Creative Artists Agency

Creative Artists Agency, LLC (CAA) is an American talent and sports agency based in Los Angeles, California.

In September 2023, French billionaire François-Henri Pinault completed the acquisition of a majority stake in CAA, in an agreement valued at 7 billion dollars. The purchase was made through his investment company, Groupe Artémis.

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 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.