iHeartMedia, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to iHeartMedia's first quarter 2026 earnings call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's remarks, we will have a question and answer session. To ask a question at this time, please press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Andre Hart, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you for taking the time to join us for our first quarter 2026 earnings call. Joining me for today's discussion are Bot Bittman, our chairman and CEO, Rich Bressler, our president and COO, and Mike McGinnis, our CFO. At the conclusion of our prepared remarks, management will take your questions. In addition to our press release, we have an earnings presentation available on our website that you can use to follow along with our remarks. Please note that this call may include forward-looking statements regarding our financial performance and operating results. These statements are based on management's current expectations, and actual results could differ from what is stated as a result of certain factors identified on today's call and in the company's SEC filings, including our recent 8 filing. Additionally, during this call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures are included in our earnings release, earnings presentation, and our SEC filings, which are available in the investor relations section of our website. And now, I'll turn the call over to Bob.

Thanks, Andre, and good afternoon, everyone. In the first quarter, our consolidated revenue was $884 million, up 9.6% compared to the prior year quarter and in line with our guidance of up high single digits. Excluding the impact of political, our consolidated revenue was up 9.3%. We generated adjusted EBITDA of $93 million in the first quarter, slightly below our previously provided guidance of approximately $100 million compared to $105 million in the prior year. The timing of the non-cash marketing expenses that we discussed in the last few earnings calls drove the majority of our slight underperformance relative to our EBITDA guidance as we recognized more of this non-cash expense in the period than previously anticipated due to timing of some of our partnership campaigns. This was also driven, in part, by our March advertising revenues coming in a little lower than anticipated, and we believe this correlated with advertiser and consumer uncertainty resulting from the impact of current macroeconomic issues. Before I go into the details of this quarter's results, today we're announcing a new cost reduction initiative that will generate an additional $50 million of annualized savings, which we will begin realizing in the second half of the year. As a reminder, this is in addition to the $100 million of in-year 2026 savings that we have previously announced. As you know, we continually reevaluate our organizational structure, flatten layers of management, and push the adoption of new technologies and tools, including AI, to improve our operating efficiency, and this latest announcement is further evidence of that commitment. I also want to add, as a result of the implementation of changes to the tax code, we expect our cash taxes for 2026 to be effectively eliminated, and for the next few years, as long as the current tax laws remain in effect. This will materially improve our free cash flow generation moving forward. Rich will speak to all of this in a bit more detail, and now I'd like to turn to our individual operating segments. The Digital Audio Group generated first quarter revenues of $327 million, up 18% versus prior year, and slightly ahead of our previously provided guidance of up mid-teens. Within the digital audio group, our podcast revenue momentum continues and was $147 million for the quarter, up 26.9% compared to prior year of $116 million, above our guidance of up low 20s. And approximately 50% of our podcasting revenue was generated by our local sales force. Our podcasting EBITDA margins remain accretive to our total company EBITDA margins, which we achieve by applying rigorous financial discipline, and we believe we have the most profitable podcasting business in the United States. In fact, we're the number one podcast publisher as measured by both PodTrack and Triton, and we're also the podcasting industry's number one podcast sales network. And one more thing to note, a major key to our success in building our podcast business has been our broadcast radio assets. If Netflix is, in essence, TV on demand, then podcasting is radio on demand. And as the number one radio company in America, that gives us a great advantage. In the first quarter, digital ex-podcast revenue grew 11.6% compared to prior year. The Digital Audio Group generated first quarter adjusted EBITDA of $87 million, flat to prior year. The Digital Audio Group's adjusted EBITDA margins were 26.5%, and as a reminder, Q1 margins are always the lowest of the year, and we expect to see DAG's full year adjusted EBITDA margins in the mid-30s as they were for the full year 2025. Turning now to the Multi-Platform Group, which includes our broadcast radio, networks, and events businesses. First quarter revenue was $493 million, up 4.3% versus prior year, and slightly below the midpoint of our guidance range of up mid-single digits. Excluding the impact of political advertising, multi-platform group revenue was up 3.9%. The multi-platform groups adjusted EBIT was $47 million compared to $70 million in the prior year. Despite this quarter's multi-platform group adjusted EBITDA performance, we remain confident we can return the multi-platform group to adjusted EBITDA growth during this year. And to reach that goal, in addition to our continuing efforts on cost, we're focused on four major drivers. Number one, programmatic. We have built the ad tech infrastructure and systems to make our broadcast inventory available through programmatic buying platforms. These partnership agreements with Amazon DSP, Yahoo DSP, Google, DV360, and others will enable our broadcast radio inventory to participate alongside our digital inventory in the same growing programmatic TAM. Second, integrated sales. By positioning ourselves as a true marketing partner for our clients and agency partners, we focus on bringing all of our advertising assets to bear. including continuing to bundle broadcast radio with other platforms for the benefit of our advertising partners. Third, increasing share of the broadcast radio TAM. In Q1, we outperformed the radio industry's revenue performance by 5.8 percentage points, according to Miller Kaplan, and we expect this to continue given the unique scale of our audience, our ad tech platforms, and the fact that we have the largest sales force in audio. Fourth, a resilient radio audience. There are more broadcast radio listeners today than there were 20 years ago. And one constant in advertising is that the revenue eventually follows consumer usage. We continue to see our partnerships with companies like Netflix and TikTok as validation of the unique power of our broadcast radio assets. We continue to premiere new music with our TikTok partnership with our broadcast radio. And following on the tremendous success of our Bruno Mars album preview earlier this year, we have nationwide programming campaigns coming up to launch new music by Madonna and Sabrina Carpenter. And if you're looking for further validation of the power of our broadcast radio assets and our radio personalities, out of all the video podcasts that appear on Netflix in the first quarter, of all their podcast views according to Samba TV, and that's our own Breakfast Club with Charlemagne. Why? Because they talk about it on the radio every morning. One more way we're quantitatively proving the value of broadcast radio to advertisers and marketers. And before I turn it over to Rich, I want to give you our view on the current macro environment. Our internal corporate insights group does weekly updates on consumer sentiment to help our on-air talent and programmers stay in touch with the issues that are important to our listeners. This week, one of the studies showed that 61% of U.S. consumers say the economy is getting worse. and 31% list inflation or price of goods as their most important issue, which is the highest since 2022. And we believe this has probably created some softness in what we feel is a reasonably healthy advertising marketplace. And with that, I'll turn it over to Rich.