Digital Signage for In-Store Promotions

A promo screen works when four things are true: a shopper can read it from across the aisle, you can change it without printing anything, it starts and stops on a date you set once, and it can show a different offer at different times of day. Get those four right and a TV by the register does more than a paper sign on every one of them.

Yes, under the right conditions, measured in two peer-reviewed field studies.

Herhausen, de Jong and Grewal (Journal of Marketing, 90(3), 2026) tracked 237 in-store campaigns. A screen raised the chance a shopper bought the featured product by 8.1%. The lift was bigger when the screen stood near the product it advertised, later in the day and on weekends. It was smaller when other promotions ran at the same time.
Nanni and Ordanini (Journal of Retailing, 100(2), 2024) ran two field experiments in grocery stores with 7,009 customers. A screen lifted sales of a discounted product kept outside the screen's own department, farther away. A discount on a product in the same department as the screen showed no measurable lift.

Put the two together: a screen next to the product it is advertising sells more of that product, best later in the day and on weekends. A screen can also sell more of a discount shelved elsewhere in the store, so it is worth using one screen to promote a deal the shopper has not reached yet, not only the shelf beside it. Do not make the screen compete: in the study, other promotional cues running alongside it cut into the lift.

A screen that only shows a photo of last week's flyer is not doing more than paper. The four things that make it worth the TV:

Readable from a distance. One offer per screen at a time, large type, high contrast. A shopper walking past either reads it or does not; there is no second look before the next aisle.
Changes without printing. Swap the image or video for next week's special from a phone or laptop. No sign shop, no lamination, no delivery of a new poster to every store.
Starts and stops on its own. A flash sale or a holiday special has a date it should come down. If removing it depends on a person remembering, it stays up for a month after it ends, or it goes live a week early.
Changes by time of day. A breakfast special does not belong on the screen at 9 pm. A good system swaps content by the clock, not by a staff member switching slides.

Most in-store promo screens carry one of four things, and the setup below works for all of them:

A weekly special — the same screen, a new image every Monday.
A flash sale — up for a few hours, then gone.
A seasonal offer — a holiday or back-to-school promotion that should not run past its season.
A loyalty or sign-up push — placed near the register, where it has the most time to be read.

A retail store usually runs these on a screen customers already pass. A restaurant or café often runs the same promotion in the same playlist that shows the menu board, swapping to a dedicated promo slide between menu items.

Where Brix fits

Three of the four requirements above map to a specific Brix setting, so they do not depend on a person remembering to act. The fourth — making the screen readable from across the aisle — is a design choice you make in the file itself, not a setting.

Add the promo as a file, then put it in a playlist

Go to Files and upload the promo image or video.
Go to Playlists, open the playlist that plays on the screen (or create one), and add the file to it.
Pick a layout that gives the promo its own zone, or its own full-screen slot, so it is not squeezed next to something else.

Give it a start date and an end date, so it takes itself down

Open the file inside the playlist and set Show from and Expires. Leave Show from blank to go live right away; leave Expires blank to run until you remove it by hand. These two dates travel with the file, so they apply in every playlist that uses it, not only the one you are editing. With both set, the promo appears on the date you pick and comes off the screen on the date you pick, and no one has to log in and delete it. Let the holiday special take itself down instead of running into February because no one remembered. A playlist itself can carry its own Starts and Expires dates, which is the better choice when the whole playlist is the promotion, such as a two-day "weekend flash sale" playlist, rather than one file inside a mixed playlist. If the playlist expires and the screen has nothing else assigned to it, the screen goes blank: put the screen on a schedule with fallback content set if it needs to keep showing something afterward. See how content expiry works for more on auto-archiving.

Show a different offer at different times of day

Go to Schedules and create a schedule, then add time blocks to it: one for the morning offer, one for lunch, one for evening. Each time block points at its own playlist, so the screen changes automatically — breakfast, lunch and late-night offers on the same TV, with no one switching anything by hand. Use Change content on the screen to put that schedule on it. A schedule also takes its own Starts and Expires dates, so a whole dayparting plan, such as a holiday-hours schedule, can run for a set window too. See how to schedule digital signage by time of day for the full setup.

Change every cooler TV in every store at once

Tag every screen that should carry the promo — a cooler TV, a counter screen, an entrance screen — with the same tag, such as "cooler-tv" or "front-door", or put them in a screen group. On the Screens page, filter by that tag or group, select all the screens the filter returns, and use Change content to put the same playlist or schedule on every one of them in one action. Change the promo once and it updates on every tagged screen, instead of logging into each store's screen one at a time.

What this is not

Running your own in-store promotions is not the same as selling screen time to a supplier or brand for their ads. That setup is built around approvals and proof that an ad played, and it is a different topic from the one on this page. This page covers your own store promoting its own offers, on a screen you already control.

How to set up a weekly special, start to finish

A worked example: a weekly special that should start Monday and come down the following Sunday night.

Design or export the promo image at the resolution your screen uses — 1920×1080 for a standard landscape TV.
Upload it to Files.
Add it to the playlist that plays on the counter screen.
Set Show from to Monday and Expires to the following Monday at 00:00, so it is gone before the next special goes up.
If the special should only show at lunch, put it in a lunch playlist instead of the all-day one, and point a lunch time block in Schedules at that playlist.
If every store runs the same weekly special, tag every counter screen the same way first, then filter Screens by that tag, select all of them, and use Change content to apply the playlist to the whole tag in one action.

FAQ

How often can I change an in-store promotion?

As often as you want. Upload a new file or swap the one in the playlist, and every connected screen picks it up, with no printing and no store visit.

Can a promotion remove itself when it ends, without me logging back in?

Yes. Set an Expires date on the file or the playlist, and it comes off the screen on its own on that date.

Can I show one offer in the morning and a different one at night?

Yes, with a Schedule. Add a time block for each part of the day and point each block at its own playlist.

Can I push one promotion to every store's screens at the same time?

Yes. Tag the screens the same way, or put them in a screen group, then filter the Screens page by that tag or group, select all of them, and use Change content to apply one playlist or schedule to all of them at once.

Does this work for a single store, or only chains with many locations?

Both. A single screen needs only the file, the playlist, and, if you want it, an expiry date. Tags and screen groups matter once you have more than one screen to keep in step.

Start a free trial and set the first promotion's start and end date before you walk away from the screen.