The day has finally come where our deepest, darkest, musical listening sins are revealed, and ranked – it’s Spotify Wrapped day! The annual playlist we all wait for year on year, created by Spotify to not only showcase our top listened to songs of the past 12 months, but also top artists and this year even musical auras too.
But how does this relate to Digital PR you ask? Well, aside from the fact that this an exceptional PR campaign in itself, it’s the format that really appeals year on year. We’ve taken this format and applied it to digital PR in 2021 ranking;
- The top PR tropes of 2021
- Our favourite campaigns we’ve spotted in the media
- The biggest stories from the past 12 months that really shook up the industry
- Top of the pops – the top pop culture juggernauts of 2021
- And finally, some of our c3 greatest hits, read on to see what ranked where:
PRs Greatest Hits in 2021
Leading the list is the always-popular ‘we turned a hotel room into an x’ – these campaigns were everywhere! With real life stays in hotels offered to create immersive brand experiences, these campaigns were all over the media. and also proved they have some serious sticking power – although not a new entry for this year they were still grabbing the headlines in 2021. Want to see the rest? Check out the rankings in full below:
The People’s Choice 2021
Disclaimer: C3 didn’t create these campaigns, but we tip our hat to those who did as there are some great concepts here. Ranked by the c3 PR team, our top campaign of 21 goes to Biliophilic landmarks with, a beautiful yet simple campaign, bringing together nature and architecture with stunning results:
Next up we’ve got AirBnB’s campaign to stay in Carrie Bradshaw’s iconic Sex and the City apartment in New York, a timely campaign dropping during the filming of the follow up series which has been heavily featured in the press of late.
Check out the rest of our top 5 in the image below:
Headlines that broke the internet…
AKA the stories that created the most buzz online – the controversial sexiest bald man’ campaign with Prince William tops the leaderboard, since it started tons of conversations about how PR stories are reported in the media. Other major headlines and news stories included the long-awaited reopening of the travel market, and the property market booming – 2021 offered PRs a lot of stories to jump on for reactive PR to amplify their client’s campaigns.
Coming in fifth on our ranking however is ‘anything TikTok’, as viral trends from the ever popular social media platform drove the media agenda and online conversation in 2021. From viral door knocking trends, to recipes, hacks and even adding new words to our vocabulary, the platform has been serving up PLENTY of PR worthy opportunities for the past year.
View the list in full below:
The word on the street
In our penultimate list we’ve ranked the top ‘pop culture’ trends from 2021!
Kicking off the list was the trend that swept the nation right at the start of 2021: Bridgerton gave us the lockdown escapism we were after with racy storylines and colourful costumes. For digital PR teams however, it was the perfect hook for our newsjacking campaigns – from property prices to tourism, the show launched a series of PR worthy opportunities with its overwhelming popularity.
Pivoting (quite literally) away from Netflix, is the headline none of us saw coming – the Evergreen Shipping cargo ship becoming wedged in the Suez Canal, and holding up the movement of goods across the world. The unfortunate collision not only caused chaos for global shipping movements, but launched a tide (sorry) of memes across the internet, as the ‘fail’ was shared worldwide.
Find out what else made our top five below;
Our top five…
And last, but by no means least, we’ve ranked our fave five campaigns from our dream team here at c3. Leading the charge is ‘The best and worst pensions in the world’ – delivered for one of our clients in the finance sector this data-driven index delivered global links with its location led content.
Next up, our streetart hotspots in America – a piece ranking the top cities for street art across the USA, driving links and coverage for our client Singulart across multiple leading US titles.
The other three campaigns we pulled out were:
- Dirty Desks – which disturbingly showed that some desks are dirtier than toilet seats!
- Doggy Workout – the pet friendly workout plan, for you and your pooch to attempt together.
- UK Rediscovered – ranking the UK’s top staycation spots for holidaymakers.
View our full list here:
We hope you enjoyed our rankings! If you want to find out more about our PR services or any of our campaigns we’ve outlined above then please get in touch!
