Outdoor Media Awards Winners Announced: December19 Wins Gold
We took home Gold in the Platform for Good: National Social Impact Award category for our festival OOH campaign with Material Focus, Recycle Your Electricals.
We're delighted to announce that December19 has been awarded Gold in the Platform for Good: National Social Impact Award category at the Outdoor Media Awards 2026, hosted by Bauer Media Outdoor and Campaign.
The win recognises our out-of-home activation for Material Focus, Recycle Your Electricals — a campaign built on a simple but powerful insight: if you want to change disposal behaviour, you have to show up at the moment of disposal.
The Challenge
The UK is the second-highest producer of e-waste per capita globally, yet only 30% is recycled. Brand tracking revealed that 18–34-year-olds were simultaneously the most sustainability-conscious demographic and the least likely to recycle small electricals. Broad awareness messaging wasn't shifting behaviour. A different approach was needed.
The Campaign
Working in close partnership with Billups and GPM360, December19 identified music festivals as critical disposal hotspots — moments when young people bring portable chargers, vapes, and handheld fans, and then leave them behind. We deployed a precision OOH strategy across four major UK festivals in the summer of 2025: Wireless, Reading, Leeds, and Creamfields — combining static rail formats, mobile digital Digivans, and Material Focus's signature pink recycling bins on the ground.
The media didn't just advertise the infrastructure. It made it unmissable, credible, and culturally relevant — meeting audiences at exactly the moment their behaviour could change.
The Results
By October 2025, brand tracking confirmed that the proportion of 18–34-year-olds recycling their electricals had risen from 64% to 75% — an 11-percentage-point increase representing thousands of young adults adopting new disposal habits. The behaviour change persisted beyond the festival season, demonstrating that well-deployed OOH can drive lasting impact, not just temporary awareness.
The Wireless Festival activation alone reached 56,097 people and delivered 92,912 impressions.
We're enormously proud of this work, and grateful to the team at Material Focus and Recycle Your Electricals for their ambition and trust throughout. This is exactly the kind of campaign December19 exists to make.
Read more about the Outdoor Media Awards shortlist via Campaign Live. Full details of the OMA 2026 winners at bauermediaoutdoor.co.uk/outdoor-media-awards.
