Hi, I'm John Balla - I co-founded the SAS Customer Intelligence blog and served as Editor for five years. I held a number of marketing roles at SAS as Content Strategist, Industry Field Marketing and as Go-to-Marketing Lead for our Customer Intelligence Solutions. I like to find and share content and experiences that open doors, answer questions, and sometimes challenge assumptions so better questions can be asked. Outside of work I am an avid downhill snow skier, hiker and beach enthusiast. I stay busy with my family, volunteering for civic causes, 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 get by with 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.
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
