Sprinklr Debuts Social Media-Driven Digital Signage Display Platform

March 19, 2017 by Dave Haynes

Data visualization is such an obviously great application for digital signage that it’s struck me as weird that no company has really picked the opportunity up and run with it.

But a very large company I’d never heard of has announced Sprinklr Display – a new product in its suite that is effectively a social media-driven visualization platform that also acts as a content management system. The company announced and showed it off last week at South By Southwest in Austin, TX.

“Data visualization is an increasingly important technology for brands who are overwhelmed with big data. They’re faced with the challenge of making this data work for them, not the other way around. Sprinklr Display is the only solution helping brands power consumer-facing experiences for retail and events, as well as command centers that provide insight to cross functional marketing and care teams,” says Justin Garrity, AVP Display, Sprinklr. “With Display on Sprinklr’s integrate-able platform, brands can easily transform their data into insight and deliver engaging experiences in any location.”

Sprinklr bought Portland, OR-based Postano a year ago when Postano was among a handful of companies doing social media visualizations – essentially staying on top of the APIs of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and others to ingest, filter, moderate, curate and display user-generated content on screens.

Sprinklr describes itself as “the most complete enterprise social technology in the world,” which would impress me more if I knew what the hell that meant. But the New York-based company has 1,200 clients, including whale accounts like Nike, McDonald’s, Microsoft, P&G and Samsung.

There is nothing all that unique about social media visualization, with numerous companies doing that as their core business or as widgets/gadgets/plugins related to a platform. It’s been around long enough that several patents have been issued, and the holders are asserting them.

Postano, by the way, already has a settlement with Monster Media.

However, this appears to be quite a bit more than getting tweets up on screens. Sprinklr Display says the highlights of the product are:

• A Command Center that has “out-of-the-box and easily-customized templates, making it simple to setup, manage and deploy thousands of displays across the globe that are always on-brand and on-point through actionable insights.”
• Multiple window, multiple visual storyboards for video walls that reflect several aspects of what all is going on.
• Integration of online product reviews, Twitter comments, Instagram images and other data to help retailers drive sales off displays that show peer recommendations.
• The design and control suite interfaces are mobile-friendly, and Sprinklr Display Remote lets users control each display screens in any location off a smartphone.

There are companies like Tint and Zoomph that also do social media visualization that finds it way to large screens, and Zoomph appears to have some stuff that also gets beyond getting a Tweet to a screen. But I don’t see the dynamic charting and graphics that this product is doing.

There’s a larger opportunity here that I also haven’t yet seen mined and rolled out – going beyond what social media says and taking conventional and IoT sensor data and working them with templates to develop really interesting visuals that change as the data changes. The attraction there is having creative you set once and then forget.

Companies like RMG Networks, Omnivex and Four Winds have done some work there, and I know the Finnish company Valota has done some integration work to visualize Salesforce data.