What does it take to get a journalist to run your story? We asked, then tested it.
Here’s a game. Four real PR campaigns. One of them earned 1,690 links from other websites – a huge number for any single piece of content. Which one?
- Cinema’s sweariest actor
- Britain’s luckiest lottery number
- What your Instagram account could earn you
- The deadliest film ever made
Have a guess … I’ll wait.
It was the sweariest actor. Buzz Bingo scraped 3,565 film scripts, counted the swear words, and crowned Jonah Hill the sweariest actor in cinema. Over 800 websites linked to it. Some of the actors named even shared their own rankings.
Notice what’s missing from that story: bingo. There’s no mention of the brand, the odds, or the offer anywhere in it. And that’s not an accident – it’s the whole point.
Why the best iGaming PR campaigns barely mention iGaming
We run digital PR campaigns for iGaming brands, and one pattern shows up repeatedly: the campaigns that win big rarely talk about the product. Regulation makes it hard to lead with odds, offers or gambling, so the strongest campaigns often lead with something else entirely – a story a journalist would want to tell a friend down the pub.
That’s often the opposite of what the rest of the business expects from a PR campaign. Sales and marketing teams want to talk about their product, their offer. Journalists don’t care about that. And part of our job, as marketers, is bringing the business along with that thinking.
We recently ran a webinar on exactly this – how to build a story journalists actually want to run – and pulled together data from successful campaigns to show what separates the ones that get picked up from the ones that get binned. Here’s a flavour of what we covered.
Journalists are drowning in pitches, and most of them are irrelevant
Data from Cision paints a stark picture: journalists get around 50 pitches a week. Most go nowhere. And yet two-thirds of journalists say PR-provided content is their single biggest source for news stories – ahead of social media, rival outlets, even the wire agencies.
The catch: 72% of journalists say fewer than a quarter of the pitches they receive are even relevant to their beat. Half reject pitches specifically for being too promotional.
So, there’s a lot of noise. Which means there’s real opportunity for any brand willing to be genuinely relevant, genuinely useful – and not obviously selling something.
Three questions that predict whether a campaign will land
We looked at dozens of campaigns from across iGaming to work out what the winners had in common. It comes down to three questions.
- Does it start an argument? Is there some tension, some conflict, something worth debating? A flat statistic nobody can dispute just sits there. A ranking, a comparison, a “worst of” – that gets people talking.
- Is there a name at the top? Jonah Hill travels. A generic statistic doesn’t. Attaching a recognisable name, team or event to your data gives it something to hang on to.
- Would someone repeat it? That’s the real test. A journalist is trying to tell their reader a story the way they’d tell a friend. If your campaign can’t survive being retold in one sentence over a coffee, it’s not ready.
We saw this play out directly. Two campaigns ran with the same broad idea:
- Bet Victor asked which action star has racked up the most on-screen kills.
- Buzz Bingo asked what the deadliest film ever made was.
They used a similar data pool – yet Buzz Bingo’s campaign earned 448 links against 84 for Bet Victor’s. One had a clear, repeatable headline: the deadliest film ever made. The other was more opaque, more subjective. Less easy to explain over a coffee.
Compliance and marketing, unexpectedly on the same side
In a regulated sector, compliance and marketing rarely agree on much. But the data says the campaigns that get rejected are the promotional ones – and the campaigns that avoid the product are the ones compliance is most comfortable with. For once, both teams want the same thing.
It’s not just about Google anymore
Links still matter for rankings – they help your SEO. But there’s a second reason to run these campaigns now: AI assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini recommend brands based on the coverage they’ve read about them. If you want to be the brand an AI assistant recommends, you need genuine coverage that discusses your category – which is a subtly different job – called AI SEO or GEO – to running a viral campaign that avoids your product altogether. Worth deciding upfront which one you’re optimising for, because it shapes the brief.
What it looks like in practice: Casumo
We ran a series of campaigns for online casino brand Casumo, including a “spot the Lioness” game timed to the Euros. Nothing technical, nothing expensive – just a moment that fitted the news agenda. It picked up coverage from The Sun and the New York Post: 31 links, 43 brand mentions.
The numbers aren’t enormous on their own. What matters is where they came from. Casumo has fewer total links than the other brands ranking for “online casino” – but the highest proportion from sites with a Domain Rating of 75+. A handful of links from The Sun outweighs hundreds from a low-authority site. Off the back of campaigns like this, Casumo moved from page eight of Google to a top-three ranking for one of the most competitive, valuable terms in the sector.
Before you brief your next campaign
Let’s recap on those three checks you need before you write the brief:
- Does it start an argument?
- Is there a name at the top?
- Would someone repeat it?
And four checks before you send it:
- Is it relevant to this specific journalist?
- Is it selling something (it probably shouldn’t be)?
- Is there an exclusive angle?
- Can you stand it up with data and a quotable expert?
And one strategic question before either: are you building authority, or are you building AI visibility? They’re related, but they’re not always the same campaign.
Want the full session?
This is a shortened version of a live webinar we ran, working through real campaign data, audience Q&A and the thinking behind each example in more depth. If you’d find it useful for briefing your own team, [download the full recording here] – it’s 35 minutes, and it covers everything above in more depth.
