Digital signage automation with Zapier

Timing is everything, or at least goes a long way towards making a digital signage deployment successful. Concise, engaging content is of course very important, but equally important is getting that content in front of your audience at the right time.

Zapier automation for real-time triggers

The Revel Digital CMS includes a wide range of smart scheduling tools available for precise targeting of content based on various conditions including geo-location, face detection, motion sensing, etc. New to the mix is our recent integration with Zapier. Zapier is an automation tool with hooks into most any web based service platform you can think of such as Slack, Mail Chimp, and Google Calendar. With Zapier it's possible to not only trigger digital signage content in real-time, but also modify content with data provided by the trigger itself.

This works by utilizing a condition available to Revel's Smart Scheduling engine known as a command. Commands can be generated in a number of ways including our REST API, player script, or in this case using Zapier.

The command will provide the trigger for inclusion of a media item within a playlist, but may also be utilized by the player to modify runtime behaviors or content. With the Revel Digital Zapier integration, it's now possible to automate the delivery of a command to your digital signage players based on any of the thousands of apps available in the Zapier library.

Let's check out a few examples

A simple example is triggering content based on a weather condition. In this case we want to include certain content in our playlist only when it's forecast for rain. We won't detail the entire integration procedure here, but there is a complete walkthrough available on our support site here:

https://support.reveldigital.com/hc/en-us/articles/360061984171-Zapier-Automation

From the Zapier account homepage you can search the available apps and get an idea of what's possible. For our weather example we can utilize the Weather by Zapier app along with our Revel Digital app as shown in the screenshot here.

In this case the Zap will be configured to send the command weather with the argument rain. We can then add a schedule condition to any item in our playlist with those parameters and we are done. Only when the player receives this command will it play the media item with this condition.

#Slack messages for the masses

Another great example is using Zapier to trigger and modify content in real-time. In this example we can use the Slack Zapier app along with our Text template gadget.

Say for example you have a corporate Slack channel and any messages in this channel are to be displayed on the corporate signage network. Easy enough, just use the 'New Message Posted to Channel' event to trigger a command. 

The message body from Slack will be used to update the Text zone within your signage template!

Thousands of automation possibilities

There are more than 3000 partner apps available on Zapier, any of which can be used in combination with the Revel Digital app in some form or another. Head over to zapier.com to check them out!