A day in the life at the Digital PR Summit 2026

Well, what a day!

We always look forward to the Digital PR Summit, it’s an absolute favourite industry event, and the energy in the room was immaculate this year. 

The sun was out, and according to Digitaloft, it was the first fully sold out event, so if there’s a wait list for next year already – count us in!

Over 500 creative and strategic brains, and over 20 talks from leaders in the industry of PR, SEO and journalism. The summit, hosted at the Royal Northern College of Music, covered everything from media relations and creativity to data, AI and the changing digital PR world with expert-led talks. 

As soon as we stepped in you could feel the good vibes in the room, Manchester was sunny, and everyone was buzzing ready for bouncing off ideas, learning, and networking at the only dedicated digital PR event – all on home turf. 

Here’s our key takeaways from the day…

Relevance should be PRs word of the day, every day

We listened to a fantastic talk by Vince Nero about hyper-relevance. While we hear about making sure emails are relevant to the journalist all the time in PR, it’s not just about knowing the journalist covers that area of media, but really drilling down into their tone and understanding their beat. 

The talk rang home the reality that journalists are spread even thinner than usual, especially with job cuts, and receiving spam-like emails from PRs that aren’t in tune with the journalist, publication, and what they write could permanently damage relationships – or get you blocked for good!

While time consuming, it’s crucial that you’re thoroughly researching journalists, understanding the angles of the pieces they’re writing, and really considering how your piece could add to the narrative. 

Quality > quantity, always

There’s a misconception that because digital PR has historically been focussed on link-building as well as traditional PR principles like building trust and credibility over time, it’s all about the quantity of links. 

In 2026, digital PR is – more than ever – about the quality of the story. Quality isn’t determined by how long the campaign has taken to research, write and outreach, though, but rather it’s also determined by the timing and relevance. 

It’s not only the relevance of the story, considering ‘how and what does this actually add to the current conversation’ and the value of the campaign, but also the relevance it has at this moment in time, when it will be most relevant, and the journalist it will be most relevant to. 

The Digital PR summit solidified that high-volume outreach, vanity metrics and those short-term wins will only get you so far, or nowhere at all, and what’s most important is truly meaningful PR that has longevity with coverage that makes a real impact, audience engagement and interaction, brand credibility and sustainable results. 

Disruptive PR doesn’t have to be loud to be heard

The day was kicked off on stage 1 by Mark Perkins, who spoke to us about The Art of Disruption, explaining that those creative, high-profile stunts at the likes of Tower Bridge London are disruptive in theory, but not always in practice.

We’re always consuming, so we have constant streams of noise whether that’s in our personal lives, on social media, at work, we don’t necessarily notice more noise – it just gets lost in the void or it’s an unwelcome addition to the noise we already have buzzing around.

For a campaign to be disruptive, it doesn’t need to be loud and in-your-face, and sometimes that’s actually counterproductive, it needs to be impactful in that it’s subtly and cleverly slotted into the everyday. Like Mark Perkins’ example of Nike’s bench with the slots removed and the iconic tick on the back, it’s something that actually stops you in your tracks – and noise on top of noise doesn’t do that. 

Product PR is an underrated tactic 

Third-party trust signals are more important than ever, especially with the evolution of AI and AI slop. 

Product PR is an overlooked tactic, and Amy Gibson from Digitaloft explained how and why product PR is one of the most cost-effective ways to get your consumer and e-commerce brands featured. 

Product PR focuses on existing products or product launches that can be positioned in articles – usually product roundups, recommendations, gift guides, reviews or seasonal features. With targeted, niche and very specific media lists with hyper-relevant journalists. 

It can be time consuming as it requires individual hyper-personalised outreach, but so worth it.

At TAL, the product PR we have executed has been very successful, including our e-commerce gardening client being featured in The Telegraph Recommends, and a skincare client’s advent calendar featured in ITV This Morning, Buzzfeed, Metro, Business Insider and Good Housekeeping to name a few. 

Not only is product PR good brand publicity, but it’s also essential for large language models as more people turn to the likes of ChatGPT to recommend products, and roundups for the ‘best X’ are bringing through recommendations from the likes of the Telegraph and Guardian as sources. 

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