Joel Ballezza

One of the most important things I've learned in marketing is that if you listen closely enough, good stories find you. That's just what I experienced in the summer of 2016.

The popular Seattle band Hey Marseilles reached out to BECU to explore a partnership, but unlike other solicitations, this one came from long-time BECU credit union members, and included a special surprise—a link to an unlisted YouTube video the band produced. When I clicked play, I was shocked.

The band wrote, filmed (on an iphone using Hyperlapse) and produced a 30-second ad expressing their passion for BECU and featuring their newest single "West Coast". Amazing.

As a marketer, this magic almost never happens so I knew I had to act quick. I reached out to the band's manager, record company and distributer, worked with our legal team to draft a contract to license the song and video. The band even sat down for an interview and shared how the idea for the video came about in a blog post. Amazing.

For a promotional plan, we used a combination of paid, earned and owned tactics including social promotion by the band, YouTube In-Stream True View ads, and email marketing to engage our existing membership with the story, and attract new members to the credit union.

The 3-month marketing plan 1.07MM impressions, 400k video views and drove thousands of visitors to the band Q&A blog post on becu.org, and our new member funnel. Following this partnership, we also booked the band to play at our annual member summit, held in Seattle Center. 

To celebrate our partnership with the Seattle Storm and in promotion of our Early Saver youth savings accounts, BECU gave a Seattle girls’ basketball team a once-in-a-lifetime experience when four-time Olympic gold medalist and two-time WNBA champion Sue Bird surprised them at their practice at a local Boys & Girls Club. 

I partnered with a creative agency and the Seattle professional sports team to build a promotional plan around the three-part Web series that social media targeted ads, earned media and influencer marketing. The video content received over 300,000 views and drove a 24% year-on-year increase in youth account openings.

Developed employee engagement program that drove a 5% improvement in CEO rating and a growth of the company rating from 3.6 to 3.9/5 on the employer review site Glassdoor. Achieved Best Place to Work awards and Top Rated CEO accolades. 

#GiveThem20 is a national marketing initiative to raise awareness for the needs of veterans. After Expedia was nominated by our friends at Starbucks, I organized a response by the Expedia staff. Within four days we filmed and tweeted our reply, nominating our partners at Delta Airlines and Holland America.

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Room & Board Partnership/Contest
By developing a partnership with the home furnishings company Room & Board and hosting a customer photo and story contest, I was able to expand Redfin's social media following, introduce each brand to the other company's customer base, and even "wowed" one lucky Redfin customer with some great furniture.

Protect Your Nest Sweepstakes
At Redfin I developed partnerships with Nest Labs and Room & Board, and hosted co-promoted sweepstakes that doubled Redfin's social following within six months. These promotions including developing Facebook entry apps, running targeted social and on-site advertising, and launching customer email campaigns.

Social Giving Campaign
Skip the fruitcake. Redfin celebrated the holidays by giving away $10,000 to deserving non-profits. I developed the Facebook-hosted voting platform for this holiday campaign and directed the promotion of the program across Redfin's social channels resulting in thousands of votes, shares and social mentions.

Just say yes. Just say yes.

That was my motto when I took a contract digital marketing role with Brooks Running Company. A neighbor cubicalmate asked if I had any experience or interested in training celebrities for the largest half marathon in the world, the Rock 'n Roll Strip at Night in Las Vegas. 

"Yes!" I quickly retorted.

I wasn't sure exactly which qualification I had assigned myself, but as an experienced long distance runner I was sure I could prepare a couple from The Bachelor to run 13.1 miles. I'd carry them on my back if I had to. And so I did.

Over the next four months I got to know Jason and Molly Mesnick, some of the kindest, easiest to work with professionals I've ever had the opportunity to work with. I discussed their goals for the December Vegas race, developed a training plan that ramped up mileage over twelve weeks, and met up with the couple for a series of training runs where I coached and ran alongside the Kirkland-based celebs. 

When the December event came around I was certain that they'd cross the finish line. This wasn't their first half marathon, but each wanted a PR and I was determined to deliver it.

Luckily race night was cool for Vegas, the air hovered just above 40°F. Perfect! Cool temps will make their miles easier. Jason had a chronic IT band issue and even brought along a roll for the run. I tucked it in my backpack and stood at the celebrity start of the rate, ahead of the thousands of other runners. It's go time.

The race went great. Jason and Molly rank steady and wove in and out of packs of other runners as they kept their pace and cadence. I couldn't be happier with their performance. 

Jason even earned his sub-2:00hr half-marathon PR, which I take pride in claiming to have earned him, pushing him the last few miles to earn him a 1:57:07. Not bad sir. Not bad. 

Produced two successful SXSW Interactive session proposals; Workplace Fitness Flexes the Mind (Brooks Running Company, 2013) and The Next $50 B Business Won't be a Website (Redfin, 2015). For the Brooks promotion, I also negotiated a partnership with SXSW and hosted the official SXSW morning run program, engaging local Austinites and conference attendees.

Paper, tape, planning and elbow grease from dozens of Expedia employees came together perfectly to create this 20-story tall tribute at Expedia HQ on Veterans Day. I led planning, volunteer recruitment, media outreach and video/photo production to support this employee engagement and employer branding initiative. 

In addition to using this tactic to honor Veterans Day, we also "digitized" a photo of Mashall Lynch from the Seahawks in advance of their 2014 Super Bowl performance. Just like our previous effort, all this was done with a little planning, tape, paper and teamwork.

In addition to being a hit with employees, each of these giant murals earned media engagement from local broadcast, business press and tech blogs.

I also was privliedged to lead employee engagement efforts around National Bike to Work Day, and coordinated the promotion not just with HQ staff, but also with partners at global Expedia locations. The story can be explore using the #LifeAtExpedia hashtag.

Each Spring and Fall BECU hosts a free shred event when we destroy sensitive financial documents for our members at various locations across Washington. In order to build on the success of this wildly popular event, I partnered with the project leads and developed a humorous Shred Event video inspired by 1980 monster truck commercials. We then used a combination of paid and organic social marketing, direct-to-member emails and Web promotion to ensure our three Puget Sound locations were taken advantage of by our members, and that our two new Spokane-area shred locations were successfully launched.

The results? We shredded our past records. 

* 172,000 lbs of documents shredded (vs. previous record of 115K)

* 47,100 lbs e-cycled (vs. previous record of 35,545)

* 4,343lbs food items donated (vs. previous record of 2,017lbs)

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Through paid, earned and owned tactics like hosting scavenger hunts, Pinterest contests, and directing live Q&As with athletes, I was able to grow the global social following of Brooks Running Company, the #1 U.S. performance running brand, from 20k to 400k in 24 months. To track this progress, I worked with our creative team to install a giant gummy bear-filled meter in our lunchroom with every bear equating to seven real @brooksrunning social followers. This not only was a fun visual to enjoy at lunch, but the meter also served to rally all employees together on the mission to connect deeper with our runners and retailers.

Brooks Smile Machine Photo Booth and Facebook App

I developed a photo booth experience and Facebook application that allowed visitors to easily tag themselves on the social platform. By connected the physical, real-world visit, with an online experience, this product introduced Brooks to tens of thousands of runners and friends of runners who were not able to visit our expo booth in person.

#RunHappyIs Meme Generator and Digital Display

To inspire our customers to share their story and define what Run Happy—Brooks slogan, means to them, I developed a digital display fed with content sourced from our community. The Run Happy Is digital display was a core component of the Brooks race expo booth. The massive display supports both portrait and landscape orientation, allows staff to curate the content that is displayed and prompts members automatically to immortalize their tweet in a custom meme generator. Runners just tweeted to @brooksrunning and answered "RunHappyIs..." The customer then got a response with a link pointing them to our Web interface, pre-formatted with their copy. The runner could then share out the graphic, or just submit it for consideration for our Run Happy Is expo display.

Since first getting involved with Web development in 2001, I've gone on to work with a variety of content management systems, including at the code and development level including Drupal, Plone and Wordpress. I also have experience standing up a website on the SiteCore and SquareSpace platforms. 

Launched Self-Hosted Blog

Shortly after joining Brooks, I transformed an under-performing blog into a key storytelling tool. Using leading open source software, I built a new platform, migrated the existing content off of a high-cost service, and relaunched using an SEO-friendly design. The results include increased organic monthly referral traffic by over 400% and a decrease in costs by 2/3. Best of all, we now had a new tool for telling deeper stories about key product launches.

To drive excitement for the launch of the PureProject line of footwear, I organized a 14-city, 14-day in-person and online scavenger hunt that drove interest all the way to product launch date. We tweeted hints as to the location our staff would be hiding in each city and saw customers drive, run and lunge to collect prizes from Brooks employees. Our fastest location, Manhattan, saw a winner arrive in just four minutes. The campaign generated 1.8MM organic social impressions 6,200 likes, retweets and comments.

In addition to the in-person component, our fan photo contest inspired amazing and creative submissions.

Hosted on YouTube and published pre-launch, this video series gave runners an inside view on who designed the products and what inspired the new PureProject line, We cut up a shoe with a band saw, showed the very room where the first designs were drafted and hosted a Q&A with customer service team.