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.
The value of big data has less to do with the sheer quantity of the data, and is more about an opportunity to take a new view of the world. That's the thought that Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, the Oxford University Professor known for his expertise on big data shared in his keynote session at the
My colleague Kelly McGuire recently teamed with Associate Professor Breffni Noone at The Pennsylvania State University to study the role of reviews and ratings and price on purchase decisions in the hotel sector. Their findings confirmed the relationship linking ratings and reviews with quality and value perceptions of hotel room purchases that they'd found
Stephanie Miller at The DMA is challenging marketers to see data differently. In her most recent blog post in the See Data Differently series of the DMA Advance blog, she spotlights the pivotal role for marketing of the Chief Data Officer. By describing the work and perspectives of Todd Cullen,
Gilt is an online retailer based in the United States, founded in 2007 and is best known for flash sales - only available to members for 36-48 hours. It's all about giving its members the inside scoop to snag something cool and sought after, and then adding the thrill of
It’s an interesting question, right? We all know our customers talk among themselves about our products and our brands. They do it in person, on the phone and on social media. Heck – even we marketers talk among ourselves and sometimes it's about our customers. It’s what people do –
The recent uptick in buzz around Hadoop caught my attention, and as always, my what’s-in-it-for-me filter kicked in, so I started sniffing around. It turns out that Hadoop brings some big advantages to the world of data that we marketers depend on so much, and as a result, I think
Sir Terry Leahy speaks with the clarity and purpose of someone used to speaking the language of data. When he was CEO of global retail giant Tesco, he presided over an organization that became the UK’s biggest retailer and enjoyed sustained robust growth - more than 10% annually over 20
Picture your "typical" sports fan - body paint, tailgating, banners on the car, and so on. You can easily imagine that person as a brand evangelist. Now think of someone you know who loves to read. Would you ever put the sports fan and the book lover in the same
Considering the large investment every organization makes in people, the impact of hiring and retaining talent can’t be overstated. With the pace of change facing most marketing organizations, what I see specifically is the need to find and retain people that are innovative, agile and anything but complacent. A tall order?
As technology has changed the way people communicate, do business and generally lead their lives, CMOs have shifted their strategies to lead data-driven marketing in ways that maximize new opportunities and mitigate new risks. As the second in a two-part blog post, I’m sharing the recurring themes I’ve taken away
