Getty Images Holdings, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to Getty Images' third quarter of 2023 earnings call. Today's call is being recorded. We have allocated one hour for prepared remarks and Q&A. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Stephen Kerner, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasury at Getty Images. Thank you. You may begin.

Good afternoon. And welcome to Getty Images' third quarter 2023 earnings call. Joining me on today's call are Craig Peters, Chief Executive Officer, and Jen Layden, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, we would like to remind you that this call will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are subject to various risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. which could cause our actual results to differ materially from these statements. These risks, uncertainties, and assumptions are highlighted in the forward-looking statement section of today's press release and in our filings for the SEC. Links to these filings and today's press release can be found on our investor relations website at investors.gettyimages.com. During our call today, we will also reference certain non-GAAP financial information, including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, adjusted EBITDA less capex, free cash flow, and currency neutral growth rates. We use non-GAAP measures in some of our financial discussions as we believe they assist investors in understanding the core operating results that management uses to evaluate the business. Reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP measures, as well as the description, limitations, and rationale for using each measure can be found in our filings with the SEC. After our prepared remarks, we will open the call for your questions. With that, I will hand the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Craig Peters.

Thanks, Stephen, and thanks to everyone for joining our Getty Images Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. I will start my remarks by addressing the recent court ruling with respect to claims by warrant holders following our D-SPAC. We disagree with the ruling. We believe Getty Images acted in line with our obligations under the warrant agreement and with federal securities laws. We are appealing the portion of the judgment in favor of the plaintiffs. To proceed with the appeal, we are securing a surety bond totaling 111% of the damages award. limiting any impact to our day-to-day operations. We expect to begin amortizing the annual cost of the surety bond in Q4. Jen will take you through the company's full third quarter financial results, but as usual, I will touch on her performance and progress at a high level. Third quarter 2023 reported revenue was $229.3 million. representing a year-on-year decline of 0.5% on a reported basis and a currency neutral decline of 1.3%. Our adjusted EBITDA finished at $80.3 million for the quarter. This reflects a reported year-on-year increase of 3.4% and a currency neutral increase of 2.5%. with EBITDA benefiting from disciplined actions taken and maintained since earlier this year to manage costs in the current environment. While it was good to see the settlement of the writer's strike, the actor's strike continued to equate to significantly reduced content production and PR activities across our media and entertainment customers for the entirety of Q3. While it's difficult to predict how quickly business can ramp up following last week's settlement of the actor strike, we expect to see an adverse impact related to the strike through at least the end of the year. With increased global uncertainty, we saw the U.S. dollar strengthen relative to our expectations, and we continue to see weakness across certain geographic and customer markets. As a result, our reported results lagged our estimates, and we expect the strong dollar to persist through the fourth quarter. We are also facing a tougher Q4 compare due to the unique timing of the 2022 Men's World Cup and the 2022 U.S. elections. As a result of these factors, Jen will take you through updates to our full year guidance. As a company, we have previously seen and navigated similar challenges over our almost 30-year history. We remain focused on our customers on our execution and on investing in the long term, but being cost disciplined in the short term in light of our near-term environment. So with that as a backdrop, I'd like to highlight some of the progress we made within the quarter. In partnership with NVIDIA, we launched our generative AI service at the end of the quarter. The service is truly unique and addresses fundamental customer needs. Our model is trained solely with Getty Images' best-in-class content addressing the legal risk that is pervasive in many other models that are trained with third-party intellectual property scraped from the web. We also believe this equates to higher quality outputs as a cake is only as good as its ingredients. With generative AI by Getty Images, users can be confident that the content they generate is safe to use in commercial settings and will not include any trademark brands, products, characters, or identifiable people. It also does not produce deep fakes or emulate the style of specific artists which we believe is valued by our editorial and creative customers, respectively. We are rewarding our contributors with an ongoing share of each and every dollar we earn from the service. Last, but certainly not least, the service and all of its outputs come with Getty Images uncapped indemnification. In terms of the economics, customers pay to generate versus download, which better aligns to our costs and recognize the value of ideation. Initial customer feedback and engagement with the service has been really positive. And we have already introduced new features to the service, such as being able to prompt in over 70 languages. And we're engaged with a limited set of customers to custom train models to their IP and brand needs. Alongside our amazing pre-shot offering and custom content, We're excited to offer a complimentary new service that helps our customers elevate their creativity, save them time, save them money, and does not expose them to legal risk. We continue to drive increases in our annual subscriber counts, primarily through iStock and Unsplash. We grew our annual subscribers by more than 88%, and more than 35,000 of those subscribers were from our targeted growth markets outside of North America and Western Europe. We renewed our agreement as the authorized photographic agency with the Rugby World Cup to deliver an industry-leading service in the creation and distribution of world-class sports content. Getty Images is the official photographer or photographic partner to over 120 of the world's leading sports governing bodies, leagues, and clubs who come to us for our industry-leading expertise in editorial operations, award-winning photographic talent, and unrivaled global distribution platform. Also in the quarter, we are pleased to partner with BBC Studios to launch a platform accelerating our archival supply chain. platform gives our customers the opportunity to search bbc archive content online and opens up access to more than 57 000 newly digitized programs the platform is a significant breakthrough making the bbc archival content more accessible for our customers around the world and a key progress item with our within our overall video growth strategy while it is a constant I would be remiss if I did not call out the efforts of our world-class team and partners who risk and sacrifice to cover events around the globe. Whether these are events and atrocities in the Middle East, the Ukraine, the drama in U.S. Capitol and courts, the extreme weather events or natural disasters, humanitarian and wildlife crises, the list goes on. I'm extremely proud of the work and the important role it plays to engage and inform the public. And with that, I'll hand over to Jen to take you through the more detailed financials.