comScore, Inc.

Welcome to ComScore's fourth quarter and full year 2020 financial results conference call. At this time, all participant lines are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded, and if you require any further assistance, please press star 0. Now it's my pleasure to turn the call over to your host for today, Ms. Jackie Marcus.

Thank you, Victor. Before we begin our prepared remarks, I'd like to remind all of you that the following discussion contains forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include comments about our plans, expectations, and prospects, and are based on our view as of today, March 10th, 2021. We disclaim any duty or obligation to update our forward-looking statements to reflect new information after today's call. We will be discussing non-GAAP measures during this call, for which we have provided reconciliations in today's press release and on our website. Our actual results in future periods may differ materially from those currently expected because of a number of risks and uncertainties, including those related to the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic impact. These risks and uncertainties include those outlined in our 10-K, 10-Q, and other filings with the SEC which you can find on our website or at www.sec.gov. I will now turn the call over to Comscore's Chief Executive Officer, Bill Livick. Bill?

Thank you, Jackie, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Yesterday, our stockholders approved the strategic transaction we announced on January 7th, and we expect it to close today. The completion of the transaction represents an important milestone for us. Together with our new strategic investors, Charter, Curate, and Cerberus, we will substantially eliminate our outstanding debt and provide us the financial flexibility to invest in the next generation products, enhance our existing core products, and capitalize on market trends, as the shift to audiences and impression-based measurement is happening. Simply said, measuring wherever an ad is placed and wherever content is consumed with a high degree of precision. That's what our clients want and expect from Comscore. We are focused and excited about our ability to grow revenue with our new strategic partners as we are coming out of the pandemic. As we officially bring 2020 to a close, I want to thank our outstanding employees who've continued to be dedicated, resourceful, and successful throughout the last year. I appreciate their efforts, and I'm proud to be representing them on the call today. Our business, particularly in movie and custom solutions, continued to be impacted by the pandemic in the fourth quarter. We believe that custom solutions will return to growth in 2021 given the advertising recovery that we are now seeing this year and our expanded rights from our strategic partner. We will start to grow our movie business again as large studios sign up for our Movie Everywhere measurement service that we've been demonstrating to them and as movie theaters continue to reopen. We have seen positive signs across many of our business lines. Our local, our national, and our international connected TV business continues to perform well. We're gaining momentum with advertising agency clients who are increasingly embracing our advanced audience metrics and rallying around our local market currency because of our innovation and our precision. We expect our TV business to grow this year with the inclusion of Comcast de-identified set-top box information and our expanded data rights with Charter and our expanded rights with connected TVs. We continue to see our core digital services stabilizing in the United States, which has been building on the trend established over the last year with large enterprise-wide clients, while our international digital services, which represents about 25% of our syndicated digital services, was harder hit by the effects of COVID. We believe our digital services can resume growth later this year. Despite those challenges, I'm pleased to say that in the fourth quarter, we generated $9.4 million in adjusted EBITDA, For 2020, we have recognized a more than $25 million increase in adjusted EBITDA compared with 2019, demonstrating that we are well positioned for even a stronger EBITDA performance as revenue rebounds. Greg will cover the details later in our financial section of the call. As I have said before, we are an inflection point in media and advertising. As the pandemic accelerated the velocity of the change in the media landscape, impressions, not just gross rating points, are starting to be used more rapidly to evaluate the success by planners, sellers, and buyers, regardless of where content and advertising are viewed and consumed by customers. Because of our census measurement, we believe, and many of our clients tell us, that we are positioned to be a leader. I would like to spend a few minutes talking about the cookie list world. We are in a strong position to take advantage of this opportunity. One area that we're uniquely positioned is activation. The combination of Comscore panels and our expansive web crawling positions us well to meet market needs as activation moves away from audience created by third-party cookies. Comscore's predictive audience solution provides a tool for reaching granular audiences through privacy-friendly contextual signals. We are the only solution to be able to offer this at scale across multiple providers. An example of companies taking advantage of this capability was the recent announcement regarding TransUnion, IHS Automotive, and PlaceIQ, who are leveraging Comscore's predictive audiences. Comscore strongly supports the privacy-safe measurement, and we have been preparing our syndicated digital measurement solutions for this new world for some time. building systems that will be interoperative with industry solutions like the WFA, known better as the World Federation of Advertisers. We have been preparing incremental services on top of them to provide clients with the best available measurement solutions. We're also building alternative solutions for publishers who want measurement outside of the WFA framework. and to support measurement from the largest sites to the smallest, leveraging extensive online panel assets and many kinds of census information. We are uniquely positioned to offer measurement in this evolving privacy-focused world. On the national television front, we're excited about the new opportunities presented by the addition of Comcast De-Identified, de-identified data sets. We're expanding the number of highly targeted networks reported in our national measurement service. These additions have proved to be valuable as we signed two network deals in the first 50 days of 2021. Additionally, we reinvented our branded content business by entering a new partnership with leading enterprise AI solutions provider, Hive. This partnership allows us to move away from a highly customized solution to a syndicated, scalable solution that is based on Comscore's TV ratings and planning services and new data sets generated using Hive's AI. Last quarter, I mentioned that we began to expand our connected TV measurement footprint. We are squarely positioned to take advantage of the opportunity with the connected TV marketplace. Currently, with the agreements in place with both InScape and Samba that spans the U.S. and international markets, we have one of the largest connected TV footprints being used to provide analytics and insights into brands, agencies, and sell-side customers. Our launch of the international connected TV measurement began in European markets and expanded in the fourth quarter to Australia. We will continue to evaluate expanding the footprint in 2021 into new markets. Connected TV information is important, but it is the combination of CTV information integrated with our full census media footprint that includes Linear TV, digital, OTT, video on demand, addressable in other media that contains the real power of unduplicated reach and frequency for planning and buying. This is where Comscore is in a unique position because of our close relationship with the MVPDs and our patents. We saw an increase in the fourth quarter for our activation products. We continue to be focused on Comscore's Connected TV contextual activated solutions for both on-demand and live streaming. These solutions go beyond brand safety and allow our clients to increase their monetization through enhanced direct sales, open exchange programmatic sales, in this cookie-free environment. We are excited about these solutions and believe they will significantly increase our activation revenue in 2021. Our live grant partnership is generating revenue, and the volume has been performing above our initial expectations. This includes the fourth quarter launch of our next-generation outcome-based measurement Data Plus Math, powered by Comscore, which I described in detail last November. Our initial clients are seeing the benefits of this service, and they're now seeing the results of their campaigns in Data Plus Math, powered by Comscore. I'd like to take just a moment to talk about our movie business. This business continues to be impacted by theater closures, But we expect to see a rebound later in 2021, now that theaters are reopening in bigger cities in New York and in California. We continue to see encouraging signs of the global recovery. China, which is now the number one global market for movies, delivered the highest-grossing box office weekend on record during the Chinese New Year celebrations. This record was even more impressive when you consider that much of the country is still operating under audience capacity restrictions. I'm confident the industry is evolving toward our strength of measuring all screens. We are the leader in box office measurement, and we believe the business can return to prior levels and beyond as the pandemic ends. Comscore is uniquely positioned to combine information, in analytical, physical, out-of-home theater, or in their home. Finally, I'd like to note recent successes with our customer renewals and wins across our product suite. In the fourth quarter, we secured new syndicated digital business with Texas Monthly, Pocket Outdoor, Team Liquid, and Adzu, and secured renewals from Hearst, Reader's Digest Canada, Trusted Media Brands, and Magnite, as well as securing renewals with four Fortune 500 technology companies. On the TV front, I mentioned that we had strong support in our agency vertical, where we expanded a longstanding relationship with Bensu Media to incorporate Comscore's local television audience and impression-based solutions in local markets. and secured an exclusive local television currency agreement with the Moran Group for 20 local markets and Strong Automotive across 20 markets. Based on this agency's success, we secured renewals with 10 of our key station groups, including an expansion with Gray Television, which we now support 87 of their 94 markets. In summary, Despite a unique environment that everyone had to deal with in 2020, we are proud of our accomplishments given the challenges that we faced. Closing out the year with another solid quarter of customer wins and renewals, we are excited for 2021, and we will work closely with our partners and our investors to bring new revenue-generating products to market from new commercial agreements. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Greg Fink. Greg?