Free Resource
The sheet we fill in before every digital PR campaign. Four angle shapes that keep earning coverage, each with a fill-in formula and a worked example, then a blank template with the three questions an idea has to pass before anyone spends a day on it.
Most campaigns that earn coverage are one of four shapes, and all four are rankings. A ranking gives a journalist the story in the headline, and it gives a regional desk its own town to write about, which is how one dataset becomes twenty articles instead of one.
| Angle shape | The formula | Worked example |
|---|---|---|
| The most X in a place | The [places] with the most [thing] per [population unit] | The towns with more tourists than locals |
| Best and worst X | The best and worst [things] for [outcome] | The best and worst times to fly |
| The hidden cost of X | The hidden cost of [everyday thing], revealed | The hidden fees on ten airlines |
| Revealed: who charges the most | Revealed: which [companies] charge the most for [thing] | Which airlines charge the most for a carry-on bag |
A ranking does two things a statistic cannot. It creates winners and losers, so the people in it share it for opposite reasons. And it splits by place, price or brand, which gives an editor a local version of a national story without asking you for anything else.
The second tab is the part that saves the time. Every idea gets three questions, and they are a gate rather than a scorecard. An idea only moves forward if all three say yes. Two out of three is a no.
Most ideas die on the first or the third. That is the point: they die in a ten-minute session rather than three days into building a dataset.
These are other agencies' campaigns, not ours. They are on the sheet because the shape is the lesson: a ranking, a number in the headline, and a subject people already have an opinion about.
Google it with two or three different wordings. If a big outlet ran it last year the shape still works, but your version needs a new cut of the data, a new market, or a new year. Running the same campaign second earns nothing, and it is the cheapest check on this page.
Give everyone the sheet before the meeting rather than opening it cold. Aim for one main data-led idea and two or three smaller or reactive ones, because the small ones fill the months when the big campaign is still being built. Fill the headline column with the number already in it. If the headline needs explaining, the idea is not ready.
The Google Sheet drops straight into your own Drive. Tab one is the four shapes with their formulas. Tab two is the blank template: idea, angle shape, headline, data source, the three checks, campaign type, target publications and status. No email required, nothing to sign up for.
