comScore, Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the CommScore first quarter 2022 earnings 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 need to press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star then 0. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. John Tinker. Sir, please begin.

Thank you, operator. 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, May 10, 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 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. Please note that we will be referring to individual slides on this call, which are also available on our website. I'll now turn the call over to ComScore's Chief Executive Officer, Bill Libick. Bill.

Thank you, John, and thank you all for joining us today. I'm very proud that we delivered another solid quarter of results in our first quarter. As a reminder, this is our first quarter that we're operating under our new solutions group. Our focus is on measuring content and ads with the goal of enabling the planning and activation of media in a privacy-forward way across all screens, television, connected TV, or CTV, digital, mobile, and, of course, the movies. We are pleased to report that we grew revenue 4% year over year, to $94 million in adjusted EBITDA growth of 22% to $6.8 million versus $5.6 million a year ago. Some of the highlights in the quarter include NBCU certifying Comscore as a local TV currency provider across all of their owned and operated and affiliate group stations. Additionally, Effective announced Comscore will be using us for local TV measurement currency. We also inked an enterprise deal with Sinclair for the licensing of our CCI service, Comscore Consumer Intelligence for Local Markets, which provides an unrivaled cross-platform view of consumer retail visitations and online shopping tied to television viewing behavior at the local market level. And our momentum continued in this current quarter with the expansion of great television for 10 of the recently acquired markets. We also continued to make progress in accelerating our privacy forward offerings. Within predictive audiences, we are partnering with IRI to bring their CPG audience segments into our activation solution. This provides the best-in-class audience targeting within contextually relevant digital experiences in a cookie-free, privacy-forward manner. We are also happy with our progress to date on Comscore campaign ratings, or what we refer to as CCR. With CCR, advertisers can truly understand their audiences, and advertising campaigns across platforms with deduplicated reach and frequency metrics that allow them to align their spend and achieve more specific and accountable campaign-specific KPIs and a higher return on their overall investment. Our CCR partnership with YouTube continues to progress. One highlight this quarter was a program where we measured cross-platform advertising performance performance around the Super Bowl. This included PC, mobile, and connected TV. The program included 10 major brands across cars, travel, software, dining, and food service. Comscore CCR was the primary measurement used to specifically identify incremental advertising reach across YouTube before, during, and after the actual Super Bowl TV broadcast. On the digital side, with the integration of our social media service shareably into our digital offerings, we have named Tanya Yuki as our EBP of digital. to focus on expanding our product solutions and driving revenue growth in this key strategic area for us in 2022. As most of you know, Tanya rejoined Comscore when we acquired Cherubly in December of 2021. In the quarter Warner Brothers Discovery announced that they would be launching their now joint upfront with Comscore as an alternative currency provider with three very large national agencies. Also in the quarter, NBCU named Comscore as a certified provider for local currency measurement, the only provider they certified for local. In April, Comcast Cable's ad sales division, Effective, announced they'd use Comscore for local TV measurement as a currency, joining the growing ranks of TV players offering measurement alternatives to write deals on. In connection with our charter arrangement, Spectrum Reach has rolled out Comscore as their preferred television currency in all 89 markets, including New York and Los Angeles. With this, we believe more ad agencies and brands will switch to Comscore to buy TV advertising. Local stations continue to subscribe to Comscore for our stable and reliable currency. It's also worth pointing out that local TV stations should benefit this year from an estimated $3 billion-plus bump in political advertising, and many of them continue to be very vocal about actively looking for our new currency to base their advertising inventory transactions on. Also in the quarter... We expanded our relationship with Vizio TV, this with a multi-year agreement to continue our access to their unique CTV viewing at the glass level. Within digital, our partnership with IRI brings their CPG segments into our activation offerings. We believe this is a big win for both of our businesses. It provides IRI with a privacy-forward way to activate key segments in a cookie-free manner, and it provides Comscore with a key segment of CPG audiences that can be transacted on across the programmatic ecosystem at scale. Our ability to deliver a holistic view of both content and ad consumption throughout the home is a critical differentiator of what Comscore delivers for our clients every day. The combination of our census-based TV coverage, which includes more than 70 million TV sets, 35 million households, and nearly 13 million smart TVs, along with our census-based digital coverage and the industry's only total home panel is what sets Comscore's ability for our customers apart. Regarding our CTV capability specifically, there are two ways in which you can get connected TV information at scale. One is directly from publishers via tagging, or server-to-server integrations, or through ACR technologies from smart TVs. We do all of them. Unlike others who trot their CTV capability, Comscore measures both ad and content consumption. And because we have a combination of set-top box, panel, and CTV, we are able to deliver an unduplicated view of consumption This isn't a new offering for Comscore. We introduced our over-the-top measurement capabilities in 2015, and we have been collecting and reporting on holistic view of media behavior for years, continuing with our history of innovation and giving Comscore a leadership role to deliver on a holistic product suite across content and ads. This is Comscore's competitive advantage complete coverage and content and ads, and a very large installed base of both buyers and sellers of media that use our services every day to run their businesses. Despite all of the press in the marketplace trouncing new currency offerings, the reality is there's only two companies that deliver the full suite of capabilities across the media landscape, period. And Comscore is one of them. Our census-based TV and digital scale, coupled with our total home panel, means that Comscore can deliver what no one else can. the ability to get a cross-platform view of digital, CTV, and linear consumption, where our clients can precisely reach their desired audiences and contextually relevant experiences. This can be done in a privacy-forward way through our activation products, which allows our clients to optimize their spend, their ad delivery, and the measurement outcomes because of our ability to deliver deduplicated audience reach. It is clear that we have the most complete cross-platform offering, along with the highest coverage of CTV, video content, and video ad inventory available in the market. Taking this a step further, in today's privacy-forward market, The ad tech industry has struggled finding cookie-free tactics that will allow them to maintain campaign performance and KPIs that advertisers have become accustomed to. Building on the contextual targeting foundations of brand safety and IAB category in keyword targeting, Comscore is reinventing contextual targeting with the addition of predictive audiences. Predictive audiences is contextually delivering targeting, making privacy forward, and providing a crosswalk between audience behaviors and contextual signals. This is a massive step forward for the industry, enabling advertisers to maintain their KPIs without cookies. Comscore is leveraging this technology, not only for our own audience information, but complementary for our data partners, providing them with a cookie-free path to surface their segments in the marketplace. Before turning it over to John, I want to reiterate that we are laser-focused on executing against our key priorities aimed at delivering profitable growth. top score measures, content, and ads. It's what we do best, and the success that we're having across the markets we operate in with new clients' wins, new partnerships, and renewal with our longstanding media and agency clients gives us confidence that the opportunity is large for us. We are developing world-class products that are privacy-forward and cookie-free. We will be ready when the market shifts with our product offerings in the space. Returning to growth in digital is a key priority for us, and it's critical to our growth story going forward. Our product and our commercial focus here, aligned on new solutions group, is just the beginning. Our currency efforts and momentum we're seeing in the market under Carol Hinnant's leadership have led us to the NBC announcement on local and our double-digit growth to start the year in our cross-platform solutions group. Finally, as I transition from CEO, I am confident in our team's leadership efforts and them continuing to deliver against these priorities as we move throughout the year. And I could not be more excited about the opportunity that's in front of us. With that, I'd like to turn it over to John. John?