comScore, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the ComScore fourth 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. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your host for today, John Tinker. Please go ahead.

John Tinker To 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, February 28, 2022. Our actual results in future periods may differ materially from those currently expected because of a number of risks and uncertainties. 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. We disclaim any duty or obligation to update our forward-looking statements to reflect new information after today's calls. We will be discussing non-GAAP measures during this call, for which we have provided reconciliations in today's press releases and on our website. I'd now like to turn the call over to Comscore's Chief Executive Officer, Bill Levick.

Bill. Thank you, John, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. With me are John Carpenter, our Chief Financial Officer, and other members of our management team. I'm proud to report to you that Comscore had another quarter of growth in the fourth quarter. Our revenue results in the quarter represent our highest year-over-year growth since 2018. Our execution in the second half of the year is evidence that we've turned the corner at Comscore and is one of the reasons I'm so excited about 2022. Secondly, we have reworked the way we run our business. At our core, Comscore measures content and ads It enables the planning and activation of media in a privacy-forward way. We built one of the largest media composition databases, enabling us to deliver and optimize outcomes across all screens, television, connected TVs, digital, mobile, and movies. John will take you through this in more detail, but we have simplified the business down to two core focus points. cross-platform solutions, and digital ad solutions. At Comscore, we are laser-focused on the measurement of content and ads and the outcomes that we deliver for our clients. A catalyst for our growth has been the continued rollout and acceleration of our product offerings, particularly our cookie-free products within our ad solutions group. along with the launch of Comscore Everywhere and Comscore Campaign Ratings, which I'll refer to as CCR. I'd like to do a bit of a deeper dive in the Comscore Campaign Ratings as one example to illustrate how we're winning through our commitment to innovation and the future of the industry that we serve. Comscore campaign ratings has gained a lot of momentum measuring the ad campaigns during the Olympics and Super Bowl and providing insights into their performance that weren't available until now. Additionally, the recent announcement regarding Comscore's joint offering with Double Verify is big news for brands, agencies, and sellers of media. We are developing a best-in-class ad verification and cross-platform audience and measurement solution to provide the most comprehensive and innovative cross-platform ad measurement today. This is further proof of Comscore's commitment to innovation and to driving the future of media measurement in our industry. As you can see, the success we're having in our products is the key to unlock wins across content and advertising solutions. In addition to the Double Verify announcement, we are proud of Discovery and Omni's announcement of their ongoing efforts to test Comscore as new currency. We also continue to make progress in local with our recent wins with Gray and with local agencies. We have stabilized our digital business. We acquired Shareably in part to help us shore up our digital talent as well as our product offering. This acquisition will complement our cross-platform and ad solutions group by integrating advanced social video insights into our client offerings across cross-platform capabilities. With our announcement earlier this year, Comscore Everywhere will allow our customers to have a holistic view on how audiences consume content and measure where they're exposed to ads across the content ecosystem. This approach of measurement and analytics represents how advertising will be bought and sold in the future, and Comscore is proud to be at the forefront of this innovation. Traditional media measurement has historically been constrained. Content was measured, but the ads were estimated due to the limitations of purely panel-based methods. Our world-class media consumption data assets and data science have allowed us to turn this problem on its head through our ability to measure second-by-second content and ad consumption with audience metrics all done in a privacy-forward manner. This creates the framework to build the measurement and analytics solutions needed now and in the future. It's why so many out there, like DoubleVerify, want to partner with Comscore. Comscore Everywhere is a single-saw, cross-platform currency which builds on the success of Comscore campaign ratings. the first in-market advertising measurement solution to provide a complete view of video across TV, CTV, and digital to agencies and brands. It will combine more than 15 years of cross-platform experience powered by a massive data TV footprint across CTV, digital, and social to provide a common, comparable audience definition across media and screens. In October, we announced our partnership with Google and became the first measurement provider to deliver deduplicated audience measurement across YouTube's largest platforms with PC, mobile, and connected TV, which includes co-viewing of the CTV screens. YouTube's addition to CCR is a game changer for brands and agencies to truly assess the incremental impact on YouTube within media plans. So much of the CTV reach in the U.S. falls only on five streaming services, and remember, only two are ad-supported, as we have reported before. The success of that we've had with product launches like CCR leads us to the kind of announcement you've heard from DoubleVerify and Comscore last week, where we jointly announced the industry's first cross-platform ad verification and audience measurement solution. With our joint offering, advertisers will be able to view deduplicated reach, frequency, and audience composition across TV, CTV, and mobile while ensuring the digital audiences are free from invalid traffic delivered in view into the correct geography and brand environment. The ongoing currency discussion with the industry has shown us strong advertiser demand for more accurate, deduplicated, cross-platform audience measurements With the inclusion of ad verification, we are excited to bring advertisers even a more differentiated and superior offering. We plan to launch the joint offering in the second quarter to a select group of advertisers. We are gaining momentum among clients and partners, and it goes beyond our relationship with DoubleVerify. As I mentioned earlier, we have a number of exciting developments on the partnership front. For example, Omni Media Group and Discovery, with some large and iconic Omni clients, including insurance, and telecom giants such as State Farm and AT&T will begin testing new ways of tabulating audiences using new currencies, including Comscore. This is a terrific opportunity for Comscore as Discovery, which operates Food Network, HDTV, and the Discovery Channel will have plenty to say about the future of measurement. We are excited to participate in this important move by Discovery and Omni. Another example of our currency momentum is with WarnerMedia's announcement earlier this year that we were selected to work with them on alternative currencies for national television and cross-platform. We are incredibly excited about the momentum we continue to see with all of our clients, including in the local marketplace, where the adoption of our services continues to increase. We've added more than 30 local ad agencies throughout the last year, and over half of them occurred in the fourth quarter alone. As part of these deals, we secured two of the nation's largest furniture retailers are using Comscore as currency. The advancements represented by Comscore Everywhere and our CCR product are resulting in marketplace adoption. I am pleased to report that one of the largest tech companies in the world utilized our CCR currency with multiple large advertisers during the Super Bowl to highlight the incremental reach that can be achieved on these platforms above and beyond the campaign that they ran during the Super Bowl. Similarly, one of the largest holding companies is also evaluating the performance of a number of iconic advertising campaigns during both the Olympics and the Super Bowl, each utilizing Comscore currency. Finally, the fourth quarter has always been our largest quarter as the majority of our enterprise accounts tied to year-end renewals. Comscore secured key enterprise renewals across local, national television, as well as our digital solutions. We also added 30 full local broadcast stations in the quarter. including stations with NBCU, Univision, Entrevision, Gray, and Allen Media. We are now the currency in most of Gray's markets, who will use Comscore's audience data as the primary selling currency in 95 of their 113 markets. Great progress by our entire team. As we shift our focus toward 2022, you can probably tell that we have plenty of momentum and we are laser-focused on driving profitable growth. We will accomplish this by staying true to what we do best, measuring content and ads in a privacy-forward manner by world-class data science and assets. To give you an example of our privacy-centric approach in building products and delivering insight, our CCR was expanded to include YouTube and YouTube TV. It was implemented through a tagless integration with Google Ad Data Hub. This enabled our clients to measure the impact of their ad campaigns on their entire YouTube universe in a privacy-first manner. It's also worth noting that Google made it a point in their fourth quarter call to highlight the use of our CCR product. Our growth will always come down the backs of both internal progress and that's as we continue to launch world-class products like CCR and predictive audience solutions, as well as with partnerships, like the one we just announced with Double Verify. Our ability to execute quickly will unlock new client wins and allow us to take share in the markets that we play in. Building off our second half execution and the recent acquisition of Shareably, we are turning around our digital business. With Shareably, we inherited an experienced and talented team that will help us lead this turnaround, led by Tanya Yuki. Along with Tanya, we believe Greg Dale and John Lieberman will play critical roles in our future digital offering. It is important to note that that Tanya and Greg played important roles at Comscore in our formative years as key executives before starting Shareably. As always, our ability to deliver content and ad measurement with speed, transparency, and unbiased view will ensure Comscore continues to expand its currency offerings in both local and national TV markets. We will continue to work closely with the MRC to win national and local TV accreditation. And all this goes without saying. All this executing and delivering world-class products and our clients in profitable growth as our shareholders comes from a commitment of our people. And now I'd like to turn this call over to John Carpenter to discuss financial details. John?