Social marketing company Unified is announcing that it has hired Shawn Douglass as its first chief technology officer.
Douglass previously held a number of roles at enterprise technology company EMC, including founder and managing director of EMC Ventures. More recently, he was CTO at cloud management company ServiceMesh, which was acquired last fall by CSC.
Unified, meanwhile, offers products for social media ad-buying and monitoring. It’s been making moves to expand the data side of its business recently, for example by adding business intelligence data to help customers understand broader trends and by acquiring Awe.sm, a startup that was best known for its link-shortening tools but also offered marketing analytics.
Douglass told me it’s the data that interests him. When it comes to understanding consumer engagement, he argued that “social is far richer than clickstream or cookie data.”
“There is no big data story in ad tech,” he said, later adding, “I want to come in and scale this the way the quants did, the way the frequency trading firms did on Wall St.”
The company says it now has more than 600 customers. It also says that Vice President of Technology David Turner (who joined Unified through the acquisition of PageLever) and co-founder/Chief Product Officer Jason Beckerman will both remain in their current roles.
Update: Here’s a blog post from Douglass talking about why someone with his background cloud computing and enterprise tech ended up at a marketing company.