comScore, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the ComScore second quarter 2021 financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's 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. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, John Tinker, you may begin.

Thank you, operator. Before we begin our prepared remarks, I'd like to remind all of you that the following discussion contains four looking statements. These four looking statements include comments about our plan, expectations, and prospects, and are based on our view as of today, August 9, 2021. We disclaim any due to your obligation to update our four looking statements to reflect new information after today's call. We will be discussing non-GAAP and on our website. Actual results in future periods may differ materially from those currently expected because of the 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.secgov. I'll now turn the call over to ComScore's Chief Executive Officer, Bill Levinick. Bill.

Thank you, John, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. With me are Greg Fink, our CFO, and other members of management. For the first half of 2021, it represented a turning point for ComScore as the completion of the recapitalization transaction was a critical milestone for us. With this transaction behind us, we are now able to focus on growing our business and investing in new products That said, I'm proud of the contract signing accomplishments in the quarter. Some of the contract signings have taken longer than anticipated, but we expect that they will produce revenue later this year and into 2022. Before I discuss the quarter, I'd like to share with you the landscape that Comscore is measuring and why we believe we have a world-class platform that measures the way media and the way our clients are demanding it today. We recently ran an op-ed piece in Media Post that discussed this topic in quite a bit of detail. In that op-ed piece, we discussed how ComScore is leading a fundamental change in how media is measured and transacted in the 21st century. We are helping the market move forward with measurement that includes Six critical considerations. First, measurement needs to be passive and impression-based. Impressions are the common language across media inventory. Second, media impressions need to be properly deduplicated so advertisers can measure their true and applied frequency management to their messaging. Modern measurement must be built by a company grounded in technology, research, and big data management. Fourth, we believe modern measurement is about audiences, not age and gender demos. Fifth, modern measurement requires a high focus on privacy. Lastly, and most importantly, we believe that the company needs deep experience in digital, TV, and movie measurement, or it is required today, and ComSport has more than 20 years of modern experience as a technology measurement and research company. Now let me discuss the quarter. We continue to feel some of the effects of the pandemic on some of our products and to our bottom line. However, we are pleased to have a higher amount of total contract value year over year in the quarters. Signing of new and expanded agreements can take time, but we're beginning to see the momentum increase, and we believe these new agreements will generate higher revenue in the coming quarters and expand our margins. With our current operating cost structure in place, we believe our new and expanded client relationships in combination with the strategic data investments And partnerships that we have announced, like Vibram, and our new partnerships, like the Google announcement that we made this morning, which I will discuss shortly, should bear fruit in the second half of 2021 as we transition back to growth. I am also proud of our success in our activation business, where revenue was up 65% year over year. Now let me turn to our other recent successes. Starting with national TV, we signed six new accounts, including Octagon, a sports marketing agency that will be exclusively relying on ComScore measurement to plan and buy, as well as an expanded agreement for Fox for a national TV measurement currency, as we announced last week. This announcement is just like the ViacomCBS announcement, that I discussed in our first quarter earnings call. Local TV measurement continues to be a core strength at Comscore. We believe the scale and the stability of our service puts Comscore in a unique position as the future of measurement in the local marketplace. In the second quarter, we executed agreements with Capital Broadcasting and Titan TV and signed renewals with leading companies, such as Standard Media Group, and the News Post Gazette. Additionally, our marketplace prominence was further enhanced with the integration into squad media cost research platform for national and local TV buys. Looking to the future, we anticipate building that cost for TV, 1,000 stations, and delivering strong results across our 200-plus markets that we measure locally. Lastly, Spectrum Reach recently announced that it is now transitioning to use Comsport as its preferred local measurement source, which we believe will help assign more agencies and media companies to use us to conduct trading for their ad business. We also remain very focused on our agency marketplace. In the second quarter, we continue to see key growth with agency holding companies like Bensu International, who have expanded their use of their advanced audiences tied to ComScore data sets for their quick service restaurant and retail client base. We believe this is a large opportunity and in place of important resources in this area. With our syndicated digital product, we are pleased that we have signed many new customers including Estrella Media, Vision 92, RAP, and Mena Media, along with Channel Factory. We are excited to see more returning clients, such as the Jellyfish Agency in the UK. We are encouraged by the new business and the positive trend in renewals. I am very proud on this call to announce a major accomplishment for our Advertising Business Week. With the expansion of our integration via Google Ad Data Hubs, or what they call ADH, that we announced this morning, this integration will add connected TV impressions across YouTube and YouTube TV to our cross-platform advertising measurement currency. Comscore campaign ratings, or CCR, will be the source. This accomplishment marks two milestones, one for achieving deduplicated audience reach measurement across desktop, mobile, and CTV with Google, and two, the integration will be foundation for the next generation of YouTube measurement across CTV without third-party pixels. These milestones will enable Comscore to provide marketers with unmatched deduplication reach and frequency of audiences, and ad exposure across linear TV, desktops, mobile, and connected TV. The new capability will allow advertisers and agencies to understand co-viewing for YouTube and YouTube TV on CTV, as well as the true incremental reach over their linear TV bots. providing total cross-platform ad measurement. The addition of YouTube and YouTube TV expands ComScore campaign ratings to include coverage of one of the largest advertising destinations, enabling comprehensive cross-platform measurement. CCR measurement, including YouTube and YouTube TV, will be available to our five-site clients for their ad campaigns. I'm excited about the expansion of our cross-platform ad measurement, and we expect it will have an impact on our top line fairly quickly. We continue to drive innovation through our next-generation cookie-free targeting for gaming audiences with our recent partnership expansion with SpikeTrap. This latest expansion leverages SpikeTrap's deep gaming experience and it enables new market segments for advertisers to retain audiences throughout the programmatic ecosystem. We understand there are significant opportunities for expanding our predictive audience measurement beyond North America. This global expansion includes partnerships in Europe and Latin America with AdSquare, and for their European location-based targets, as well as retargetedly for their Latin American audiences. Additionally, ComScore and Commerce Signal, a various financial service business and a leading provider for omni-channel payment for marketers, announced an expansion to begin developing next-generation contextual audiences for ad targeting, ad inventory. The collaboration will pair Commerce Signal's advanced payment analytics with Comscore's predictive audience contextual targeting solutions to create an innovative audience not available anywhere else. By combining Commerce Signal retailing shopping data that can differentiate in-store versus online purchases, With Comscore's media consumption information, advertisers will better be able to understand the high-value audiences in a privacy-compliant way. With all of these new and exciting products and partnerships, we believe the activation revenue should continue its fast-growing trend and pick up even more momentum. As we discussed last quarter, we are also in the early stages of out-of-home measures This year, we've already signed the top three digital out-of-home advertising companies, including an agreement with GSTD to measure video at their gas station network. GSTD is a national video network which delivers target audiences at scale across tens of thousands of fueling retailers. The agreement will build on our last quarter announcements with the Outdoor Advertising Association Given wins from the last quarter with Lightbox and in the third quarter with Captivate, and additionally with one of the largest nation's retailers, we expect this new product offering to generate revenue later this year with momentum building into next year. With respect to movies, we experienced a rebound in revenue as U.S. theaters reopened at scale, while countries such as the U.K., Ireland, and France reopened in the middle of the second quarter. The movie industry is now firmly positioning itself in a recovery mode, and we expect box office revenue to return to pre-pandemic levels over the next year. Over the last few weeks, we have expanded our relationships with multi-year deals with two major studios who are both leaders in theatrical and streaming we continue to focus on measuring OCD consumption wherever it occurs. These agreements, in combination with recent box office numbers, are giving us confidence the industry is healing. As such, we expect tailwinds in the future quarters. As you have heard, we are encouraged by the results we're seeing in customer acquisitions and contract closings and are confident The second half of 2021 will serve as runway for our evolution into the best modern measurement service for the future of media. Before we discuss our financials in greater detail, I'd like to address the recently announced planned departure of our Chief Financial Officer, Greg Fink. First and foremost, I want to extend my deepest gratitude to Greg for his many contributions and his leadership during the time at Comscore. Greg came to Comscore during the most difficult period, and he played a most critical role in putting those challenges behind the company, helping to rebuild our controls and our processes. Greg aligned our cost structure, he implemented a new ERP system, and he put us onto a path of growth. On behalf of everyone at Comscore including the entire management team, our board of directors, and myself. I want to thank Greg for all of his hard work and wish him well on this next endeavor. With that said, I'd like to turn the call over to Greg to review our financial details.