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.
A weekly ritual at our house is to pore over the local Sunday newspaper print edition and drink big mugs of strong coffee. My wife and I take different sections, we discuss various items that strike us along the way, and we can often have the world's problems solved by noon. It's very
The opening ceremonies for the 2012 summer Olympic Games in London, England are about to start and I could not be more thrilled. The Olympics are the pinnacle in the world of sports and the opening ceremonies are a phenomenal opportunity for people all over the world to burst with pride as
As you might expect, blogging is a lot like many other skills – you have to work at it over time before you start to see improvements. Blogging does not at all come naturally to me, so it’s a personal goal of mine to keep working at it until I
The Supreme Court of the United States is set to reveal its ruling on the landmark health care legislation known as the Affordable Care Act. Much angst has resulted from this law and many parties that feel obliged to support or criticize the law have prepared statements, and in some
I had a chance to attend a moderated panel discussion at the last SAS Global Forum Executive Conference with executives from Best Buy, Seminole Gaming and Office Depot, and each speaker offered their own unique story about how applied customer analytics makes a difference in marketing. I captured some key points in previous
Yesterday’s SAS Financial Services Executive Summit included a session titled “Big Data for the Next Big Idea,” which was moderated by SAS CMO and EVP Jim Davis , and included executives from organizations whose size tells me these people know exactly what big data is: Aditya Bhasin from Bank of America, Robert
As a marketer, one of the highlights of the SAS Financial Services Executive Summit has been the interactive session titled "Exploring and Exploiting Trends to Really Understand Today's Customer." The session involved all participants engaged in case studies, which included a facilitator and graphic artist from Matter Solutions. This session provided
Today's second annual SAS Financial Services Executive Summit included a great panel discussion moderated by Lori Bieda from SAS, and featuring Greg Holzwarth, SVP and Managing Director, Customer Information Management at SunTrust Bank, Harvey Koeppel, former CIO and SVP of the Global Consumer Group at Citigroup, and Joseph Grillo, VP of
SAS is hosting the second annual SAS Financial Services Executive Summit today at SAS global headquarters with executive leaders from the banking, insurance and capital markets industries. The theme of the show is "Ignite," which references coming together, sparking innovation and inspiring change. The keynote speaker is a very well known change agent
We had the good fortune to have Ralph Thomas, Ph.D., VP of Strategic Analytics and Database Marketing from Seminole Gaming, participate in our integrated marketing management panel at the 2012 SAS Global Forum Executive Conference along with his colleagues from Office Depot and Best Buy. Each panelist presented a short
I had the pleasure to sit in on a panel discussion at the the 9th Annual SAS Health Care and Life Sciences Executive Conference focused on the topic of understanding and managing customer behavior in the changing health care landscape. This panel was moderated by Dipti Patel-Misra Senior Manager in the Center for
I am at the 9th Annual SAS Health Care and Life Sciences Executive Conference, an extraordinary event that draws the best and the brightest leaders as both speakers and attendees from the pharmaceutical, health insurance, health care and related industries. One session featured speakers from Independence Blue Cross sharing their
Alan Adams, Senior Director of Customer Analytics at Office Depot, took part in a great panel discussion on integrated marketing management at the 2012 SAS Global Forum Executive Conference along with his colleagues from Seminole Gaming and Best Buy. The session included a short presentation by each panelist, followed by
SAS Executive Lead for Customer Intelligence Lori Bieda moderated this panel and introduced the concept of Marketing Optimization as the "Holy Grail" of marketing for the power it holds to enable marketing to fulfill its mandate as driving profitable growth for organizations. Joining her in this session was Stephan Chase,
I had the distinct pleasure today to hear Guy Kawasaki deliver a keynote address at the SAS Global Forum Executive Conference 2012. I thought of his engaging address as a nice guide for personal effectiveness, particularly in a professional realm. And my main takeaway from yesterday's keynote address by Joe
I just saw the legendary NFL quarterback Joe Theismann deliver his keynote address today at SAS Global Forum 2012, and as expected, he provided us with vivid anecdotes and recollections from his experiences both as a championship athlete and as a businessman. By delivering an engaging mix of humor, lessons learned
As a marketer at SAS, there are few better moments than being at SAS Global Forum, happening right now at Walt Disney Dolphin Resort and the Gaylord Palms Resort in Orlando, FL. It's like an annual family reunion of SAS users from around the world, all coming together to reconnect,
We recently held a half-day session devoted entirely to search marketing that gave us an opportunity to cast a wide net internally about this very important topic. I learned some new things and also had a few moments where it seemed the obvious was being presented, but sometimes even "hearing the
During January 15 - 18, 2012 in New York City, the National Retail Federation will conduct its 101st annual "Retail's BIG Show" and once again SAS will be there in a big way. The retail industry is a big deal at SAS and SAS benefits retailers in a big way, with more than 600
According to Wikipedia, marketing with music can roughly be traced back to 1923 with the dawn of commercial radio broadcasting. What we now know as a "jingle" first aired on Christmas Eve in 1926, touting the merits of General Mills' Wheaties cereal. As we all know, musical messages have since become a staple for advertisements on
My friend and colleague, Matt Fulk, has detailed in his posts some of the great ways we've used SAS Customer Intelligence to improve our own marketing. Using SAS fits with our culture of measurement and analysis that keeps us constantly focused on finding better ways to do things, and one
One of the best things about having marketers as my target market is that I personally benefit from thought leaders I get to work with to offer my audience valuable content. And this blog is a great way for me to share some of the best of the best. When it
As mentioned in a previous post, We had the pleasure to sponsor the eMetrics Marketing Optimization conference again this year with a marketing lab. Our featured story was an innovative use of customer analytics by Organic, a digital marketing agency and SAS customer. We highlighted how Organic worked with their client Pulte
I've had the pleasure to work closely this year with the Association of National Advertisers on a Thought Leadership Sponsorship. One of my favorite outcomes of that effort was an e-Magazine titled, "Measures for Success - How to become a more accountable marketing organization." The title article of that eMagazine
My friend and colleague Amartya Bhattacharjy led a roundtable discussion today titled, Merging Art and Science in Marketing at #PBLS11, which I've tried to distill for you here. He began with the traditional view of marketing in terms of two types of activities that had their own mindsets: Brand marketing (mass
My colleague and friend Colleen Cruz led a roundtable discussion at #PBLS11, titled How to Boost Effectiveness with Marketing Operations Management (MOM). There was a robust discussion that brought out some of the main advantages of a marketing operations management solution, and I captured three main ones to provide a summary: Boost efficiency with
I’ve discovered that bestselling author Jim Collins is both a great writer and a great speaker because his keynote address at #PBLS11 has been absolutely riveting. And his lessons on greatness can certainly apply to marketing, so I’ve summarized it for us here: He started by stating that greatness is
Andy Swenson, VP of Database and Revenue Management at Pinnacle Entertainment outlined their approach to customer loyalty, which included some great takeaways for companies in any industry. The gaming resorts leader partnered with Teradata to provide the database and with SAS to handle the marketing solution that enabled them to differentiate
Scott Hudgins, VP of Customer Managed Relationships at The Walt Disney Company shared details about how Disney has approached CRM and the guiding principles and key learnings that have driven their success. They began their CRM process in 2001 knowing that most of their customers were somewhere in one of their
Jim Bampos presented in a session today at PBLS11 titled, Driving the Total Customer Experience with Data. He described the extraordinary journey he’s led his company on to manage customer experience and how it literally transformed EMC to be centered on the customer. Prior to embarking on that journey, EMC saw itself as a data
