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Social Media Management Acquisitions Rage On As Sprinklr Buys TBG Digital

This article is more than 9 years old.

As social media sucks up ever more of our time and attention, marketers are scrambling to find ways to listen in on what people are saying about them, engage them in conversations, and track the results. And ideally they don't want to do that with a gazillion different products--which is driving a lot of the companies providing them into each other's arms.

Latest example: New York-based Sprinklr, which makes one of the broadest sets of social media management software offered as an online service, is announcing today that it's buying TBG Digital, one of the pioneers in helping big brands advertise on Facebook and Twitter . Such consolidation isn't new, but with more social media enablers rushing into the market, M&A doesn't look to end anytime soon.

The five-year-old Sprinklr has been making a big play to become a one-stop shop for all social media marketing. In short, says CEO Ragy Thomas, Sprinklr aims to reinvent the front office in the same way human resource management firm Workday is reinventing the back office. Sprinklr now offers 15 integrated products or "modules" aimed at helping big brands manage their social presence across paid media (advertising), owned media (websites and apps), and earned media (public relations and the like).

Thomas says the acquisition will help accelerate Sprinkr's recent release of a paid social media product to complement others in social listening, engagement, and other areas. Ten-year-old TBG brings not only technical expertise in paid advertising but big-name customers such as Dell and Vodafone and most importantly sales folks who know how to serve them. "I had to get external help to get our technology to market," Thomas says.

Sprinklr, which boasts big brands such as GM, Virgin Atlantic, and Microsoft in its own client base of 500, plans to keep the TBG workforce, some of which has shared offices with Sprinklr in New York and San Francisco. Indeed, it's looking to hire 50 to 70 more people. With TBG, Sprinklr will have 500 people worldwide, up from 300 in late April. That's when it raised $40 million in additional funding and said it's aiming to go public next year.

Despite its broad portfolio of products, Sprinklr still has to contend with a large array of competitors. Besides a raft of startups such as SocialFlow and Lithium to TBG rivals Nanigans and Kenshoo, Sprinklr is up against big companies that have themselves been buying up a number of social media management firms, among them Google, Oracle, Adobe, and Salesforce.com. Thomas gamely contends that "there's enough complexity in the social infrastructure that warrants a distinct solution" focused on all the aspects of social media. The larger companies, he contends, can't focus as sharply on social media.

Thomas wouldn't reveal how much he's paying for TBG but allowed that he had to pay up and persuade CEO Simon Mansell not to take another of "multiple options" for acquisitions.

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