Getty Images Holdings, Inc.

To all sites on hold, we appreciate your patience and ask that you please continue to stand by. Good afternoon and welcome to Getty Images' first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Today's call is being recorded. We have allocated one hour for prepared remarks and Q&A. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Stephen Kanner, VP of Investor Relations and Treasury at Getty Images. Thank you. You may begin.

Good afternoon and welcome to the Getty Images' first quarter 2024 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, and free cash flow. We use non-GAAP measures in some of our financial discussions as we believe they represent our operational performance and underlying result of our 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'll open the call for your questions. With that, I will hand the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Craig Peters.

Thanks, Stephen. And thank you to everyone for joining Getty Images' first quarter earnings call. I will touch on our performance and progress at a high level before Jen takes you through the full first quarter financial results. As expected, our financial performance in the first quarter was soft due to macroeconomic challenges we outlined in our last call. Residual impacts from the Hollywood strikes and the pressured agency business. Within editorial, we also faced a tougher year-on-year compare, with Q1 of 2023 being the only quarter of year-over-year editorial growth before the strike impacts impacted the balance of the year. For the first quarter, 2024 revenue was $222.3 million. representing a year-on-year decrease of 5.7% on a reported and currency-neutral basis. Adjusted EBITDA came in just over 70.2 million for the quarter, down 7.9% reported, or 7.7% currency-neutral, and representing 31.6% of revenue. On April 1st, we closed on and funded the acquisition of Motorsport Images. Motorsport Images represents a truly iconic archive of automotive imagery and video that augments Getty Images' existing offerings. Motorsport Images also brings deep relationships across racing series such as Formula E, teams such as McLaren Racing, races, and sponsors. In combination with Getty Images' established position as the official photographic partner of Formula One, We are excited for what this edition can offer the growing number of motorsport stakeholders. Continuing on the content front, we were pleased to announce renewals with Bloomberg and the English Football Association. Earlier this week, we exclusively covered the Met Gala for a sixth consecutive time. We also added new content partnerships with the Saudi Pro League, Visual Capitalist, FilmPak, Spekti, and Niche Sport Media. The motorsport acquisition and these partners stand as a testament to our continued commitment to deliver the very best visual content to our customers. Looking forward, the Olympic torch is now lit and on its way to Paris, where we are once again the official photographic agency of the International Olympic Committee. But before Paris, we have the upcoming UEFA Euro 2024 tournament, where we are the official photographer supplier for UEFA. add in the global election cycle, and our teams are busy doing what they do best. On the topic of doing it best, our expert team was recognized by industry peers across a range of categories and award ceremonies during the quarter. This year, our team was honored with over 40 awards of excellence in categories including news, sport, and politics at ceremonies such as the White House News Photographers Association Awards, the SJA British Sports Journalism Awards, and the NPPA's Best Photojournalism Awards. We were excited to add Southern University and A&M College in Louisiana, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and Delaware State University as partners in our Historically Black Colleges and Universities, HBCUs, program that provides funding towards the digitization of HBCUs photographic libraries. This program continues to preserve and surface rarely seen archival photography, as well as contemporary news, sport, and entertainment coverage that is additive to our customers. On the generative AI front, we continue to expand our commercially safe generative AI offerings in partnership with NVIDIA, adding the tool to iStock, launching new capabilities such as in-painting and out-painting, and we started rolling out generative AI capabilities across our free shot creative library. a powerful combination that allows customers to quickly secure the exact imagery to meet their needs while benefiting from the quality, depth, breadth, and creativity embedded in our creative library. It is still early days, but we're seeing positive engagement, hearing positive feedback, and seeing early signs of how this adds to our business with about half of those purchasing AI plans not having previous spend with the business. At NVIDIA's GTC conference in March, we announced our upcoming custom fine-tuning capabilities. Starting this month, we will offer enterprise services to custom fine-tune the NVIDIA Edify Foundation model to a company's brand and visual style. As a part of custom fine-tuning, we will also release a collection of APIs that provide finer control over image output, one of the biggest challenges in generative AI. Our gender API tools are already being used by leading creatives and advertisers at Dentsu, McCann, and WPP. We're excited for the balance of the year, and now I'll turn the call over to Jen to take you through the more detailed financials.