging story which linked nicely in with their pet insurance product.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 88. 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 🙂