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So, you want to put TVCs on your digital signage?

You've just launched a digital signage network. You've got screens, locations, an audience, and perhaps even a relationship with a local television station willing to supply some terrific content.

Excellent. Free content! Professionally produced commercials! What could possibly go wrong?

Well, a few things, actually.

Television commercials (TVCs) are designed for television. And while digital signage and television both involve moving pictures on rectangular screens, that's roughly where the similarity ends.

There are some important differences worth understanding before filling your shiny new network with 30-second TV spots.

First, there's the small matter of attention

A television commercial is designed for someone sitting down, watching a programme, with sound, and — at least theoretically — paying attention.

Digital signage is different.

Your audience may be walking through a shopping mall, standing in a queue, browsing a store or passing through a railway station. They may have only a few seconds to notice your screen, let alone absorb its message.

And in many environments, there's no sound.

A beautifully produced 30-second television commercial might spend its first ten seconds establishing a scene, another ten developing a story, and its final ten delivering the brand and message.

Unfortunately, your digital signage audience may have walked past before the brand even appears.

This doesn't mean TVCs are useless on digital signage. Far from it. But the most effective creative often needs to be adapted: shorter, more visually direct, with a clear message, prominent branding and little or no dependence on audio.

Sometimes a well-designed ten-second version will accomplish far more than the original 30-second masterpiece.

Now, let's talk about share of voice

Here's where things get interesting.

One of the fundamental commercial principles of an advertising network is share of voice — the proportion of available advertising exposure allocated to a particular advertiser.

When you sell advertising on your screens, you're essentially selling slices of a finite resource: audience attention, delivered through screen time.

That resource needs to be manageable, measurable and fairly allocated.

Imagine a screen showing four commercials in a repeating rotation. Each plays once per cycle.

Every advertiser receives exactly the same number of plays.

But Advertiser D occupies more than twice as much airtime as Advertiser A.

Now imagine that all four advertisers are paying the same amount.

That's a rather awkward conversation waiting to happen.

And as your network grows, the problem compounds. How much inventory do you have left to sell? How do you guarantee an advertiser a particular share? How do you price different durations? What happens when another advertiser wants to join the rotation?

None of these problems is mathematically insurmountable. Sophisticated scheduling systems can accommodate different durations and calculate their actual share of airtime.

But there's a much simpler way to run a predictable commercial network.

Standardise the unit you're selling.

The humble 15-second spot

A useful starting point for many digital signage networks is a standard 15-second commercial slot.

Every advertiser works to the same duration. Every slot represents a predictable portion of the available inventory. And calculating share of voice becomes straightforward.

Want to accommodate a 30-second advertisement? That's entirely possible. Just recognise that it consumes two 15-second units of inventory, and account for it accordingly.

Some environments are better suited to even shorter durations — six or ten seconds, for example. The appropriate standard depends on the venue, audience dwell time and commercial model.

The important thing isn't insisting that every advertisement in the world must be 15 seconds long.

It's establishing a consistent commercial unit, rather than allowing whatever files happen to arrive to dictate how your advertising inventory works.

That distinction becomes enormously important when you start selling meaningful volumes of advertising.

And while we're at it, can we talk about MOV files?

Television production workflows frequently produce video in Apple's MOV format.

MOV isn't inherently bad. It's a container format that can hold several different types of video encoding, some of which are perfectly suitable for digital signage and others which most certainly aren't.

The trouble is that digital signage networks operate across an extraordinary variety of playback hardware — Android devices, Windows PCs, Linux players, embedded systems and purpose-built signage devices.

You don't want a commercial that plays beautifully on the editor's Mac but requires an obscure codec installation on half your network.

A much more sensible delivery baseline is MP4 containing H.264 video, encoded to specifications supported by your players.

Even MP4 isn't a guarantee by itself. The underlying codec, profile, resolution, frame rate and other technical characteristics matter too.

Asking a content supplier for a properly encoded MP4 is not unreasonable. Every professional video production workflow can accommodate standard delivery specifications.

It's also a lot less expensive than troubleshooting a hundred screens that suddenly won't play someone's new commercial.

But what about the great content you're getting for free?

Don't throw it away!

Relationships with broadcasters, local content producers and community organisations can be enormously valuable. News, weather, local events and other programming can make a digital signage network more engaging and relevant to its audience.

And modern distribution technologies, including broadcast delivery systems such as ATSC 3.0, can make getting that content onto geographically dispersed screens remarkably efficient.

But there's an important distinction between content that adds value to your network and advertising that consumes your commercial inventory.

Editorial content, community announcements and unsold-airtime programming can often be managed within a separate, clearly defined allocation. Their durations may be considerably more flexible, provided they don't compromise the airtime you've promised to paying advertisers.

Commercials, on the other hand, need to respect the commercial structure of your network — regardless of where they originated.

A free television commercial isn't necessarily free if it consumes valuable airtime you could otherwise sell.

The bigger picture

Launching a digital signage network is exciting. Getting content flowing onto screens is an important milestone, and the temptation to say yes to everything is entirely understandable.

But the decisions you make at the beginning tend to become the operating assumptions of your network for years to come.

Establishing a few sensible creative specifications early — file formats, encoding standards, durations, aspect ratios and content categories — isn't bureaucracy for its own sake.

It's how you build an advertising product that can scale.

A product where advertisers know what they're buying, operators know what they have available to sell, and every screen reliably delivers what it's supposed to.

Because ultimately, you're not just putting videos on screens. You're building a business around a finite and valuable advertising resource.

And that's worth getting right from the outset.