How long should each slide stay on screen?
· 5 min read
About ten seconds is a sensible starting point for a photo with a short line of text, and it's what Casty gives each playlist item until you change it. Anything with more to read needs longer, and the easiest way to judge it is to read the slide aloud at a relaxed pace and add a few seconds. Menus and timetables, which people stand and study, shouldn't rotate away at all.
Time it by reading it out loud
Read the slide aloud slowly, as if you'd just glanced up from your phone, and count. Then add two or three seconds, because nobody starts reading the moment a slide appears. Their eyes have to find the screen first, then work out where on it to look.
A slide that says "Sunday roast, served 12 till 5" takes a few seconds. One with four dishes, four prices and a line about allergens takes a lot longer, and if it needs 25 seconds to get through, that's usually a sign it's carrying too much. Split it in two or cut it down. Writing words for screens has plenty of examples of cutting.
How long are people in front of it?
The other half of the sum is how long your audience stays put, and that varies a lot from screen to screen. Someone queuing at a cafe till might be there for two minutes. Someone walking past a shop window gives it a few seconds. A table in the pub glances at the bar screen on and off all evening.
That changes how long the whole loop should run, more than any single slide does. Take the cafe queue. Eight slides at ten seconds each make an 80 second loop, so someone who waits two minutes sees all of it, some of it twice. Put thirty slides in and the same customer sees twelve of them, and which twelve depends on when they joined the queue. Anything near the end of the list barely gets a look.
A window or a busy corridor works differently again. Nobody stays for the loop, so every slide has to make sense on its own to someone who catches just that one. Screens at the till goes into queue screens in more detail.
Menus and anything people study
Rotating content suits promotions. Information people need to read to the end is another matter. If your menu board flips to a picture of a cocktail while someone's halfway down the mains, they'll either wait for it to come round again (a bit annoyed) or give up and ask at the counter.
Keep menus, prices and timetables on screen for as long as they apply, and put the rotating content next to them. A Casty layout can be split into areas, so the menu stays put on the left while a playlist of specials turns over on the right. With two screens behind the counter, one fixed menu and one rotating screen is a set-up that works well.
Where you set the timings in Casty
Durations live in a few places, and it helps to know which is which:
- In a playlist, each item shows for 10 seconds when you drag it in. To change it, click the item, open the Advanced tab, tick Set a duration? and type the seconds.
- In the media library, each file has a default Duration, which is what it gets when you add it to a playlist. Set it there once for a file you use a lot.
- In a layout, text, images and shapes share one duration and each widget has its own. The layout runs for as long as the longest of them, and the running time shows at the top of the editor.
- In a campaign, each layout takes its turn, and the Duration column shows how long one pass through all of them takes.
The help pages on building a playlist and designing a layout show where each setting sits.
Making one message come round more often
Sometimes one slide matters more than the rest: tonight's quiz, or a deal that ends at six. The simple fix is to put it in the playlist twice, spaced apart. The tidier one is to schedule it as an interrupt layout, which gets a set share of every hour on top of the screen's normal content. You type the share into Share of Voice as seconds per hour and Casty works out the percentage, so 300 seconds is five minutes in every hour. Priority, interrupts and overlays has the steps.
The opposite problem is real too. Regulars see the same loop every visit, and by the umpteenth time a slide stops registering. Maximum plays/hour on an event stops something being shown too often. Swapping a slide or two each week keeps the loop fresh, and an expiry date on seasonal media in the library takes it out on its own once the date passes.
Transitions and video
Casty can add transitions between items. A gentle fade is fine; anything flashier eats into the reading time and gets old fast on a screen people see every day. Long videos hold everything else up too, so trim clips before you upload them. A two minute brand film in the middle of a playlist of stills means two minutes with no offers on screen. Video or still images covers when a clip is worth the time it takes.
Questions people ask
How many slides should a playlist have?
Enough for the whole loop to fit in the time people usually spend near the screen. For a till queue of a couple of minutes, that might be eight to ten slides at ten seconds each. A bar screen watched all evening can take more, as long as you change them regularly.
Should my digital menu board rotate?
The menu itself shouldn't. People need time to read it, and a menu that changes while they're halfway down is frustrating. Keep the menu fixed and use a separate area of the layout, or a second screen, for anything that rotates.
Can I make one slide show more often than the others?
Yes. Add it to the playlist more than once, or schedule it as an interrupt layout with a set number of seconds per hour in Share of Voice.
What slide length works for a shop window?
Short, with every slide making sense on its own. People walking past give a window a few seconds, so one big message per slide works better than a sequence that only makes sense if you watch all of it.