Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, Inc. 2021, fourth quarter and full year earnings conference call. My name is Seb and I'll be the operator for your call today. There will be an opportunity to ask questions on the call. You can register your question by pressing star one on your telephone keypad or press star two if you wish to withdraw your question. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Eileen McLaughlin, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings 2021 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Earnings Call. On the call today are Scott Wells, Chief Executive Officer of Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, Inc., and Brian Coleman, Chief Financial Officer of Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, Inc., who will provide an overview of the 2021 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Operating Performance of Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, Inc. and Clear Channel International BV. After an introduction and a review of our results, We'll open the line for questions and Justin Cochran, Chief Executive Officer of Clear Channel Europe, will participate in the Q&A portion of the call. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that this conference call includes forward-looking statements. These statements include management's expectations, beliefs, and projections about performance and represent management's current beliefs. There can be no assurance that management's expectations, beliefs, or projections will be achieved or that actual results will not differ from expectations. Please review the statements of risk contained in our earnings press release and filings with the SEC. During today's call, we will provide certain performance measures that do not conform to generally accepted accounting principles. We provided schedules that reconcile these non-GAAP measures with our reported results on a GAAP basis as part of our earnings release and the earnings conference call presentation. which can be found in the financial section of our website, investor.clearchannel.com. Please note that the earnings release and earnings conference call presentation that are available on our website are integral to our earnings conference call. They provide a detailed breakdown of foreign exchange, segment revenue, adjusted EBITDA, and adjusted corporate expenses, including the impact of share-based compensation and restructuring charges, among other important information. For that reason, we ask that you view each slide as Scott and Brian comments on them. Also, please note that the information provided on this call speaks only to management's views as of today, February 24th, 2022, and may no longer be accurate at the time of a replay. With that, please turn to page four in the presentation, and I will now turn the call over to Scott Wells.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for taking time to join today's call. It's great to address all of you for the first time since I assumed the role of CEO of Clear Channel Outdoor at the beginning of this year. The transition with William has gone smoothly and I'd like to extend my thanks to him for his past leadership as well as for his ongoing strategic contributions in his new role as Executive Vice Chairman. With the support of our talented and dedicated team, we are making this leadership transition from a position of strength as we continue to transform the world's oldest advertising medium into a technology-fueled visual media powerhouse. I'm pleased to report strong results for the fourth quarter of 2021, particularly given the challenges we faced earlier in the year. On a reported basis, consolidated revenue increased 37 percent compared to 2020. Our revenue also soundly surpassed our revenue for the fourth quarter of 2019, excluding China and movements in foreign exchange. Brian will provide an in-depth review of our results following my remarks. I'm especially proud of how our organization responded to the severe COVID-related headwinds we faced in the past year. The entire CCO team has my sincere thanks for rising above the myriad challenges we faced to deliver these results. Throughout the pandemic, we kept our eye on the ball and doubled down on our strategic plan. As a result, we strengthened our presence in the advertising community during this period. And as our markets reopened, we saw consistent improvement with each passing quarter. culminating in our very strong fourth quarter performance. We've developed a dynamic, smart, addressable platform that we believe will grow and strengthen over time, allowing us to serve advertisers in ways that we could only imagine a few short years ago. We are meeting advertisers where they need us most and demonstrating our ability to accurately reach their target audiences, even as consumers alter their mobility and purchasing patterns. The outdoor industry overall has returned to growth, and we believe we can grow revenue in excess of real GDP and traditional media as a result of our business transformation efforts. The resilience our business has demonstrated throughout the pandemic is certainly a strong and tangible data point. This resilience is further supported by the macro environment where advertisers are being overexposed to digital and challenged by non-sports linear TV. Our continuing push to add intelligence, addressability, and attribution will serve to strengthen Adafone's role as the last mass visual medium. Our ability to drive cash conversion rounds out the reasons we're excited for the future. As you can see in our 2021 results, incremental revenue leads to strong cash conversion, particularly in our America's business, and we believe we have a powerful engine for cash generation as we drive revenue growth while continuing to operate efficiently. Looking ahead, We believe our long-term outlook remains very positive, and we remain committed to our strategic roadmap, which includes accelerating our digital transformation, improving customer centricity, and driving executional excellence. Today, I'll unpack our three primary digital transformation initiatives. First, we have continued to grow our digital footprint, which is central to our long-term growth strategy. From perspective, digital led the rebound in 2021 and was up 66% in the fourth quarter and up 41% for the full year. In the US, we deployed 94 larger format digital billboards, giving us a total of more than 1,500 digital billboards in 2021. Combined with our smaller format digital displays in airports and on shelters, we have a total of more than 4,000 digital displays across the United States. And in Europe, we added 1,361 digital displays in 2021 for a total of over 17,500 digital displays now live. In the year ahead, we are aiming to deploy a similar number of digital billboards in the US and digital displays in Europe, which will further expand the addressability of our portfolio. And we are investing in the team and infrastructure to accelerate that process. Second, we have continued to up-level our radar offering through a range of partnerships that have further elevated our analytics capabilities and our ability to measure the impact of our assets. Radar is now well established in the U.S., and in the past year we introduced Radar for audience proximity planning in our major European markets. We believe this has been a contributor to the rebound of our business. Radar offers advertisers an easier way to unlock the value of out-of-home advertising by applying approaches and strategies traditionally applied in the online world to the physical world's largest screens. Our ability to deliver a valuable set of actionable insights to advertisers is enabling our sales team to focus more on selling creative ideas that effectively reach the demographics that advertisers want to reach. Over time, we expect to continue to attract new advertisers and broaden our discussions with our customers beyond the locations of our outdoor assets to include, as well, the value of specific audiences and consumer behaviors. We are demonstrating our ability to influence purchasing decisions even as consumer mobility patterns change. This is a key outcome driven by the investments we've made in our platform. And third, we're continuing to build on our programmatic presence. Through our integration with multiple DSPs and SSPs, our digital out-of-home platform is increasingly accessible to digital advertising buyers through the same buy-side platforms they utilize to spend their digital budgets. This was an example of our digital transformation and customer centricity pillars working in tandem, using technology and partnerships to open our assets to new buyers and budgets. While it's still a small component of our results, revenue from programmatic increased substantially in the past year, and we expect it will continue to advance in the year ahead. Our expectation is based on the strong evidence that advertisers value the programmatic option from their behavior with digital display, video, and most recently, CTV. I'll address our other strategic pillars, customer centricity and executional excellence, in future calls. But if you refer to slide five, you can see a few examples of successful campaigns driven by all three of our strategic pillars. In summary, as we continue to execute on our initiatives, we believe we will strengthen our ability to attract more advertisers to our platform and gain share from other media as we drive growth in the out-of-home medium. At the same time, we remain focused on further demonstrating the operating leverage in our model through profitable growth, while pursuing accretive opportunities and strengthening our balance sheet. Finally, as we announced in December, we've also commenced the process of evaluating strategic alternatives for our European business as part of our focus on optimizing our portfolio. Europe performed very well in the second half of 2021 and is positioned well for our strategic review, including a possible sale. With that, let me turn it over to Brian to discuss our financial results as well as our guidance.