What pubs put on their screens (and what works)

Pubs tend to use their screens for what's on (the match, the quiz, the band), the food menu and specials, drinks worth trying, and the practical bits like kitchen hours and the Wi-Fi password. The content that works is right for the time of day and readable from across the room. What gets ignored is anything too small to read from the bar, or out of date (a screen still showing last Tuesday's quiz does more harm than a blank one).

Each screen has its own job

The screen behind the bar is seen by people waiting to be served. They give it a few seconds at a time, many times a night. A screen in the dining area is seen by people sitting down with time on their hands, and one by the door or in the window is for people deciding whether to come in at all.

So they shouldn't all show the same thing. In the Casty demo, The Crown (a pub in Bristol) has three screens: one behind the bar, one in the garden room and one at the kitchen pass. The bar screen runs the fixtures board through the afternoon. The kitchen pass shows the menu, and the garden room has an evening rotation of food and drink promotions. On a big match day all three switch to the fixtures for the length of the game, then go back to normal on their own.

If you're still working out where screens should go, where to put screens in a venue covers sightlines and heights.

What's on: sport, quizzes and music

Sport is the obvious one. A board listing this week's games, the kick-off times and which screen is showing what saves the bar staff answering the same question all Saturday afternoon. Keep it as a list you can update in a minute. Casty stores it in a dataset, a small table you edit like a spreadsheet, and the board on screen follows whatever's in it.

Quiz nights and live music come next. People decide on Monday whether they're coming out on Thursday, so the promotion needs to run in the days before, with the details that matter: the day, the start time, what it costs to get in and how to book a table if you take bookings.

There's more on both in promoting live sport and fixtures and promoting quiz nights and events.

Food: the menu, specials and kitchen times

If you serve food, the screen nearest where people order should show what's available now. A Sunday lunch menu at 8pm on a Wednesday tells customers nobody's paying attention. Schedule the lunch menu for lunch and the evening menu for evenings, and put the kitchen's closing time somewhere people see it before they've queued for ten minutes.

Specials suit a small playlist in one part of a screen, one dish per slide with its photo and price. Add this week's pie and take last week's out. When something runs out, take it off the screen too (Casty's menu boards have an Availability switch for exactly this), so nobody gets to the bar and orders a dish you haven't got.

Drinks: guest ales and things to try

Pubs with a changing range get a lot from a screen. A guest ale board with the brewery, the strength and a line about how it tastes does what a chalkboard does, minus the smudges and the handwriting. A beer of the month slot, sometimes part-funded by the brewery, fits naturally too. The demo has one called Ale of the month on The Crown's screens.

If a supplier is paying towards a promotion, switch on proof of play for it. Casty then records each time it plays, and you can download a report to show them it ran as agreed. Proof of play explains how.

Drinks offers come with licensing rules, so read running happy hours and time-limited offers before you put a price promotion on screen.

The practical messages

Some of the most useful slides aren't promotions at all. They answer the questions people would otherwise ask at the bar:

• Kitchen hours, and when last food orders are on a Sunday
• The Wi-Fi name and password
• Whether dogs are welcome, and where the family area is
• Private hire for birthdays and wakes, and who to ask about it
• Local taxi numbers, late on a Friday and Saturday

Slot them into the rotation between promotions. Each one saves a member of staff a conversation at a busy moment, which is a decent return for a slide that took two minutes to make.

What doesn't work

Long videos, mainly. A two-minute brand film with the sound off, on a screen people glance at for a few seconds, wastes the screen. Ten seconds a slide (the starting length for each item in a Casty playlist) is about right for most pub content, with a bit longer for anything people need to read properly, like a fixtures list. How long should each slide stay on screen? goes into the detail.

Small text is the next problem. If you can't read it from the furthest table that can see the screen, it's too small. Clutter is close behind: logos and borders and three offers squeezed onto one slide. One message per slide works better almost every time.

Then there's stale content: last week's quiz still up on Wednesday, or the Christmas menu hanging on into January. Give anything with an end date an end date in the schedule as well, and it stops by itself.

Sport and your own content on one TV

Plenty of pubs have one big TV that shows the match and nothing else. You can still use it for your own content: plug the Casty player into a spare HDMI input and switch inputs with the TV remote when the game starts and finishes. It works, but it relies on someone remembering in the middle of a busy shift. If you can, give your own content a screen of its own and leave the sport TV to the sport.