How to Design an Outdoor Ad That Works in 10 Seconds

That constraint is not a limitation to work around. It is the entire brief. Design for it deliberately and a ten-second ad outperforms a beautiful one that needs thirty.

Before opening any design tool, answer one question in one sentence: what do you want someone to know if they only look once?

Not three things. One. "Fresh croissants, until 11." "Trial month, 19 euros." "We fix screens, same day." If your sentence has an "and" in it, you have two ads and should run them as two frames.

Everything below is downstream of that sentence. Type size, colour, motion — all of it exists to get that one sentence into someone’s head while they walk past.

The most common mistake is designing on a laptop at arm’s length and forgetting the viewer is three metres away and moving. Our own creative rules for book a slot on our Berlin screens:

• Body text: 36px minimum. That is the floor for readability from ten metres or more.
• Headlines: 72px or larger. The headline is doing the work; give it the room.
• Bold, sans-serif faces — Helvetica, Arial, Roboto. Thin weights and light colours wash out on a bright display.
• Three to five lines of text, maximum. Past that you are writing a poster nobody will read.

A quick check that costs nothing: shrink the design to thumbnail size on your phone and hold it at arm’s length. If the headline is still legible, it will hold up on a screen at three metres. If it is not, the font is too small or the contrast is too low — and it is almost always the contrast.

Screens crop, mounts sit at odd heights, and some layouts reserve zones for other content. So:

• Keep key text and logos inside the centre 80% of the frame.
• Avoid the bottom 10% — on our screens that band is reserved for the ticker.
• Avoid the top 5% as well. Content pushed to the very edge reads as a mistake even when it is not.

Design as if the outer border might vanish. On a real wall, sometimes it effectively does.

High contrast between text and background is the single biggest readability lever — bigger than the typeface, bigger than the palette.

• Dark text on light, or light text on dark. Never mid-tone on mid-tone.
• Avoid pure black backgrounds. They turn a bright display into a mirror. Use a dark grey around #222 instead.
• White, yellow and orange hold up best for calls to action.
• Skip heavily saturated colours — they look harsh at signage brightness levels, which are far above your monitor.
• Test on more than one screen if you can. Monitors and commercial displays render the same file differently.

Here is how the ten seconds actually break down on a screen running a loop:

Seconds 0–2 — the hook. You have about two seconds to earn the second glance. Open on your strongest visual: the product, large, well lit, and unmistakable. No logo lock-up, no fade from black, no “introducing”. If the first frame is a title card, you have spent your hook on typography.

Seconds 2–6 — the one sentence. Headline appears and holds. This is the sentence you wrote at the start. It stays on screen long enough to be read twice, because most people read it once at half attention and once properly.

Seconds 6–8 — the proof or the detail. Price, time, offer, location. One of them, not all four. This is the frame where ads go wrong: it is tempting to add opening hours, a website, a phone number and a QR code. Pick the one thing that moves someone from interested to acting.

Seconds 8–10 — the call to action. One CTA, in a high-contrast colour, in the safe zone. “Ask at the counter.” “Order now.” “Visit us.” Put it in the final two seconds of the spot so it is the last thing on screen before the loop turns over.

Keep the loop itself between 3 and 10 seconds. Longer spots feel fine in review and get cut in half by real foot traffic. And never flash more than three times per second — beyond being unpleasant, it can be genuinely harmful.

The best creative in the world does not help if it will not load. Our full video and ad specs:

• 1080 × 1920 px, 9:16 portrait — our screens are mounted vertically.
• MP4, MOV or JPEG.
• 25 MB maximum.
• H.264 / AVC, progressive scan. Never interlaced.
• Stills at 1920 × 1080 or higher before you scale them.

If you are exporting from a phone editor, check the aspect ratio before you check anything else. A landscape video letterboxed into a portrait screen wastes more than half the surface you are paying for.

Movement is why a screen beats a poster: a moving image in a window draws considerably more attention than a static one — which is the whole mechanism behind what digital signage actually is. But movement for its own sake is worse than stillness. Sliding text, spinning logos and constant transitions read as noise, and noise is what people filter out on a busy street.

The most effective spots we run are the plainest: a real product photograph with a slow push-in, one headline, one price. A Berlin kiosk operator did exactly that across six locations — actual shelf photographs turned into short motion spots, one screen per location. Within three weeks, coffee sales were up 25% and liquor sales up 15%, with no price change and no promotion behind it, as the Berlin kiosk case study sets out. The creative was not clever. It was legible, it was the right product, and it played 200+ times a day.

The same plainness travels. It is what makes a window work for screens for retail and fashion, and it is why the design brief barely changes between a shelf and a shopfront.

1. 1Read the headline out loud in one breath. If you cannot, cut it.
2. 2View the design at thumbnail size at arm’s length. Still readable?
3. 3Is every important element inside the centre 80%?
4. 4Is there exactly one call to action?
5. 5Is the spot 10 seconds or shorter, portrait, and under 25 MB?

Five yeses and your ad will do its job on the pavement. That is the whole test.

Budget is the other half of the decision, and we cost it out in what digital signage costs in Berlin. The rest of the series sits in more local marketing guides.