Hi, I'm John Balla - a Digital Marketing Principal here at SAS focused on Content Strategy. I co-founded the SAS Customer Intelligence blog and served as Editor for five years. I like to find and share content and experiences that open doors, answer questions and maybe even challenge assumptions so better questions can be asked. Outside of work I stay busy with my wife and I keeping up with my 2 awesome college-age kids, volunteering for the Boy Scouts, keeping my garden green, striving for green living, expressing myself with puns, and making my own café con leche every morning. I’ve lived and worked on 3 contents and can communicate fluently in Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian and passable English. Prior to SAS, my experience in marketing ranges from Fortune 100 companies to co-founding two start ups. I studied economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and got an MBA from Georgetown. Follow me on Twitter. Connect with me on LinkedIn.
We're pleased to have Scott Brinker, a thought leader and entrepreneur at the intersection of marketing and technology, as the newest contributor to our sister blog from our friends Down Under called "Left of the Date Line." In his first post for that blog, he explores the idea that everyone in marketing
Today is the day we celebrate Mother’s Day in the United States. So, in honor of Mother’s Day, I decided to crowdsource as much motherly advice as possible to provide useful inspiration for marketers. The inspiration hit me late on Friday afternoon and I'm so pleased to have a big
Mobile customers have the potential to change our business in profound ways. Advanced mobile communications is coming of age at a time when other technologies and societal shifts are working in parallel to radically transform whole industries. Some of these shifts have shown up in the marketing realm in the form of social media, customer
If you have not visited the SAS Customer Intelligence (CI) web page lately - please take a look and let us know what you think. It's been redesigned to give you a better experience when you visit - flatter navigation, more visual appeal and (my favorite) your point of view. Your
I consider myself lucky to have confirmed first-hand that Nate Silver is a relatively smart guy. He most recently published a book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – but Some Don’t, and he is particularly well known for accurately predicting the outcome of the 2012
Online marketers all want the same thing - for our customers to get what they want, when they want it, and with the fewest clicks possible. We already know that satisfied customers usually return, and now they share their experiences so the stakes have never been higher to get it
The digital world we live in gives marketers the opportunity to capture, record, measure, analyze and report just about anything nowadays - and we do it! Clicks, conversions, likes, attrition, business drivers, value destroyers - you name it and it's all fair game. Therein lies the rub - it's all fair game, and that's what's putting
Each fall, SAS Customer Intellience (CI) customers gather at SAS global headquarters for the SAS CI Customer Connection. It's a great opportunity you to interact with your peers in other companies and to gain firsthand knowledge on how to make the most of your CI investment in three important ways: Much of the event is planned to give you many
Content plays a critical multifaceted role in marketing today - simultaneously beckoning and informing your customers at any given time. Content imparts details, stirs emotions and sways decisions. And when created and promoted correctly, content fuels a sales funnel whose narrow end points to the shangri-la of closed sales and happy customers. And
It's Valentine's Day - a day widely associated with love, or at least as a day for acknowledging love. It's celebrated world-wide with offers of candies, flowers, poetry and many other ways to make it very clear how you feel. While observed around the world, Wikipedia notes that it's a working day in most countries. And
On advantage of being a marketer at SAS right now is that we have a roughly 35-year head start on our competitors in terms of helping organizations manage big data. And because much of big data is driven by customer data, marketing is ground zero for big data in most organizations.
This post originally appeared in our SAS Voices blog, published by my colleague and fellow blogger Courtney Peters. It's a great story about how Oberweis Dairy harnessed the power of marketing analytics to cultivate loyalty. That effort has helped them grow from a family-owned dairy farm to a major regional food manufacturer
The idea of customer centricity in marketing is as "old as dirt" - it's probably been around as long as people have been interested in buying or selling things to each other. So why are we still talking about it, and why is it so seemingly elusive for some organizations? The
Being named to the Top 100 of the Fortune Best Places to Work list is a highly coveted honor that SAS has enjoyed for 16 years in a row. In order to be considered for this annual ranking, candidate companies have to answer a comprehensive set of questions that really
It's remarkable how the women my life really like shopping at the different Chico's FAS stores. I think a big reason is that somehow they manage to deliver a boutique experience for every customer at all their stores. That's not an easy feat when you run over 1,000 stores nationwide under 4 different brands: Chico's, White
The Economist Intelligence Unit recently published a report that highlights some C-suite dynamics that remind me of that childrens' game "monkey in the middle." The report details multiple ways in which surveyed CMOs believe one thing about the role of marketing in the company, and then their other functional peers (CIO,
A colossal man-made storm known as “the fiscal cliff” looms on the horizon of the United States economy. Much attention has been paid to the political wrangling behind this situation in Washington, while Congress seems oblivious to unanimity among economists that large-scale abrupt austerity measures like this “fiscal cliff” generate more harm
Apparently the “big” in “big data” is only going to get bigger. And it turns out that organizations have not prioritized big data as much as they perhaps should because too many of them aren’t effectively leveraging customer data across channels. Both of those are positions held by the Altimeter
This is the cross-post of a funny and informative post written for an internal SAS blog by my colleague and blogger extraordinare Chris Hemedinger. For those of you not familiar with "spam," it's a scourge of electronic media that shows up in blog comments among other places - placed with the intention of gaining better
As previously mentioned, I attended this year's DMA Annual Conference as a sponsor and found many ways that it was a wonderful experience as both a sponsor and an attendee. That said, there actually was one part of my DMA experience that gave me pause enough to want to share it
"Awesome" is possibly the most over-used word in the English language, and its over-usage is driven by its versatility. Generally, something awesome is impressive in a way that warrants talking about it - so it's something remarkable. Knowing that, it's easy to understand how in our social-savvy, interconnected online world, awesomeness matters.
Standing in my own crosshairs as my own target market means that almost all work that I do can be a learning opportunity, and going to DMA2012 was certainly a biggie. What I saw and experienced at the show reaffirmed the idea that it’s never been more exciting to be
By and large, marketers are an optimistic lot. We're often big extroverts with big ideas, laying grand plans and generally having a good time along the way. Our view of the future is usually rosy, with all sorts of reasons to hope for the best and reach for the stars.
Over the last decade, five companies have emerged with the potential to aggressively reshape the landscape of multiple industries – and to change life as we know it. They are the "Tech Titans:" Amazon, Apple, eBay , Facebook and Google. Collectively, these five companies are worth more than a trillion dollars. Their
In this era of "do not call lists," anti-spamming legislation, mailing opt-outs and the many ways that consumers tune us marketers out, one might expect the 95 year-old "Direct Marketing Association" to be a quaint reminder of a bygone era, gradually fading into irrelevance. That's definitely not to be the case because they have evolved
The phrase “Content is King” may not be new, but it certainly has enduring relevance in our digital world where so much of our lives are experienced online and increasingly shared online. In fact, the very essence of social media is found in the ways we create content, share it,
We're working on a project with a retail industry thought leadership organization called Retail Systems Research (RSR for short). My colleague, Wilson Raj, is working with RSR Managing Partner Nikki Baird to explore how data-driven customer centricity holds the key to successful omni-channel retailing. Omni-channel retailing is a concept that applies
In case you've missed it, our friends from Down Under have written some great posts about customer intelligence on our sister blog, Left of the Date Line. Each one of our colleagues have a few posts, so here is a summary of my favorites, which I encourage you to read:
It should be no surprise that our marketing department here at SAS has a strong culture of measurement and accountability. As a result, it should shock nobody that we actually use our own customer intelligence solutions to help achieve our continuous improvement. My colleague, Matt Fulk, heads up the team that has been
17 days ago, I posted Olympic inspiration for marketers and in it I shared a few good lessons for marketers from the Games. With a long-term focus, discipline, results orientation and teamwork, all sorts of victories are possible - for both athletes and marketers. Those same lessons have been validated
