Creative Artists Agency is doubling down on the hospitality business.
The Hollywood agency has acquired two corporate hospitality firms, Beyond Sports & Entertainment and Goviva, and is rolling them up with its existing practice to form a high-end hospitality, events and experience division called CAA Premium Experience.
CAA will merge BSE and Goviva with Inside Sports & Entertainment Group, a corporate hospitality firm that CAA acquired last year, and the three companies will operate as one under the new name. Financial details of the transactions were not disclosed.
CAA Premium Experience will be led by CAA Sports co-heads Michael Levine and Howard Nuchow.
“The combination of these three companies, coming together with our agency, puts us in a position to reshape the corporate hospitality and VIP events business globally,” Levine said. “The customer list of all three of these companies is broad and vast. The sweet spot is large corporations that are using passion points within popular culture to create unique experiences for either employees or existing or potential customers.”
The combination will form a division of more than 50 employees with experience working with hundreds of companies and global sports and entertainment events. All three firms are based in New York, and CAA is actively seeking office space in Manhattan to house CAA Premium Experience.
Corporate hospitality has evolved and become more sophisticated to include the creation of full-service, premium travel and hospitality experiences. In recent years, top corporate hospitality firms have created events featuring athletes and celebrities for corporations and high-net-worth individuals. With all those factors, the hospitality space is seen as high-volume business with good margins, when done effectively. CAA’s own Inside SEG recently created a private concert featuring CAA client Katy Perry for a global technology company’s client event.
BSE, Goviva and Inside SEG formerly were competitors in the space, working with such global companies as Barclays, UBS, American Express, SAP and Brown-Forman.
BSE specializes in sports VIP experience packages, special events, ticket concierge services and personal appearances, and was founded in 2007 by Ari Strulson, Kyle Olson and Jason Marshall.
Goviva has some of the same capabilities, but in addition to sports, the company specializes in creating entertainment, culinary and fashion experiences featuring celebrities. It was founded in 2011 by Robert Tuchman, Will Steinberg and Brett Sklar.
Tuchman is a veteran in hospitality. Before founding Goviva, he started TSE Sports & Entertainment and sold it to private equity firm Pfingsten Partners.
CAA is a relative newcomer to the corporate hospitality business, as in February 2014 it acquired Inside SEG. Since then it has been eyeing ways to build it out, Levine said. CAA talked to about half a dozen companies before striking the deals to buy BSE and Goviva, Levine said.
Levine noted the growth of Inside SEG exceeded the agency’s expectations. “Our satisfaction with that business led us to be more confident and motivated us to do these next two deals,” he said.
All the founders of BSE and Goviva will work with Inside SEG founders Alan Baum and Ety Rybak as part of CAA Premium Experience.
“We had a strategic plan to grow the business, and one of the ways was to find the right people,” Baum said. “We looked around the industry and looked at our competitors and people we liked. Beyond Sports & Entertainment and Goviva were huge competitors of ours, but were also respected in the industry, people that we got along with.”
Although the companies overlap in capabilities and customers in some areas, each brings something new to the table.
BSE has developed a technology where it can locate tickets to sporting events for corporate customers in minutes. Goviva has excelled in creating its own events beyond sports, involving celebrities such as chefs and musical acts.
The combination with CAA, which represents more than 1,000 athletes, as well as entertainers and chefs, will be helpful in creating new events, as well as bringing business to CAA’s talent clients, Tuchman said.
Corporate hospitality is a fragmented business, with hundreds of operators specializing in different aspects, such as individual ticket sales or event creation, around the world.
“If you look at major competitors, there is probably only a handful, but they are in different areas,” Tuchman said. “So you might have a competitor who is very good with sports packages. There might be a competitor who does stuff like we do on the talent side with experiences and events.”
The business is expected to enhance CAA’s other business lines, include corporate consulting and property sales. Many sports teams now employ corporate hospitality executives and it is increasingly becoming a component in sponsorships.
“If you look at sponsor deals and other deals, a huge part of it is corporate hospitality,” Tuchman said. “CAA is extremely smart in seeing this trend.”
