Stagwell Inc.

Washington, D.C., and welcome to Stagwell Inc.' 's earnings webcast for the first quarter of 2024. My name is Ben Allison, and I lead the investor relations function here at Stagwell. With me today are Mark Penn, Stagwell's chairman and chief executive officer, and Franklin Nusser, the chief financial officer. Mark will provide a business update, and Frank will share a financial review. After the prepared remarks, we will open the floor for Q&A. You are welcome to submit questions through the chat function. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that the following remarks include forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial data. Forward-looking statements about the company, including those related to earnings guidance, are subject to uncertainties and risk factors addressed in our earnings release, slide presentation, and the company's SEC results. Please refer to our website, stagworldglobal.com forward slash investors, for an investor presentation and additional resources. This morning's press release and the slide deck provide definitions, explanations, and reconciliations of non-GAAP financial data. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Mark Beck.

Thank you, Ben, and thank you to everyone joining us for our first quarter earnings call. On our Q4 call in February, I talked about our excitement and confidence in 2024, highlighting that we expect to return to growth in the first half of this year. Several factors give us confidence, including the abatement of industry headwinds, such as tech restructuring activities, strong new business trends, a record-breaking political cycle, and our continued investments in digital innovation beginning to contribute to growth. Today, I'm pleased to share that these trends are beginning to play out exactly as we anticipated. Stagwell delivered $670 million of revenue in the first quarter. These figures represent encouraging growth in revenue of 8%. Additionally, we continue to post record net new business figures for both the first quarter and the last 12 months. Importantly, we delivered these growth figures while effectively managing our costs. Actions we took in 2023 helped us grow our adjusted EBITDA by 25% year-over-year to $90 million. These results are highly encouraging and give us the confidence to reiterate our full year guidance today. We also draw confidence from gathering tailwinds. Advertising is once again growing. Our reputation is expanding, and we are participating in record new business pitches. AI will, within the year, create vast digital transformation opportunities. International work is proving a fertile area for expansion, and the advocacy season promises to be historic. This quarter's performance was driven by two double-digit growing capabilities. Performance, media, and data grew 13% in revenue and 12% in net revenue. Advocacy showed 80% revenue growth to 54% net revenue increase. Digital transformation led by double-digit growing gaps return to revenue growth, but it's still building up an expanded pipeline as tech companies are beginning to come back online and research is still overcoming the impact of last year's writer's strike. Continuing a trend from last year, we saw outsized year-over-year growth in our relationships with our largest, most impactful customers. In the first quarter, our top 100 customers, now representing 50% of our total net revenue, grew 25%. Geographically, we saw a return to growth in the United States, our largest market, with total revenue growth of 9% year over year. Our international businesses also continued their momentum with revenue growth of 7% in the quarter. Europe has been a major area of focus for us recently, and we opened our new regional headquarters in London just a few weeks ago. This focus is translating its strong revenue momentum with the EMEA reaching only 14% year over year. Turning to cost and profitability. As I mentioned previously, we delivered $90 million of adjusted EBITDA in the first quarter, 25% higher than the first quarter of last year, and representing a 17% margin and improvement of 320 basis points year over year. This impressive figure is a direct consequence of the proactive steps we took last year to manage our costs. In 2023, we took staffing actions that resulted in $98 million of annualized savings. As a result, our labor costs are 2% lower in the first quarter of 2024, helping to deliver a staffing to net revenue ratio of 64.3% and improvement of 270 basis points over the first quarter of last year. Also driving this margin improvement is a laser focus on managing our G&A expenses. Despite our growing net revenue in the quarter, our total G&A expenses were almost exactly the same as in the same period last year. We're installing modern systems for back office, utilizing offshoring, and adding AI capabilities to streamline operations. We're seeing particularly strong growth in adjusted evoDOT from our performance, media, and data capability growing 212%, and creativity and communications growing 42%, a testament to the focus that all of Stagwell is placing on controlling our costs. Net new business continues to break company records, giving us increasing confidence in our full-year guidance. In the quarter, we delivered 66 million of net new business, a record for the first quarter for Stagler. This brings our last 12-month net new business figure to $284 million, also a company record. Quarter after quarter, we've increased the LCM net new business figure to $212 million a year ago. Importantly, the size of our wins has grown impressively, and we continue to be invited to larger global pitches. In the first quarter, the average win size increased 13% year over year. These net new business numbers were driven by some important wins, including Pogo de Chao, the Star Tribune, Vassal, and Wilson, as well as expansions with Target and L'Oreal. In Q1, Stadwell agencies captured over 70 of the top awards across major industry shows. including an array of Agency of the Year designations. Maybe 1-2% of the market, we are far to see that in terms of industry recognition. These include four agencies featured on the Ad Age A list, including Coder Theory being recognized as Business Transformation Agency of the Year, Gale winning US Advertising Agency of the Year by campaign, Assembly being named Media Agency of the Year, and Exponent PR, which he con-shopped with Nicole McVoy, took home the disruptive Agency of the Year crown. Our M&A program was active. We might not have gotten every deal we sought, but the net revenue in adjusted EBITDA from companies acquired in the fourth and first quarters exceeded the net revenue in adjusted EBITDA lost from Consensual Life Deposit Dispositions. We achieved this despite the initial outlay in acquisitions being only about 15% of the dispositions gross proceeds. This is concrete evidence that our M&A machine can be a major driver of value for investors moving forward. As I've discussed previously, we're exploring a further non-core disposition. Hope to have more color on that later in the year. In the first months of 2024, we made strong progress in expanding our global Sidekick and our first fresh creative agency, What's Next Partners. Just last month, shortly after the end of the first quarter, we announced the acquisition of Proz, a digital-focused brand and marketing consultancy in Brazil, which significantly expands our Latin American presence. We're looking to become more competitive internationally by doubling our business outside of North America to 40% of net revenues over the coming years. Our current focus is in Western Europe, the Middle East and Asia. This quarter, we took steps to sharpen our capabilities in data, media and AI through a combination of internal initiatives and external partnerships. In the first quarter, we maintained strong investment of $14 million into the Stagwell Marketing Cloud, our AI-enabled suite of products for modern marketers. We're now working to bring our research products under the Harris Quest plan to market and expect to see sales growth in the back half of the year. SMC orchestrated its first software launch with Google Cloud as we deepened the partnership on GenAI announced last year. At Google Cloud Next, we launched a data clean room solution on Google's platform that will provide our clients with a private and secure space to mix and match their first-party data with Stagwell's vast scope of data source We're also focused on growing AI leadership across our agencies. One focus will be scaling best-in-class use cases, such as Gale's Enterprise Alchemy AI platform announced this quarter, which reduces the time spent on critical tasks across all disciplines in the agency to help Gale's almost 800 people work smarter, better, and faster. Leftfield Labs is incubating customer AI solutions to elevate the customer experience. And our largest performance media agency, Assembly, is set to announce a new AI solution later this month. We are making significant progress in our media studios unit on building the last mile of the media chain, from planning, targeting, and audience creation, down to placement and media supply. On our last call, I announced we'd be building a Stagwell ID graph solution. Today, we are partnering with Nexen, a global unified advertising technology platform, We'll have more to share on that partnership in the coming weeks as we roll out our new offerings in data and media. In other parts of our business, we're preparing for Sport Beach this June at the Cannes Lions Festival, where we'll return for a second year with more brand sponsors and more athletes, including Joe Burrow, Juju Watkins, and Nathan Rapinoe. Sport Beach continues to benefit the company, increasing our exposure worldwide and leading to new business opportunities. Finally, we're excited later this month to host our definitive Future of News Summit in partnership with top publishers across the U.S., including Axios, Business Insider, New York Times, Politico, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Trade Desk, and Ad Fontes Media. Recognizing the fears around brand safety of main advertisers who are cautious about advertising across news and opinion sites, we'll release a first-of-its-kind study for advertisers to better understand where and how they should be advertising across the news industry. It's been a busy quarter. We are never standing still. We are marching forward to achieve our goal of offering everything from global full service to platform self-service. Wherever you look, Skyworld is evolving and bringing our partners along with us to the cutting edge of marketing services. We're on the forefront of AI, of global performance marketing, of culturally relevant events, of advancing online advocacy campaigns, of the move to more social media and content, and the combination, once again, of media and creative. These efforts and a solid quarter of revenue growth give us confidence about the year ahead. Now, I'll hand things over to Franklin Luther, our Chief Financial Officer. walking through some of our financial results in more detail.

Frank? Thank you, Mark. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us to discuss our first quarter results. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question after the prepared remarks conclude, please feel free to submit them through the chat function. The company returned to revenue growth during June 1, driven by strong performance in our median advocacy businesses, improving market conditions in the U.S., and continued momentum in the international markets in which we operate. For the quarter, we reported revenue of $670 million, an increase of 80% as compared to the same period in the prior year. Net revenue, excluding pass-through costs, increased 2% for the same period to $532 million. Building on the trend from 23, our largest customers continued to invest in their relationship with our agencies. In the first quarter of 24, our top 100 customers, now representing 50% of our consolidated net revenue, grew 25% versus the prior period, our largest improvement in the last five quarters. The number of relationships also expanded, with the number of customers in our top 100 being serviced by more than one of our agencies increasing 12% year over year, providing further evidence that our strategy of delivering integrated services is working. Another positive signal was the occurrence of an inflection point where period-over-period revenues with existing customers from growing relationships exceeded those from declining relationships. Our net new business performance for the quarter represented the fifth consecutive quarter of increasing trailing 12-month performance and set another high watermark of $284 million. We are tangibly benefiting from being invited to participate in larger global officials as the average size of our wins increased 13% year over year. The combined impact of net new business and improving performance with existing clients leads us to reaffirm our guidance for the year. Turning to revenue by capability. The first quarter saw revenue growth in four of our five principal capabilities. Performance median data delivered $77 million in revenue, an increase of 13% over the prior year period. This performance was driven by a combination of new business wins and growth from existing customers. Particular areas of strength included transportation and lodging, consumer products, and the financial services sectors. Creativity and communications delivered $292 million in revenue, an increase of 11% over the prior period. We had strong growth from a number of consumer products customers, as well as clients in technology, media, and communications sectors, which grew about 2% over the prior period. Digital transformation returned to growth in the first quarter, with revenue increasing to $196 million, a 6% improvement over the prior period, driven by strong performance in food and beverage, advocacy, and technology-based lives, which grew 20% period over period. This growth was partially offset by softness in financials as we anniversary the regional banking crisis for early 2013. Consumer Insights and Strategy reported $46 million in revenue, a decline of 7% year-over-year. This was largely a consequence of customers within the entertainment sector increasing spending more slowly, subsequent to the Hollywood actors and writers' strike late last year. Sagro Marketing Cloud posted $60 million in revenue, an increase of 7% year-over-year. The suite of software products continues to be an investment priority for us. In the first quarter, we maintained our investment spending of approximately $14 million into the cloud as we continue to build an industry-leading suite of tech products for the modern market. Finally, advocacy is a significant contributor to the business mix in election years as we benefit from increased political fundraising and the spending running up to the elections in November. In the first quarter, advocacy revenue grew to $65 million, an increase of 80% over the prior period. Now turning to geographical breakdown, we saw continued strong revenue growth in our international businesses of 7%. This was led by exceptionally strong growth of 14% in the United Kingdom. In the U.S., our largest market, revenue increased 9% over the prior year. Turning to costs, management took decisive actions in 23 to right-size our cost structure to better align with trending revenue. The results of these actions can clearly be seen in our first quarter results. In the first quarter, the company delivered $90 million in adjusted EBITDA, an increase of 25% over the prior period, and it also increased the related margin to 17%, an improvement of nearly 320 basis points over the prior quarter. Staffing is our largest cost, and in 23, we took actions that reduced annualized salaries and headcount by $98 million and 4% respectively. We benefited from the full effect of these successive actions during Q1, as labor costs were lowered by more than 2%, or $7 million, and the staffing cost-to-net-revenue ratio was lowered to 64.3%. an improvement of 270 basis points versus the prior year, and the lowest first quarter ratio since our merger. In addition to staffing, we also focused on efficiently managing our G&A costs. For the first quarter, our G&A expenses were just under $100 million, in line with the same period in 23. This results in G&A as a percentage of net revenue ratio of 18.8%, an improvement of nearly 30 basis points versus the prior period. Our G&A costs are inclusive of certain unbillable expenses. These costs tend to grow in line with our net revenues. For both the first quarters of 23 and 24, our unbillable customer expenses as a percentage of net revenue remain stable at 6%. Adjusting G&A expenses to account for these unbillables, our G&A actually decreased by slightly more than $1 million year-over-year, representing a 2% decline, excluding unbillables. The cumulative impact of our revenue growth and cost actions contributed to the strong adjusted EBITDA performance during the quarter, and allowed us to maintain our strong investment in the Stagwell market class. Excluding the $14 million of cloud investment in Q1, our first quarter adjusted EBITDA margin would have been approximately 19.9%. Now moving to the balance sheet. We continue to make efficient allocations of capital to maintain a strong financial position. Starting with deferred acquisition consideration, we reduced obligations approximately $65 million from the end of the first quarter last year to $101 million at the end of the first quarter in 24. We remain on track to reduce our debt obligations to approximately $40 million by the end of the year. We also acquired 4 million shares during the quarter at an average price of $6.11 per share for approximately $25 million. Our existing buyback authorization as of quarter end now has $114 million in remaining availability. CapEx, the capitalized software per quarter, was $14 million, broadly in line with our targets. As a result, we ended the quarter with cash of $130 million and drawings under our revolver of $182 million. Our leverage ratio at quarter end was three times. And finally, as highlighted by Mark in his remarks, we are reaffirming our full year 24 guidance as follows. Organic net revenue growth is expected to be between 5% to 7%. Organic net revenue excluding advocacy growth is expected to be 4% to 5%. Adjusted Ether is expected to be between $400 million to $450 million. We expect to deliver approximately 50% free cash flow conversion. And adjusted earnings per share is expected to be between 75 cents and 88 cents. That concludes our prepared remarks for this morning. I will now turn the call back over to Ben Allison to open the Q&A portion of the call.

Thank you, Frank. Just a reminder, if you have any questions, please submit them via the chat button at the top of the screen. We're going to start with a question here from Barbara Crockett at Rosenblatt. She says, can you please walk us through what you see as the drivers of acceleration of organic net revenue growth over the balance of 2024, from the 2% reported in Q1 to the 5-7 that's in the guide today? How much visibility do you have into this acceleration? Do you think it's going to be a steady round, or is there going to be one or

Sure. Thank you, Martin, for that question. Look, I think as you analyze it, you can see international is moving along nicely. Advocacy is moving along nicely. Media is moving along nicely. And then next to really come up and continue to grow is digital transformation has room for growth. Look, media is firing on all cylinders already with double-digit growth. Our pipeline, when I look at our pipeline, is 50% higher than it was at this time last year. We are in a record number of new pitches of enhanced size, given the enhanced reputation. Also, AI is beginning, I think, customers are beginning to get over the, let's take a look at it and start to implement the phase. So I think that you're going to really see a good second quarter. And things will build to the third and fourth quarters because that's when advocacy and media in the holiday season tend to crescendo. So I look at it as you're going to really kind of have, you know, see strength building through the year as I think digital transformation will strengthen and media and advocacy will really take off in the second half of the year. So that's how I see it developing, you know, and meeting the goals.

And perhaps just on digital transformation, a question here from Jason Cryer at Craig Howard. He's asking about green shoots we're seeing in digital transformation that kind of gives us confidence in our attempt to grow back.

Yeah, we're seeing, I think, some of the companies that had cut back last year beginning to come back. We're seeing growth as, again, really AI. I mean, look, if you make the chips and then you have all the cloud, you need the applications. And I think that people are discovering the applications. And we are in the AI application building business. That is what we're doing. I think first customers have to be assured that their data would not go into the worldwide global data pot. And I think that's why we put together the clean rooms for both internally and for our clients in order to provide that kind of confidence. And I think as customers get confident, that AI can be used safely and securely, you're just gonna see this take off. We're gonna go back to the biggest problem being finding engineers as opposed to the biggest problem finding work. And I think that really should hit in the second half of the year. I think you can see that building in all of the tech companies in terms of what they're reporting.

Maybe just on the tech customers as well, and it begs the question here, just talking about tech coming back, some of the key trends we're seeing with technology customers and then sort of rebounding in this year.

Yeah, I mean, we're seeing them slowly. They're not back to full throttle yet. I think they still have more to go. It is shaping up to be a year of competition. We chose some increase. Again, our list of top clients would be a list of largest, size tech companies. In many ways, we're a tech company's tech company, helping to develop AI front ends, consumer interactions, as well as to build new applications for our clients. But I think you're still seeing some caution on the side of those companies. But again, they are building out their programs, how to bring AI to the masses. and that is where we're going to benefit. And I think at a certain point the floodgates will open here and that that can't be too far away.

Chipping gears a little bit, just onto the international side of things, a question from Mark, so I've got to wish you a benchmark. He says, with just about 12% of net revenue outside the U.S. and the U.K., how should we think about growth by geography being factored into our guidance, or growth by geography moving forward? And he asks, is expansion to Asia Pacific still a meaningful

I think you can see, when you go through our acquisitions, you can see clearly our strategy. A group of those acquisitions are frontiers of marketing, people like Movers and Shakers, people like Leftfield Labs and AI. And the other group of acquisitions is clearly Brazil, UK. You're going to see really more focus in Asia and the Middle East in the next few months. going to see us to build in the global network that we need to win. But for the first time, we're in a $40 to $60 million pitch. People are looking at Stagwell and seeing us as the logical company taking on the majors at a growing scale. So we're going to complete the global network. We also think that we put together Bluefin, which is an office where we brought together 17 European agencies in London. And we can see the benefits, 14% growth just beginning, frankly, because they used to get very small pitches because their services were fragmented. Now it's almost like a shopping mall. You can see advertising, research, media, a set of coordinated services, and they're getting multi-million dollar opportunities. So while the European marketplace may not be a high grower, our ability to grow market share in Europe I think having put together our agencies and having added a structure with James Townsend, a CEO, having brought in a whole marketing team, I think we have very good prospects. And that's what we're going to do region by region until we have a complete functioning, scaled global network.

Great. We'll just have a question on net new business first, and then we'll shift the advocacy number of questions on that topic. But Laura Martin over at Needham, she goes, 66 million of net new business wins in Q1, very impressive, up to 284.4 over the training 12 months. What do you think is the normalized revenue? Like, you know, are we in mid-single digits, kind of high single digits? What do we do?

Well, look, I think that we'll see a little bit, you know, what the Fed does today with our economy. But look, I think we're building back to our targets. right, of getting to the 10% year over year growth. We know that we had 15%, you know, in 2022. 2023 for a number of factors was not the year we had planned, but a lot of those factors were exogenous. They were fear of recession. They were media slowdowns. They were strikes across photo and other industries. There was tech pullbacks. You know, we're striving to get back to those numbers, and I think this is a big transition year. By the end of the year, we'll have an expanded global network. We'll have our Stagg World Marketing Cloud, you know, products, at least in research. I think Outback and Full Force will have our media, you know, our ID graph that will extend our capabilities, I think, into, you know, deeper media services that will also open up, I think, of more revenue opportunities. Digital transformation will be in the thick of AI. So, to me, this is a transition here back to that kind of growth that we believe is the long-term target that the firm is capable of.

Advocacy. A couple of questions on this. First off, from CKL at Wells Fargo. Did advocacy outperform your expectations on the revenue net revenue and just keep the dark side in Q1? We obviously didn't adjust the guidance today, but does that strengthen advocacy as well as the new business talent you just discussed?

Give you some more confidence in the ability to achieve guidance. I think the strength of advocacy obviously gives us, you know, is one of the elements that gives us confidence, I think. advocacy was a little stronger than expected, particularly since there were no real primaries on each side. And so when you see that kind of strength in advocacy and you look at it, well, you know, 2028 will probably be, I thought 2024 will be the record, but now I realize it will be 2028 because there will be, you know, no matter who wins, open presidencies on both sides and there will be double primaries. So I think that the building strength of this, given the fact that there are no primaries, essentially shows that this is going to be a record year. You can see it forming. People are really going to intensively focus on this race, particularly once the conventions get kicked off. Even though there's a little bit of a lull now, advocacy is picking up. People are planning on an incredible and I think the services we provide will continue to diversify in the area.

Just following up on advocacy, another question from Laura. She's asking, there's obviously some press speculation that some legal fees might catabolize media spending focus from the Trump campaign. Do you think those legal structures might lower media spending and advocacy revenue in 24 versus expectations and how maybe might that impact our business?

We don't do fundraising for the Trump campaign. So it's not, our focus is really on the House and Senate races and super PACs that are not directly the campaign. So that factor wouldn't come into us really either way. I think America's voice for big race and people, there used to be kind of no tradition of people getting involved and active used to be about over 1% that we've contributed. Now it's hit around 10 to 12%. And I think you're going to see really strong participation. And those factors are not going to influence us one way or the other.

Great. One question on growth rates, and then we're going to talk about AI a little bit. But question from Cameron. Can you discuss what drove some of the divergence in growth rates between gross and net revenue in the quarter and how much of an impact might performance media have?

It's less about performance media. We have now acquired a number of companies that have more, that recognize more gap revenue versus net revenue. You look at kind of, we acquired Team Epiphany, Left Field Lounge. Some of these new companies are more event oriented. Some of the digital online fundraising also generates higher levels of gap revenue. So I think those two or three factors show this divergence. We talked about the gap revenue because, after all, it is evidence of economic activity. We're looking for how we're going to make money. The fact that those kinds of revenues change are part of showing the building sequence of events here. I think that's going to be quite favorable to Stagwell through the year.

Shifting gears, AI. A question from Jack Vance Center in India. So two parts to this one. Can you talk about latest you're seeing in terms of customer projects involving AI and then the other part of it is can you speak more about how we're using AI in our shared services platform internally to improve efficiency?

Sure. We have about three to four hundred people internally Well, just to go back to say, remember that we have the Stagwell Market Cloud and we have a central innovation group. And that was one of the key principles in building Stagwell. And, you know, as Frank pointed out, our EBITDA would be another $14 million higher if we were not investing heavily, you know, in AI and other tech products as a central innovation function. We've got about 300 or 400 employees who are assigned on to the central kind of AI experimental. Right now, we're actually completing a survey of what everybody is looking for out of AI. Obviously, you know, on the word side, people are looking for lots of the ability to summarize information and the ability to help write things more clearly. And I think there's a lot of interest in text to video, you know, give me a picture of a dog in snow kind of thing. And I think On the client end, clients want to make sure that before they dive into AI, this can be safe and secure. And that's why we are working on safety and security first. And then they want to understand. You know, we're seeing applications where shopping bots will make it just far easier for you to say things like, I'm having an office party, tell me what to buy. The whole ability for you to look through data sets and say, hey, can you bring up all the polling on the presidential approval for the last five years? These are unprecedented ways in which people can interact with technology and get a response that would have taken hours and hours And so we think there's going to be an enormous amount of work in redoing virtually every website to be AI-enabled in order to provide that kind of confidence. That's where I think we're focusing a lot of our work with clients is exactly there. How does AI change your brand? After all, if you're going to effectively interact with a brand's AI as much as you're going to see advertisements, that becomes the absolute critical part of how you market and establish your brand image. That's why I think it really benefits us because we're used to really engineering and designing the last mile, that connection between the company and the customer. And I think you're going to see that work explode.

Great. Just one final question on our side of things, and I think this one's for Frank. Between your appetite to grow your media business and digital capabilities internationally, potential divestitures, the DAC, What should we expect in terms of deleveraging by the end of 2024? I think three times is leverage at the moment. Yeah, we're at three times now.

We expect to be somewhere in the mid twos by the end of the year, I would say. And that comes from the stronger cash flows that we'll experience in the back half of the year. It steadily ramps up Q3 and then Q4, really drives a lot of cash and that will drive down the leverage ratio.

Great. Well, that brings us to a closed day on our first quarter earnings call. Thank you very much for joining us, and we hope you'll be able to join us in a few months' time for our second