JLA Account Manager Adam Harkness explains what a speaker bureau gets up to when live events are all called off…
As some of you may have noticed, there is a small problem facing our industry at the moment.
Toilet paper was disappearing from store shelves, flour has become more valuable than gold and the country has come to a standstill. But most importantly of all, all live events have been cancelled! How will the country cope?!
I thought I would talk about some of the many things we’re doing to keep busy:
Speaker Briefings
For some time we have been developing a platform where we can bring big name talent to client events over the marvel that is video streaming. That put us in a fantastic position to get going with streamed speaker events right away. We’ve been running weekly briefings with some of the biggest and best names we know.
So far we’ve been lucky enough to hear from William Hague, Tim Harford, Robert Peston and just yesterday had George Osborne giving us his thoughts on how the current Government has handled the crisis (“surprisingly well”) and the challenges facing the economy in the future (in short, there will be many). Next week it will be Eddie Izzard’s turn which should be great.
Client Forums
One of the few good things to come from all of this is how the industry – and society at large for that matter – have all come together in a way we haven’t seen in a long time.
It’s been great to hear from all our clients and the many agencies we work with about the problems everyone is facing in their own companies, and what they are doing to overcome them.
We’ve been running weekly forums on Zoom to connect our clients with each other, so people can chat about them in an informal setting and come up with some solutions. We’ve not totally figured it out just yet, but if even a few ideas come from it, it will be worthwhile. If you’re up for joining some of these, please email [email protected].
Join us on a client forum!
Social Media
Turns out a country wide lockdown leaves a lot of speakers and entertainers with a fair amount of time on their hands.
Our social media team have been doing an amazing job of reaching out to some friends of JLA and getting them to record messages of motivation and some light relief.
It’s always interesting to see inside people’s houses too, but maybe that’s just me being a nosey wotsit.
Check them out on our social profiles here:
JLA+
And finally, but arguably most importantly, we have been rolling out more “events” via our JLA+ platform than ever before.
If you’ve tuned in to any of our briefings, or indeed run your own event online, you’ll know how surprisingly brilliant they can be and actually gives you a level of interactivity you might not always get at a larger event.
They are also significantly cheaper to run, with no venue hire, travel or equipment costs and also a decent chunk off a speakers usual fee. So I personally think that they are here to stay even once we’ve all been vaccinated.
And again, it’s also quite cool to see inside people’s houses – I think I may have a problem…
Alongside the mountains of admin we’re doing, which nobody wants to hear about, that’s what this speaker bureau been up to!