Last month, JLA Account Director Andrew Stoney flew to North Carolina to represent JLA at this year’s ENGAGE 2025 IASB Convention, his 12th year attending.
I sat down with Andrew to talk through this year’s most important takeaways, and the impact the event has as a whole.
1) Was there a particular theme that stood out to you at ENGAGE 2025?
A key theme that underlined this year’s event was the notion of ‘looking ahead’ – considering how the industry is changing and evolving.
The speaking marketplace is quite crowded at the moment. There are lots of new speakers, which in turn has led to new bureaus and new speaker management organisations. As a result, an important strand to IASB’s 2025 event was looking at how we’ll all work in a more collaborative way across the board, to promote best practice, amplify the benefits of bureaus, reinforce strong relationships with our artists, and uplift the industry as a whole.
Since my first time attending the conference in 2013, the event has grown steadily, with this year being its biggest yet. Notably, there is an increasing diversity of attendee type – beyond just speaker bureaus, there was also a larger presence of speakers, speaker management, and other organisations travelling from all over the world to join.
Against this backdrop, it was announced at this year’s event that the International Association of Speaker Bureaus (IASB) will be renamed in 2026 to the Global Speakers Industry Association (GSIA). It’s a significant shift, and more reflective of the scope of those involved in the field.
2) Any external speakers you saw that you want to spotlight / you’re looking forward to working with now?
One speaker I’d highlight this time around is pianist Felipe Gomez. Felipe drew insights from his experience as a virtuoso performer – reflecting on lessons learned about high performance and achieving excellence through consistency and discipline. This is all set within the context of his emotional connection to his work, and the idea of inspiring through passion – making for a keynote that is both moving and engaging.
Beyond keynotes, there were also a series of concurrent sessions and workshops looking at the use of social media (e.g LinkedIn) and AI in the work we do – critically exploring how we can use these tools to our advantage.
3) How has it been working on the IASB Board of Governors this year?
For the last 12 months, I’ve been on the Board of Governors for IASB. There’s a great group of us from all over the world – we’ve got members from the UK, South America, the US, Canada and beyond.
Working on the board, it’s been really interesting to get different viewpoints on matters relating to the industry, and explore how the association as a group can deal with them in both an effective and united way. We also have the rebrand ahead of us, so we’ll be exploring how best to communicate this change in the years ahead.
I’m very grateful that people have voted for me to take on this role, and have really enjoyed it so far – it’s been a great opportunity to meet key figures within the industry and discuss what matters most in the speaking world.
4) What was your top takeaway from the event?
Across all the years I’ve attended the conference, I’ve always found the opportunity to connect with and learn from others incredibly valuable.
Although we’re all booking talent, whether that’s high-profile business speakers or sector-specific experts, and our ‘end product’ is technically the same, we all go about our work in such different ways. By meeting and speaking with other agents around the world, I’ve been able to pick things up that I wouldn’t have thought to try – whether that’s something people do differently in the US, or in Mexico, or Australia, and so on. Learning from others about how they approach their work means we can elevate what we do and the service we offer to our clients in the UK.
This all links back to the name of the conference, ‘ENGAGE’. Whilst our work revolves around booking keynote speakers that will engage our clients’ audiences, IASB’s convention offers the chance for us to all engage with our own global community – to reinforce our internal connections, learn from and support each other.