Oak View Group, IAG Ink Branding Partnership (Exclusive)

Oak View Group and Independent Artist Group have entered a new partnership intended to create more branding opportunities for the agency’s music roster, the companies tell The Hollywood Reporter. Oak View Group is one of the largest venue management companies in the live events industry, with a portfolio that includes Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena, The University of Texas’s Moody Center and New York’s UBS Arena among others, while IAG has a roster of heavy hitters that includes the likes of Metallica, Neil Young, the Smashing Pumpkins and Deadmau5. IAG is looking to leverage Oak View’s long-established relationships with brands the agency doesn’t have, while OVG sees a wide list of marketable acts it can pitch beyond sports. “The majority of the content we house at our venues is non-sports-related, it’s music, but when you look at the concert tours themselves and talk to the manager, talk to promoters, a common theme is that brands don’t know how to spend money in this space,” Oak View Group president of global partnerships Dan Griffis says. “We’ve been driving the bus on sports sides for a very long time, building out a successful agency when it comes to selling naming rights deals, jersey patches, all sorts of sports sponsorships, but we’ve never leaned into music the same way, and we thought IAG felt like a great place to start.” This is the first brand partnership OVG has established with one of the booking agencies. As for the types of brand deals Griffis expects to sell, he didn’t give specifics but did say he expects experiential partnerships to be a focus. Jarred Arfa, IAG’S EVP and head of global music, says the partnership started this year as a more typical conversation about artist booking but expanded into a broader discussion on OVG’s brand partnerships reach. While IAG and all the other major booking agencies have in-house branding departments, Arfa says “a lot of those deals are around commercials and bigger initiatives, not local market thinking of who can be a tour sponsor on each date.” “We work with OVG so much already, it just makes a lot of sense,” Arfa says. “They could have 10 or 15 brand partners per venue. So just on that scale alone, it’s an advantage for our agency. Our brand team can focus on bigger picture stuff, and the more man power we have and the more we can do, I look at as the better even if it’s from an external source. It’s to the betterment of our artists.” OVG will operate on commission for the partnerships the company brings to IAG’s roster, the companies said. As for if OVG would be looking to establish more partnerships of this sort soon, Griffis didn’t give a definitive answer but said that “we’ve had a significant amount of success not over-extending ourselves and not representing too many similar things at the same time.”