Sourcing and Validation
Buyer Lists
The DMO seeds potential Buyers from multiple sources, including from the ServiceNow Buyer create form and from lists of Buyers migrated from uTour.
Buyer creation/modification form
Frontline teams can submit new Buyer creation/edit requests to the DMO through ServiceNow tickets. Teams are required to include buyer organization/names and address. This information provides the DMO team a starting point for sourcing buyer information.
Ambiguous Requests
The DMO will make a best effort to identify and validate Buyer information submitted through the Buyer request form. For requests where the Buyer cannot be confidently identified, it is the policy of the DMO to first reach out to the requesting party either through email or slack for more information before closing a ticket without action.
Under no case will the DMO log partial, incomplete, or unvalidated information into Auth Data related to requests with ambiguous or nebulous information.
uTour Buyer Migration spreadsheet
The DMO team has populated Buyers into Auth Data using a manually curated list of Buyers originating from uTour. Buyers on this list were validated and de-duped through a case-by-case investigation of each proposed Buyer.
Buyer Validation
The DMO validates any new Buyer into Auth Data based on the information that lies within the official business registration information databases for the state, province, or country where the business is registered.
Business Registry List & Restrictions
Below is a list of generally accessible business registry search websites for states in the US:
- Alaska (AK)
- Arizona (AZ)
- Arkansas (AR)
- California (CA)
- Colorado (CO)
- Delaware (DE)
- Florida (FL)
- Hawaii (HI)
- Idaho (ID)
- Iowa (IA)
- Kansas (KS)
- Kentucky (KY)
- Louisiana (LA)
- Maine (ME)
- Massachusetts (MA)
- Michigan (MI)
- Minnesota (MN)
- Mississippi (MS)
- Montana (MT)
- Nevada (NV)
- New York (NY)
- North Carolina (NC)
- Ohio (OH)
- Oklahoma (OK)
- Oregon (OR)
- Pennsylvania (PA)
- Rhode Island (RI)
- South Dakota (SD)
- Tennessee (TN)
- Texas (TX)
- Vermont (VT)
- Washington (WA)
- West Virginia (WV)
- Wyoming (WY)
Below is a list of regionally restricted business registry search websites for states in the US:
- Alabama (AL)
- Connecticut (CT)
- Georgia (GA)
- Illinois (IL)
- Indiana (IN)
- Maryland (MD)
- Missouri (MO)
- Nebraska (NE)
- New Hampshire (NH)
- New Jersey (NJ)
- New Mexico (NM)
- North Dakota (ND)
- South Carolina (SC)
- Utah (UT)
- Virginia (VA)
- Wisconsin (WI)
DMO members based outside the US require a VPN service to access regionally restricted business registries. The websites will have varying levels of security, so using a less popular server or a dedicated IP is recommended. Proton VPN has been tested and is able to access all of these websites.
The District of Columbia (DC) website is not regionally restricted.
Below are business registry search websites frequently used by the DMO:
Other Validation Resources
Absent the locality of the Buyer’s business registration, the DMO will use search engines and AI tools to identify in which state or country registry to find the Buyer’s official business information.
Sample AI prompts used to source Buyer data include:
- What is the legal business name of [trade name]?
- Where is [business name] registered?
- What is the business registration information for [trade name/business name]?
- Who owns [trade name]?
- What company is registered at [address]?
- What business operates under the trade name [trade name]?
Once the locality has been identified, the DMO will search within the relevant database to obtain the necessary business registration information.
Connecting with uTour
To maintain connection between UTA’s different systems, each Buyer within Auth Data must be linked to their corresponding entry in uTour. This is done by adding an ExternalRecord of type uTourId to the Buyer.
If no entry exists in uTour, the DMO will create a new Buyer profile in uTour and link it to the Auth Data instance of that buyer.
Undeterminable business information
The DMO will make a reasonable effort to accurately identify Buyers from uTour and migrate them into Auth Data. However, there are many reasons an entity in uTour will not be migrated, most commonly from lack of information that prevents the DMO from identifying the Buyer with certainty.
Individuals that cannot be validated
Individuals lacking identifiable contact information cannot be migrated into Auth Data with reasonable certainty. The key problem is the difficulty in disambiguating one person from another with the same name. In these cases, the DMO will not migrate that uTour entity into Auth Data.
Trade names or legal names that cannot be validated
Buyers using trade names that cannot be validated within a business registry will not be migrated into Auth Data.
Venues as Buyers
Within uTour, venue and buyer entity types can both be listed as Buyers within a deal. In the case where a uTour venue acts as a Buyer, the DMO will use the legal business name of the venue’s operating entity as the buying party in Auth Data. The DMO will link the Buyer to the uTour ID of the venue, even though the Auth Data instance of the venue will also link back to the same uTour ID.
Multiple buyers listed as one
Deals in uTour can be structured such that multiple Buyers are added to a deal contract. This can be done by creating a new uTour Buyer entity named as a combination of all the Buyers involved in the deal. For example, a uTour Buyer would be created for “The Complex Live & Dead Nation Presents” instead of creating separate contracts for The Complex Live and Dead Nation Presents. Multiple Buyers can also be listed as an OBO (“On Behalf Of”) entry such as “Mojo Concerts obo MESSA S.A.”.
In these cases, the DMO will not create an Auth Data party that is the combination of the buyers. If each Buyer exists individually in Auth Data, the DMO will not link the uTour entity to any of the individual Buyers. The joint uTour entity will remain unlinked to any party in Auth Data.