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.
I have always loved watching the Olympic games for so many reasons. To begin with, the Opening Ceremonies with the pageantry of the parade of nations is unparalleled. For me, that means pride at cheering my parents’ Brazil and Hungary teams, then the USA team, of course. Then there are
I have never liked referring to people as a “resource,” or as an “asset” in the impersonal sense. Even with people reporting in to me, doing that always seemed to trivialize the individuals being referred to and just never has sat well with me. At the same time, I’ve seen
Knowing if your campaign is successful and why is not as easy as it seems. Even in ideal conditions, there are plenty of factors beyond your control, such as competitive action, sales investments, product quality, and customer-specific issues. Digital channels have added layers of complexity, while also providing the means for
Fan loyalty is everything in the sports business. So when Major League Soccer (MLS), the top flight pro soccer league in the US and Canada, wanted to deepen customer engagement, it started by getting a better understanding of its fans. MLS wanted to reach out to fans with personalized information that
Today's announcement of SAS once again being named a Best Place to Work is a point of pride for our company. It's our 17th year in a row on this esteemed list and 11th time in the top 10. I can attest that the recognition is well-deserved, and our workplace culture is more than
The amazing digital world we live in provides consumers with information whenever, wherever and however they want it. It can be both dazzling and dizzying at the same time, so more and more consumers gravitate toward brands they can trust, companies that know them and organizations that engage with them in ways
As 2013 comes to a close, it’s time to take stock of some of the topics that captured our attention this year in the context of five “hot topics” we focused on. Marketing Analytics Marketing Analytics is near and dear to our hearts, among other reasons because we’ve had a
I have the good privilege to work with colleagues that represent all the best qualities of data-driven marketers. Jenn Chase and Matt Fulk lead our Marketing Services team, which has collaborated with me and my peers in dramatically improving our marketing results by using our own Customer Intelligence solutions. This "drinking
When you value something, it’s worthwhile. It’s desirable, important or useful. An activity that’s worthwhile is one that creates value in some way, and therefore should be safeguarded. That’s the premise behind a landmark study commissioned by the DMA's Data-Driven Marketing Institute called, The Value of Data: Consequences for Insight,
The following post originally appeared on the DMA Advance blog, republished here with permission and gratitude. It was written by Stephanie Miller, VP at DMA and Chair of the Program Committee for their conference, NCDM13: Where Marketing Meets Big Data. The secret glue between IT and marketing departments is big data.
