comScore, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the CommScore second quarter 2024 financial results 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 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I'd now like to hand the conference over to John Tinker, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

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, August 6, 2024. Our actual results in future periods may differ materially from those currently expected because 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 that 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 slides on this call, which are also available on our website, www.comscore.com, under Investor Relations, Events, and Presentations. I'll now turn the call over to Comscore's Chief Executive Officer, John Carpenter. John.

Thanks, everyone, for joining us this evening. Look, there's no way to get around the fact that 2024 has not played out as we had expected. It's certainly frustrating for our stakeholders, especially our employees who bust their humps every day to deliver, and that certainly weighs heavily on me and, as I know it does, the rest of the leadership team. Despite that frustration and the financial print here in the quarter, we are making progress with the turnaround of this company. The path we're on is one that will take us from being a company that was heavily reliant on syndicated revenue from products focused on legacy markets, undergoing tremendous disruption to a company that drives growth be a transactional model tied to solving the rapidly growing problems that will define the future of media measurement. I think it's fair to say that the pace of that turnaround isn't what we expected it would be at this point in the year. However, given what we're seeing in the market, we're convinced that we're moving in the right direction as we execute our playbook. The pressure that we've seen on our clients and what I'd refer to as the legacy media segments with our syndicated digital and TV products being down in the first half, certainly helps point to the rough first half we've had, but it also highlights why the turnaround we're executing is the right one. While much of the industry is obsessing over yesterday's problems, Comscore is unapologetically focused on the emerging areas that will enable the future of media and advertising measurement, areas where Comscore has a unique set of assets and capabilities to deliver durable value within a rapidly changing media environment. We're seeing encouraging strength in our cross-platform offerings, specifically our Proxemic business. And in terms of our cross-platform ad campaign measurement product, CCR, the pace of that, of adoption, isn't accelerating as quickly as we had hoped or as quickly as we needed it to to offset some of the weakness we see in certain parts of our traditional business. But while we fully expect CCR to ramp up as we move through the back half of the year, it's clear that the timeline for that ramp It's going to look a bit more similar to the activation business when we integrate a new platform than what we had originally anticipated. To give you an example of what I mean by that, we launched our predictive audience segment as part of Proximic in a major programmatic platform in May of 2023. Our first month with the product in that platform, we saw a relatively small revenue bump, which remained the case for several months before it started to scale meaningfully. Today, the monthly revenue from predictive audiences as part of Proximate in that platform is more than 100 times those early months, and we're now closing in on nearly a million dollars per month in that one platform alone. I bring that up as an example because there's some significant parallels to CCR being integrated into these same platforms. In both cases, we're integrating value-added differentiated products into some of the most important channels within the programmatic ad ecosystem. I'll have more to come, but with that, let me just turn it over to Mary Margaret here to speak about the second quarter results.