Organizational Hierarchies

WARNING

While the ability to establish company hierarchies between Buyer parties is articulated within the model design, the ability to mark parties as such within the DMO app has not yet been enabled. This section articulates how this would be done once that capability has been enabled.

Buying parties range from individuals to multinational corporations with a presence across the world. The DMO does not seek to reproduce every detail about a large buyer organization’s corporate structure within Auth Data. Instead, only the necessary information required to conduct business is captured.
See details below for how the DMO handles various corporate structures:

Subsidiaries

A subsidiary is a company that is owned or controlled by another company, known as the parent company or holding company. Large buying organizations may consist of a collection of wholly or partially owned subsidiaries. For example, the City Winery LLC is the parent company for each of their regional venues (Boston, Chicago, Nashville, Philadelphia, etc) which are legal buyers individually.

Within Auth Data, each of the subsidiaries are listed as individually distinct buyers. Each of these buyers would then be linked to a parent organization to indicate that they are subsidiaries of a larger organization.

Multi-level Corporate Structures

It is not uncommon for large buying organizations to have multi-level organizational structures. This could be accomplished by placing subsidiaries within holding companies (and potentially place those holding companies within others) which are then owned by the larger parent organization.

In Auth Data, we do not seek to capture the full and multi-level corporate structure/hierarchy of any individual buying organization. As an example of the potential complexities of potentially reproducing an outside party's corporate structure, see Live Nation's extensive list of subsidiaries and holding companies.

Large-scale Buyer organizations may have operations across the globe with separate legal subsidiaries focused on different parts of their global business. See example above: The corporate buyer may have operations in booking, venue ownership and event production across multiple regions, with each representing legally registered companies. In addition, holding companies compiling parts groups of their businesses may exist along with entities create explicitly for tax optimization. Much of this ownership, especially with private subsidiaries, is not publicly disclosed in any registry or financial documentation.

To avoid complications of tracking this and focus on the information that is relevant to UTA, we instead flatten the structure and link all of the buyer children to a single parent buyer.

Buyers with International Offices

Buying organizations may operate offices in multiple countries. Individual countries require businesses to be registered in that country in order to conduct business within their borders. Within Auth Data, each foreign entity is recorded as a distinct buyer. The DMO then connects the foreign entities to a parent buyer that represents the main global entity.

For example, Ticketek Entertainment Group (TEG) operates TEG Live Europe Limited in the UK and TEG Dainty Pty Ltd in Australia. The UK and Australia entities would be children of the main TEG party.

Buyers with Regional Domestic Offices

Within a country, a Buyer organization may operate one or more regional offices in different geographies. In the context of Auth Data, regional offices are not distinct buyers. Regional offices are allowed to operate in states outside of the Buyer’s state of incorporation because they register there as a foreign entity in that state.

For regional offices, the DMO will add addresses (of type “RegionalOffice”) for each regional office to the main Buyer profile.

Note that some regional offices may be subsidiaries of the parent Buyer and not a regional office. This could be the case when a regional office was once an independent company that was subsequently acquired by the parent. If the regional office maintained their business registration, then the DMO would add the regional office as a distinct Buyer and connect it to the profile of the parent Buyer.

Buyers with Separate Buying Departments/Brands

Large Buyer organizations may have separate departments or brands that book only certain types of clients, such as separate departments for live music and comedy. These departments may exist in the same or different offices.

The DMO will treat these departments similar to regional offices. Specifically, if the department is its own distinct legal entity, it will be logged as a distinct buyer. Otherwise, it will be treated as an additional address to the main Buyer profile.

Joint Ventures

Buyer organizations may create joint ventures with other buying organizations to address new markets or opportunities. They may also take large investment stakes in other buying organizations, creating shared ownership of a buying organization.

Because ownership stakes can fluctuate and not be made available to the public, we only connect child buyers to parents when the child is a wholly owned and publicly declared subsidiary of a parent buyer.

For example, Live Nation Entertainment, Inc. acquired a 51% stake (later increased to 75%) in OCESA Promotora de Eventos S de RL de CV ("OCESA"). As OCESA is not a wholly owned subsidiary of Live Nation, we would not mark Live Nation as a parent buyer. OCESA would simply be listed as an independent buyer within Auth Data.

While it may be possible that Live Nation has enough of a controlling stake in OCESA to dictate operations, in the context of Auth Data we do not want to put ourselves in a position where we are tracking the investments of Buyer parties as this information is often not available or relevant to the data UTA needs to conduct business.