The month in links – July’s Digital PR highlights

As you may know, summer can be a tricky time in the world of PR thanks to summer holidays and endless OOO emails, but that certainly didn’t stop the team from securing some incredible coverage over the last month – and doing so with smiles on faces because the sun finally made a prolonged appearance! 

Our clients – who span multiple industries, including health and fitness, spas and wellbeing, automotive, lingerie and travel – gained links via brand campaigns and press office activity from high-authority sites including timeout.com, mirror.co.uk, thescottishsun.co.uk, heraldscotland.com, travel.nine.com.au, dailymail.co.uk, msn.com and lots more. 

We earned these links by revealing the world’s clearest views, creating the perfect dream job for drive thru fans, finding out which citizenship tests are the easiest to pass, partnering with The Lullaby Trust to share expert advice on keeping babies cool in a heatwave, sharing tips on what to do about body spots in the lead-up to summer and sharing the most popular baby names inspired by all things flowers and plants. More on all that coming up…

 

Brand Campaigns

The Viewpoints Around the World with the Best Visibility – Premier Inn

For plenty of us, visiting major landmarks and taking in the most special views is top of the list when it comes to travelling somewhere new. Often, that involves climbing (or stepping!) to the top of a tall building or structure to get that bird’s eye view and soak in the scenery. So how gutting is it when you make the effort to get to the top only to find that the view is obscured by clouds? This got us thinking – which stunning vistas around the world are most likely to offer clear views? We set about finding out, analysing nearly 100 viewpoints around the world to reveal exactly that!

We took our list of popular viewpoints from around the globe and gathered weather data for each one (the average cloud coverage, number of days per year with more 50%+ cloud cover, average visibility and average visibility grade – all based on weather in 2023). We then created a score for average visibility distance in kilometres by considering the frequency of visibility extremes. This score was then multiplied by 2 to create a 0-100 scale, which allowed us to rank the viewpoints based on their visibility.

We pulled our findings into a few ‘top’ lists; The top 50 viewpoints with the clearest views, Europe’s best viewpoints, Asia’s best viewpoints, Africa’s best viewpoint, Oceania’s best viewpoints, North America’s best viewpoints and South America’s best viewpoints – which meant it did incredibly well with international media. Coverage highlights included The Scottish Sun, The Herald and Australia’s Nine.      

 

Recruiting a Drive Thru Reviewer – AutoTrader

It’s a juggle right? Keeping your car interior clean when there are so many drive-thru options available in this day and age. AutoTrader know that this is all the more tricky for drivers who lease their vehicle because there’s a financial benefit to returning it in pristine condition, sans ketchup stains and grease marks. 

We decided to have a bit of fun with that notion and start a recruitment drive for someone to help to find the dine-out dishes that make the least amount of mess and smell; a new ‘Drive-Thru Reviewer’ who would earn £300 for exploring and ranking five drive-thru meals within their local area, evaluating everything from the quality of the packaging, to how messy the food is and how long the scent lingers in their car after that final bite. All of that information would prove super useful for other drivers. 

We secured coverage on Motoring Research, Yahoo, The Northern Echo, Sussex Express and more.  

 

Could You Pass Your Country’s Citizenship Test? – Remitly

It’s fair to say that most of us have probably never considered what a citizenship test entails – but for some, it’s the biggest exam of their life. Taking a citizenship test is crucial to gaining residency and is a huge, extremely time-consuming and challenging endeavour.

Given that so many of Remitly’s customers undergo the citizenship process in a country different to the one they were born in every single year, we wanted to delve into some of the trickiest citizenship tests around the world to find out how many people would actually pass their own country’s assessment.

We instructed 2,100 participants from the UK, US, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, and Spain (some of the top nations that people want to move to) to take a version of their own country’s citizenship test and found out how many of them would pass. It turns out that Aussies are most likely to pass, with 96% of participants passing our practice test (by achieving a score of 75% or more), while German residents came in second with 95% of participants passing. The UK’s test is pretty difficult it seems; only 42% of Brits passed their test, while just 7% of Canadians passed their own citizenship test.

The story flew! We got coverage on Time Out, Mail Online, MSN, The Mirror and more. 

 

Press Office Best Bits

Keeping baby cool in a heatwave – iCandy

It’s so nice when we can go out with stories that really add value to audience’s lives and this was very much one of those instances. Our client, iCandy, have recently partnered with the Lullaby Trust and so with the recent heatwave hitting, we were able to offer out tips from experts from both organisations on keeping babies cool in the heat. 

The tips were used by Yahoo, The Parenting Daily, Chronicle Live and more.  

 

Treating body spots – Beauty Pie

Another day, another weird beauty ‘hack’ appearing on TikTok. We spotted a new viral DIY recipe of vinegar and baking soda spreading on the social network and Beauty Pie’s experts confirmed that it’s… a really bad idea. And so we took their advice to the press to flag the risks.

We secured coverage on The Mirror, The Manchester Evening News, Times Live, OK and more.   

 

Floral baby names – Patch Plants

Everyone knows that popular baby names go in cycles and so, for our client Patch Plants, we were keen to explore just how popular flora-inspired names are right now, so we looked at the most popular botanical baby names in America based on data from the Social Security Administration (SSA). Olivia (and Oliver), Chloe, Rowan, Violet and Amir were some of the top monikers. 

Our list of names made it onto Yahoo, Biba, MSN and Parents.com to name a few. 

 

Whether you need some press office prowess to get your experts heard or want to get your hands on our team’s creative muscles for your next campaign, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch here.