Peter Micelli’s New Management Company Sets Sights On Top-Tier Talent, Building ‘Celebrity Companies’

After top agents at CAA, WME and UTA have made an exodus to a new management venture backed by former CAA veteran Peter Micelli, Micelli’s company is making its pitch as a way to shake up the talent industry and the way representation is done by giving the top 1% of celebrities the company’s full attention.

In a sales deck obtained by TheWrap for the unnamed venture (the deck lists the company as Moxie Media, but that name has changed), the company sees opportunity in building celebrity companies in the vein of Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine that have been able to produce content but also have a clearly defined voice capturing Witherspoon’s personal brand and have been able to branch out into areas of lifestyle and beyond.

The 20-page deck takes aim at the legacy agencies by saying that “equity value is in free fall,” and they’ve become so large that agents don’t have time to devote attention to their biggest earners because of “bloated client lists.”

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“All the principals of Moxie Media are higher-level and more established in the business than when Mike Ovitz & Ron Meyer formed
CAA or when Ari Emmanuel & Tom Stickler formed Endeavor,” the deck reads. “The agency’s equity value is in free fall, there has never been a better time to recruit high-end representatives away from their current incumbent. We have never seen more high-end representatives ready to leave these institutions.”

The venture would put a cap on the number of clients per representative and offer “Tiffany-Level Representation” to instill the value of diversifying the celebrity’s business model. Micelli’s venture would raise third party capital of anywhere to $5-7 million per celebrity company, then the venture would take a 1/3 ownership, the celebrity would retain another third, and a third party investor would take the remaining third. Investors in Moxie (or whatever the name becomes) will have the right of first refusal to invest in each celebrity company.

The deck highlights the opportunity to attract literary agents amid the rift between the WGA and the agencies. It also points to attracting athlete talent like Serena Williams, LeBron James and Megan Rapinoe as tastemakers and influencers beyond just their athletic celebrity, and it aims to target the opportunity generated by the need of massive media empires to find celebrities to curate content.

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We will focus our celebrity companies on creating opportunities that are synergistic with the massive media empires of today,” the pitch reads. “Specificity will replace the legacy studios and celebrity companies will be the biggest growth opportunity over the next 10 years. Media Empires will need help with curation and premium content. We are designing Moxie Media to fill that need.”

The company will also offer in-house production services that will generate revenue doing individual TV series or films and can generate revenue by offering those services to the celebrity companies.

But above all the goal is to “re-define the relationship between brands and entertainment,” with brands partnering with the venture across multiple verticals, offering brand partnership as a service to distributors or even having specific brand-supported verticals.

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“For example, Nike would participate in a Sports vertical, acting as co-financier of development, collaborator during development and production, and a promotional partner during distribution,” the deck explains, citing examples like Nike for Sport or Beats for Music.

Celebrities, it says are the new Mad Men, and one of the four tenants of Micelli’s venture would be to turn celebrity engagement into “direct to consumer opportunities in a post-COVID-19 world.”

THR first reported the news.

Umberto Gonzalez contributed to this report.

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