Back Market - Last Shot Gallery

Back Market the world's leading refurbished tech marketplace, came to us needing to make one thing impossible to ignore: the environmental cost of upgrade culture.

The result was The Last Shot Gallery - a sustainability PR campaign that turned climate research into a two-day immersive exhibition in London, pairing hyper-real iPhone photography with UCL climate science to show what ten iconic global landmarks could look like under the weight of fast tech and e-waste.

It became Back Market's first UK pop-up activation, drawing hundreds of visitors, national press coverage, and 576m in total campaign reach.

Back Market, had the data on its side but not the emotional pull: research showed people knew climate change was real, yet it wasn't changing how they shopped for tech. The challenge was to close that gap — to make a climate statistic feel personal, urgent and shareable, and give press a reason to come and see it for themselves.

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Our research for Back Market uncovered a stark disconnect between climate awareness and consumer action: 89% of Brits said they'd personally noticed signs of climate change, yet over a third admitted it hadn't changed how they shop for tech - against a backdrop of electronic waste now among the world's fastest-growing waste streams.

To translate that gap into something people would feel, not just read, we created The Last Shot Gallery — a two-day immersive exhibition in London that used hyper-real iPhone photography to imagine ten global landmarks, from Brazil's Iguazu Falls to the River Seine in Paris, reshaped by the environmental consequences of planned obsolescence and our relentless upgrade culture.

To ground the creative in credible science, Professor Mark Maslin, Earth System Science expert at UCL, mapped each artwork to real-world environmental projections - pairing emotionally resonant storytelling with data journalists and reporters could stand behind.

The gallery marked Back Market's first UK pop-up activation, drawing hundreds of visitors through its doors, hosting an expert panel with actor and climate campaigner Will Attenborough, and setting the creative template for future Last Shot Gallery activations in international markets.

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Seen in the Media

• The Guardian - Overconsumption and ruin: before and after images visualise how tech could harm our planet
• Campaign - Back Market "The last shot gallery" by Words+Pixels
• Mirror - iPhone 12 Pro slashed by £649 in significant price drop deal