Dan Cropsey

Gained 1,700+ purchase preference, intent, and lifestyle audiences.

Most brand advertising targeted broad proxy audiences like demographics, or when using purchase data, it was typically targeted to audiences who "bought the product" or "did not buy the product." Most audience targeting could not reach and specifically influence consumers based on the "why" or the "why not" behind the purchase.

I merged the analytics behind strategic retailer and brand portfolio decisions with retailer loyalty transactions, purchase panels, location-visiting behavior, demographics, store profiles, and product label data to identify the why behind the buy. We built and upheld shopper personality audiences by sourcing diverse lifestyle data, linking behavioral signals, identifying personas from trends, mapping choice drivers, scoring 100+ million shoppers for 1,700+ personas, validating traits with real purchase patterns, defining qualification rules, and delivering audience IDs to DSPs and agencies.

We were the first to market with choice-driver-based audiences. I enabled new audience targeting, richer purchase affinities insights, and highly personalized messaging—achieving higher ROAS, especially for brands looking to acquire new brand buyers.

Achieved a 90% major retailer adoption rate.

Retailers struggled to understand their local market buying needs and competitive situation beyond major markets like the Chicago metro area. Legacy solutions were fixed, expensive, and too broad for localized product assortment, pricing, and promotion decisions.

I created a solution that allows retailers to define their own local markets where their stores and competitive stores could be grouped and analyzed based on location and proximity, while maintaining retailer partnerships, data cooperation, and confidentiality rules that do not expose individual competitor sales. I built a modern data platform to manage client store aggregations, created a UX for defining local markets by zip codes or proximity, added certification to enforce retailer rules, enabled high-scale store/product aggregation, and re-vetted market data weekly.

I launched the first retailer-defined micro-trade area and competitive intelligence market, achieving 90% penetration. This improved localized decisions, created a new revenue stream, strengthened retailer partnerships, and drove brand investment.

I helped transform CPG advertising by enabling the first omnimedia addressable targeting and measurement based on purchase behavior, achieving the leading market share in CPG audience targeting and measurement.

Most digital and television advertising was targeted and delivered to media based on demographic proxies rather than actual purchasing behavior, resulting in media budget waste, less relevant messaging, and poor ROAS measurement.

I enabled advertisers to target individual consumers or media programs based on what viewers buy and, not just on what broad demographic or interest group they may belong to. I built a large, nationally representative shopper loyalty platform by recruiting retailers and enabling privacy-safe data sharing, household linking, and identity anonymization. I also appended demographics to enrich audiences, created syndicated and custom segments, delivered them with digital IDs to media platforms, and used campaign logs to run test-versus-control analyses for incrementality and ROAS.