Dan Cropsey, Management Consultant in Fox River Grove, IL, United States
Dan is available for hire
Hire Dan

Dan Cropsey

Management Consulting Expert

Fox River Grove, IL, United States

Toptal member since August 26, 2025

Bio

Dan has conceived, created, and commercialized some of the most widely used marketing data and analytics solutions across brands, retailers, agencies, and media. His innovative solutions were relied upon by thousands of brands and spanned the marketing enterprise, including brand strategy, consumer intelligence, assortment, promotion, retail media, measurement, and advertising. Dan now brings his unique mix of domain, product, data, AI, and technology expertise directly to clients as an advisor.

Case Studies

Industry Expertise

  • Business Services
  • Information & Document Management
  • Advertising & Marketing
  • Media & Internet
  • Data Collection & Internet Portals
  • Publishing
  • Retail
  • Grocery Retail

Other Expertise

  • Data Science
  • Data Strategy
  • Marketing
  • Media
  • Product Design
  • Strategy

Work Experience

President & Founder

2024 - PRESENT
Harmony Marketing Technology Advisors
  • Advised a major consulting firm on their strategic product extension to enable omni-media audience activation of their unique consumer behavior data and insights.
  • Provided a leading Voice of Customer company and its executives with company strategy and product design guidance as a board advisor.
  • Informed a major retail industry service company's executives on their data monetization capabilities, product design, revenue potential, and business risks.
  • Evaluated and recommended enterprise data and analytics strategies and vetted strategic vendors for a major CPG brand and their marketing data strategy.
  • Helped assess, package, and execute a retail and eCommerce data company with a new data solution design and go-to-market.
  • Advised on product, data, and go-to-market strategies for an AI-based consumer intelligence company specializing in synthetic real-time consumer feedback and actionable marketing and retail insights.
Focus areas: Strategy, Design, Execution, Data Strategy, Marketing Technology (MarTech), Advertising Technology (Adtech), Product Strategy, Product Design, Data Science

SVP, Head of Data Strategy, Solutions, & Partnerships

2016 - 2023
Catalina
  • Developed the corporate data strategy and multi-year solution roadmap. Engaged as a lead contributor on product and digital strategies.
  • Identified and onboarded new consumer, brand, and retail data sources to differentiate our end-to-end marketing solutions from strategic insights and planning through campaign activation, personalization, and measurement.
  • Launched shopper personality audiences to deeply understand nuanced purchase motivations and choice drivers like eating habits, lifestyles, and marketing responsiveness, leveraging Label Insight, Experian, IRI, Ibotta, and Numerator.
  • Extended shopper touchpoints beyond our in-store printers into the broader omni-media ecosystem with privacy-safe integrations with retailers, brands, and agencies via industry enablers Experian, LiveRamp, Samba, Beeswax, and DSPs.
  • Augmented industry-leading shopper transaction data with receipt panels, mobile visits, and other total market data, providing broader visibility into consumer behavior fueling diverse penetration, volume, and loyalty campaign strategies.
  • Led the Nielsen Catalina Solutions operating committee to help govern the Nielsen and Catalina joint venture.
Focus areas: Strategy, Design, Data Strategy, Data Science, Advertising, Marketing, Analytics, Retail Marketing Campaigns, Shopper Marketing, Out-of-home (OOH) Advertising, Consumer Insights, TV, California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

Executive Vice President, Product & Development

2012 - 2015
Networked Insights
  • Launched marketing analytics solutions for audience insights, content planning, brand health, campaign management, and media targeting.
  • Introduced acclaimed Pinpoint Technologies throughout the Kairos platform, automating the discovery of the "why" behind spikes in social media conversations, maximizing advanced text and classification analytics.
  • Became the first to market with brand health, purchase funnel, and advocacy metrics using real-time social media signals via computational linguistics, along with predictive analytics correlating brand sales and survey equity data.
  • Established Twitter partnership and certifications.
  • Integrated diverse social media and digital data from 30 million sources, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, forums, commenting platforms, consumer reviews, news, Comscore, and Tribune Media.
  • Launched Kairos, the company’s first self-serve marketing solution, starting the transition to a SaaS business model.
  • Provided brands with a 360-degree understanding of their target audience’s brand perceptions, category preferences, media usage, entertainment choices, and 15,000 other interests, attitudes, behaviors, and topics.
  • Introduced SmartSearch technology to radically simplify the use of social data by proactively organizing the social web’s unstructured text, becoming the first solution to eliminate the need to write complicated search queries.
Focus areas: Advertising, Marketing, Analytics, Data, Text Analytics, Operations, New Products

Senior Vice President, Technology & Product Development

2010 - 2012
Nielsen Catalina Solutions
  • Co-founded and led product design, technology, and operations for Nielsen and Catalina Marketing's joint venture established to revolutionize advertising effectiveness via integrated "single source" consumer purchase and media behavior.
  • Launched several of the industry’s first digital and television media buying, targeting, and measurement solutions that leveraged actual purchasing behavior versus demographic proxies.
  • Designed consumer privacy-friendly systems to anonymously link online, television, and mobile viewing and advertising exposures with corresponding product purchase behavior for 60+ million households.
  • Integrated media viewing and purchase panels to address demographic representativeness gaps and quality concerns.
  • Built a diverse high-performance organization with annual investment and operating budgets $10+ million.
Focus areas: Data, Data Science, Technology, Marketing, Advertising, Analytics, Retail Sales, New Products

Global Consumer Product & Technology Leader | Vice President, New Product & Retail Strategy

2002 - 2010
NielsenIQ
  • Championed global technology and operations for Nielsen’s multi-billion-dollar global consumer business unit, including Nielsen’s retail measurement, consumer panel, shopper loyalty, BASES, and advanced analytics divisions.
  • Coordinated strategic product and productivity initiatives and investment decisions exceeding $20 million annually.
  • Created the technology and product business plans for the company's largest and most strategic joint venture with Catalina Marketing.
  • Led the resolution of major client delivery issues across a 25,000-employee global business services organization.
  • Led product strategy, innovation, new product development, and go-to-market execution for the US $250-500 million retail measurement business unit.
  • Appointed by Nielsen’s executive board to co-lead the development of their global next-generation Answers On Demand delivery platform and go-to-market strategy, which later achieved record client request for proposal wins.
  • Co-led a major turnaround of Nielsen’s critical retailer partnerships, resulting in unprecedented revenue growth, data cost reductions, retailer endorsements, and brand engagement that helped grow the broader $500+ million US business.
  • Turned a competitively disadvantaged retail store level measurement business into an industry differentiator in less than two years with Local Market Planner, achieving around 90% market share.
  • Partnered with global marketing executives to develop our global shopper loyalty strategy, business plan, and partnership, which led to several global deals.
  • Managed product development for Nielsen’s fastest-growing Strategic Plannerä, Account Plannerä, Category Business Planner, and Wall Street solutions, allowing 2,000+ clients to identify sales, promotion, and distribution opportunities.
Focus areas: Data, Data Strategy, Data Science, Marketing, Advertising, Consumer Products, Retail & Wholesale, Analytics, Consumer Insights, Merchandising, Retail Management, Retail Strategy, Retail Marketing Campaigns, Retail Merchandising, Category Management, Shopper Marketing

Vice President, Product Development

1992 - 2002
Efficient Market Services (EMS)
  • Directed and co-architected the retail information industry's first daily store-level decision support products and supporting high-scale operational systems.
  • Designed and helped develop StoreView, the industry’s first in-store decision support tool that allowed store personnel to monitor store sales, promotion execution, merchandising compliance, and out-of-stock activity.
  • Steered the implementation of a scan-based trading product line that delivered accounting-quality sales data to reconcile consignment programs between retailers and manufacturers.
  • Co-managed PromoCast's development, a revolutionary demand forecasting technology that uniquely leveraged store data.
Focus areas: Marketing, Merchandising, Promotion, Data, Data Science, Logistics & Warehousing, Analytics, Sales Forecasting, Retail Merchandising, Supply Chain, Retail & Wholesale, Retail Management

Project Leader & Lead Software Programmer

1985 - 1992
A.C. Nielsen
  • Led the design and development of Opportunity Explorerä, an AI-based product that was the first-place winner of the 1993 Information Industry Association Product Achievement Award.
  • Managed and co-developed the CD-ROM Market Plannerä. This unique application and publishing system gave CPG professionals exclusive access to national sales patterns on 500,000+ products.
  • Led the development of numerous projects that turned raw retailer point-of-sale data and promotional observations into strategic product sales information used by most leading retail and CPG manufacturers.
Focus areas: Data, Software, Consumer Products, Retail & Wholesale, Analytics

Skills

Industry Expertise

Consumer Products, Retail & Wholesale, Technology, Software

Other

Strategy, Data Strategy, Product Design, Marketing, Data Science, Collaboration, Active Listening, Design, Execution, Marketing Technology (MarTech), Advertising Technology (Adtech), Product Strategy, Advertising, Analytics, Retail Marketing Campaigns, Shopper Marketing, Out-of-home (OOH) Advertising, Consumer Insights, TV, California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), Data, Text Analytics, Operations, New Products, Retail Sales, Merchandising, Retail Management, Retail Strategy, Retail Merchandising, Category Management, Promotion, Logistics & Warehousing, Sales Forecasting, Supply Chain, Consumer Behavior, Path To Purchase, Sales, Media

Collaboration That Works

How to Work with Toptal

Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.

1

Share your needs

Discuss your requirements and refine your scope in a call with a Toptal domain expert.
2

Choose your talent

Get a short list of expertly matched talent within 24 hours to review, interview, and choose from.
3

Start your risk-free talent trial

Work with your chosen talent on a trial basis for up to two weeks. Pay only if you decide to hire them.

Top talent is in high demand.

Start hiring