StudioHawk case study
StudioHawk: checking the data before a national ranking went public.
StudioHawk's Digital PR team wanted to rank Australian towns by how stuffy their summers feel. The team designed the idea and the method. My job was to carry out the data analysis and make sure the result would still stand when a journalist or a reader in one of those towns looked closely.
- Agency
- StudioHawk
- Year
- 2026
- My role
- Method review, data analysis and documentation
- Published
- The West Australian and PerthNow (Seven West Media), September 2026
Looking at the data before calculating anything
The index used two public datasets: climate records and census geography. I first checked that both allowed commercial use. Then I looked at the data before running any numbers.
That is where the main problem showed up. Some coastal towns sat on parts of the climate map that had no records. If I had followed the written rule strictly, those towns would have quietly dropped out of a national ranking. That kind of gap is easy to miss and very hard to explain once a ranking is in the news.
On the first day of work I wrote to the team. I showed how many places were affected, proposed a fix and said I would follow the strict rule instead if they preferred. In the same message I raised two smaller limits of the data, so they were known early rather than found later.
The team approved the fix.
Every decision written down
The brief set a hard test: another analyst should be able to reproduce the final scores without asking me a single question. So I kept a register of decisions and limitations. For each choice it records what I did, why I did it and which towns it affected.
I delivered on the agreed deadline and within the approved hours. StudioHawk's data team reviewed the dataset and the method and approved the work without changes.
Who did what
StudioHawk designed the idea and the method, ran the campaign and made every media decision. I reviewed the method, raised problems early, proposed fixes, carried out the analysis, documented the method and its limits and handed everything over to the team.
Published coverage
PerthNow and The West Australian, both Seven West Media titles, published the ranking on 14 September 2026.
Read the story in The West Australian ↗
In the agency's words
“Samiran supported our data team on several Digital PR projects. His data for an El Niño summer campaign landed coverage across seven Seven West Media titles, including The West Australian and PerthNow. His work is clean, easy to use and well received by our team and journalists. Very knowledgeable, highly recommend.”
What this means for your agency
I raise a problem when it is still cheap to fix. I bring options. Your team decides. Every decision is written down so your team can explain the result to a journalist.