Description
Creative Artists Agency LLC (CAA) is an American talent and sports agency based in Los Angeles, California. It is regarded as an influential company in the talent agency business and manages numerous clients. In March 2016, CAA had 1,800 employees.
History
Creative Artists Agency (CAA) was formed by five agents at the William Morris Agency in 1975. At a dinner, Michael Ovitz, Michael S. Rosenfeld, Ronald Meyer, Rowland Perkins, and William Haber decided to create their own agency. The agents were fired by William Morris before they could obtain financing. CAA was incorporated in Delaware and had a $35,000 line of credit and a $21,000 bank loan and rented a small Century City office. Within a week, they sold a game show called Rhyme and Reason, the Rich Little Show, and The Jackson 5ive. An early plan was to form a medium-sized full-service agency, share proceeds equally, and do without nameplates on doors or formal titles or individual client lists, with guidelines like "be a team player" and "return phone calls promptly."
CAA used its writer clients to attract actors to the agency. Ovitz and CAA were the first to package films like TV shows. Representing numerous A-list actors and having about $90 million in annual bookings in the late 1970s, Ovitz led the agency to expand into the film business. By the mid-1990s, CAA had 550 employees, about 1,400 of Hollywood's top talent, and $150 million in revenue. In the 1990s, CAA was owned mostly by several key agents, including Ovitz, Meyer, and Haber.
Ovitz was good at "packaging talent for movies and TV projects" and negotiating large deals between Japanese conglomerates, such as Sony and Matsushita, with Hollywood studios, such as Columbia/TriStar and MCA. Ovitz expanded the agency into advertising and telecommunications. In 1992, the Coca-Cola Company placed CAA in charge of much of its marketing campaign, to work alongside advertising agency McCann Erickson. In 1995, CAA was described as the industry's most powerful agency.
In 1995, Ron Meyer was appointed as the head of MCA, and Ovitz left for Disney. After Ovitz and Meyer left, talent agent Jay Moloney took over the company but struggled with a drug addiction and left the agency soon afterward. After Ovitz, the agency was taken over by Richard Lovett, who was made the president, along with Kevin Huvane, Rob Light, Bryan Lourd, Rick Nicita, and David O'Connor as managing partners.
In 1996, several CAA agents defected to rival agency William Morris Endeavor, taking with them prominent directors and actors. The partners founded the CAA Foundation in 1996 to create positive social change by encouraging volunteerism, partnerships, and donations. In 2012, it worked with Insight Labs for education reform, and contributed to its School Is Not School reform effort.
CAA established CAA Marketing in 1998 to work with brands and clients for promotion purposes. CAA Marketing developed Chipotle's Back to the Start video and created a marketing campaign for the Coca-Cola Company.
In 2003, it opened a New York City office to manage theater clients. CAA began expanding into sports in 2006. From 2005 to 2015, CAA developed greater fiscal discipline, with more emphasis on profits, possibly as the result of the influence of private equity firms. During these years, CAA doubled in size, from 750 to 1,500 employees. In 2010, new technological developments such as the digital distribution of movies put strains on the industry. There was pressure to diversify into television, publishing, concerts, and find other ways to grow. In that year, private equity firm TPG Capital invested $165 million with an additional $200 million in debt financing.
CAA began an expansion into sports in 2006, under the leadership of CEO Richard Lovett. A report in USA Today suggested that CAA's development of its sports-related clientele was significant in 2007. A report in Nexus magazine in 2015 suggested that CAA was well-positioned to develop the E-Sports market. CAA puts together deals for sports stars such as writing their clients into fitness apps.
CAA's agents scrambled to deal with a strike by the Screen Actors Guild in 2008. In 2010, TPG Capital gained a 35% interest in the agency and pledged $500 million for investments. The transaction enabled acquisitions in areas such as sports and overseas operations. It later sold a controlling stake to TPG Capital in October 2014. In 2015, TPG Capital was reported to own 53% of CAA. CAA is co-owner with an investment bank. CAA has diversified into different businesses such as sports marketers and leagues and digital commerce. In 2014, CAA has been undergoing a transformation from relying solely on booking talent, into engineering multimedia deals worldwide. To this end, CAA established CAA Ventures, a venture capital fund that has supported products such as the Whisper app.
The WGA, who in 2019 held a dispute between the top four Hollywood talent agencies (William Morris Endeavor, Creative Artists Agency, United Talent Agency and ICM Partners), on September 30, 2020 asked CAA to sell a majority stake on their Content company wiip for reaching a deal, with CAA accepting their divestment on December 16, 2020 and selling the majority of it to South-Korean studio JTBC.
In September 2021, it was announced that CAA would acquire ICM Partners. The deal closed in June 2022 at a value of $750 million. Following the acquisition, about 425 ICM staffers and agents were to join CAA.
