Unacast Looks to Monetize Its Location Data, Hires ironSource’s Cunningham as CRO

Beacon and proximity data company Unacast announced today that ad industry veteran Chris Cunningham, formerly the Vice President of Revenue for ironSource, is joining the company as chief revenue officer. Cunningham will help formulate a strategy for Unacast to monetize all of the data it aggregates from beacons and sensors.

“No one has solved creating the physical world cookie, a true and accurate identity as relates to an individual and a behavior,” Cunningham told Street Fight. “Up until today, Unacast has been entirely focused on the supply side. Now there’s an opportunity to really understand the data the company is sitting on, and what the commercial opportunities are as that data relates to consumers and brands.”

Cunningham had been an advisor to Unacast, which launched at SXSW last year, for about five months. The Oslo, Norway-based company partnered with Reveal Mobile just last week to tackle the complexities of bridging online and offline by targeting consumers in the real world, and announced a similar partnership with Opera Mediaworks a little more than a month ago. “We are thrilled to have Chris join us and, under his leadership, we look forward to creating new ways to merchandize proximity data, scale our business, and serve the data-driven ad industry,” said Unacast CEO Thomas Walle (who will be a speaker at Street Fight Summit West conference in San Francisco on June 7th) in a release.

Though barely one year old, Unacast is the largest network of its kind in the world and growing rapidly. The hype surrounding beacons has yet to materialize as an approachable marketing strategy for many brands and retailers, but the technology’s massive potential has kept it at the forefront of the location-based advertising conversation. Unacast wants to turn that potential into actionable solutions.

Annie Melton is Street Fight’s news editor.