New research shows that Croydon is London's most cactus-obsessed borough!
Barnet is the seventh most expensive place to buy a horse!
Bexley named European hotspot for Instagram influencers!
We get a lot of press releases like this, as do all media organisations.
They usually follow the same formula. A company wants to get itself in the news, so it hires a PR agency to come up with a quirky survey that'll appeal to news editors after an easy story. The ones above are made up, but they're not so far from dubious claims that sometimes do the rounds.
Normally, we bin any "New Research Shows..." press releases. But this year we thought we'd have a bit of fun. Over the past 12 months we've made a note of every example to hit our inbox, and then mapped the results. See how your borough measures up with our compilation of press release claims (all brands removed):
Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea are the two most-PRd boroughs. This is to be expected, as they're also the most well-heeled and tourist-friendly areas. Croydon also seems to attract "New Research Shows..." press, perhaps because marketeers know that its oft-maligned name will resonate in a headline more than, say, Hillingdon.
The quality of "New Research Shows..." messaging is variable. Some companies make a genuine effort, and put together meaningful and interesting results. One rare example, which we actually covered a few years back, was this map of the cheapest pint near every tube station. That took proper research, and turned up some curious results.
More usually, the "New Research" takes the form of a token survey, with leading questions and a tiny sample size, whose "results" are twisted into something that'll get a headline. We wouldn't touch those with somebody else's bargepole. Except to plot them on this map.
Among the 200 or so press releases we tracked for the chart, a few stand out as particularly niche. The prize has to go to the company who discovered that Brent is the 8th worst place in the country for young professionals with a maths degree. Needless to say, that one did not dominate the front pages.
Sometimes we can spot connections between unrelated press releases. Croydon is supposedly the "second mouldiest city in the UK", but it also turns out to be the "second most allergy-prone city". It also happens to be the third most Christmassy town in Britain (behind Manchester and Bolton)... so perhaps that should read 'Christmusty'.
We received specific claims for 32 of the 33 London boroughs. The only one without is Ealing. So, today we can announce: "New research shows that Ealing is the least press-released London borough". Perhaps we'll even press-release it.
