Your Front Page Promo Reel is the #1 position for promotion and news on your site. It is the largest element and commands the greatest attention from your visitors. While you can use it for sales, we would recommend you don’t out of respect for your reader’s attention. Visitors should expect this position to always bring them the most relevant, freshest content you have to offer. Take care what you use the Promo Reel for! You don’t want visitors to become banner blind to your Promo Reel!
Slots
Your front page promo reel comes set to support 25 “slots.” Slots determine the position in the rotation for a particular item. Empty slots are not displayed. Do not change your promo reel settings to less than 25 slots.
Slots 1 through 9 are yours exclusively for local use. Corporate will not syndicate content to the first 9 slots without some unusual circumstance or notice well in advance of doing so. Corporate promotions will appear in slots 10 through 25. You may assign items to these corporate slots that might not be highly important, but do not set them to a high priority.
Priorities
Priorities allow multiple items to be assigned to the same slot. As of November 15, 2017, the “winning” item in a particular slot with an overlapping schedule is the item with the highest priority. This is useful in case you want to have a long-running feature in a certain slot, but need to interrupt it with another item. You would set your long-running item to a low priority, for example the default, 0, and your interrupting item to a higher priority, for example 1. Try not to go too crazy with priority numbers to avoid confusion and mistakes. While the promo reel editor attempts to stop you from adding multiple items to the same slot with the same priority, this is not the case when it comes to syndication. When a local item and a syndicated item have the same slot and the same priority, the winning item is usually the syndicated one.
Slots 10 through 25 are used by corporate for national, format-specific, and special promotions. Take care what you schedule in these slots, as they may be overridden by a corporate promotion at any time.
Please note that the “displayed” and “not displayed” labels on items in your promo reel editor’s item list are not 100% accurate. This is especially evident when the list of items spans multiple pages. If the list can not show all items scheduled to a particular slot on one page, it may say that an item is “displayed” because it is the winning item on that page of the list, not because it is actually the winning item for that slot! Always check your actual, public-facing site to confirm.