OUTFRONT Media Inc.

Good day and welcome to the fourth quarter and full year 2020 earnings conference call. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Greg Lundberg. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining our 2020 fourth quarter and full year earnings call. On the call today are Jeremy Mail, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Matt Siegel, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. After a discussion of our financial results, we'll open the lines up as usual for a question and answer session. Our comments today will refer to the earnings release and the slide presentation that you can find in the investor relations section of our website, outfrontmedia.com. And after today's call is concluded, an audio archive will be there as well. This conference call may include forward-looking statements, relevant factors that could cause actual results of different material from these forward-looking statements or listed in our earnings materials, and in our SEC filings, including Our 2019 Form 10-K, our 2020 quarterly reports, as well as our 2020 10-K, which will be filed tomorrow. We will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures on this call. Any references to OIBDA made today will be on an adjusted basis, and reconciliations of OIBDA and other non-GAAP financial measures are in the appendix of the slide presentation, the earnings release, and also on our website. I will now turn the call over to Jeremy and Matt.

Thanks, Greg. Good afternoon, everyone. And again, thank you for joining us today. Let's begin with a quick look at some key figures on slide three. Total revenues were down 31% or 29% on an organic basis, slightly better than our guidance. US billboard improved more than we anticipated, driven in particular by positive growth in digital billboards. On the transit side, where ridership is still lagging, Our revenue declines were largely unchanged. Like you, we are very encouraged by developments surrounding vaccinations, the lifting of restrictions, sports coming back, and a gradual return to normal. And we look forward to posting growth in the second quarter and the rest of the year. Our cost initiatives helped drive another contraction in the EBITDA loss rate to 41%, and FFO to 53%. Both of these were nicely ahead of expectations for the quarter due to our better billboard results. If you turn to slide four, the overall shape of our recovery out of the pandemic continues to improve on every metric in this table. Also notable here is that we generated improved free cash flow and increased our cash position once again. Now let's look at revenues in a little more detail on slide five. This is a new view of our US billboard business, broken down into a couple of different pieces. Going into the pandemic, we saw digital revenues decline more quickly than static, and we told you that digital would likely recover more quickly on the other side. Well, they did, as you see here in the yellow line, which returned to growth. It's a great 2020 trajectory, reflecting increasing confidence and some terrific new digital inventory. You may also recall that last quarter we mentioned that our smaller markets were down just 14%. We thought it might be helpful to show graphically that this contracted to just 4% this quarter, as you can see from the purple line. When you look at our larger markets, the blue line, The performance is lower, reflecting lockdowns and restrictions that have particularly impacted larger cities, including New York and Los Angeles. Clearly, the slope of all of these lines is very positive, and everything has been moving in the right direction. Moving on to slide six, we show a similar view of US transit. Obviously, it's not the same slope as Billboard, but it has been heading slowly in the right direction. So far, rail audiences have been stubborn to return, but with every week of low infection rates and increased vaccinations, the potential for meaningful ridership recovery increases. And it's worth noting on the top left of this chart just how strong the performance was in 2019 when we grew transit by 21%. I'll talk more about recovery later on this call, but first let's look at the rest of our revenue picture. Bringing a closer look at our U.S. numbers on slide seven, billboard was down just 13%, while transit lagged considerably, down 65%. Ridership was and remains the issue. You can see our national and local on slide eight, down 36% and 24% respectively. Obviously, transit weighs heavily on these, and the loss rate in local was considerably better on billboard than on transit. National was similar down on both, but again more in transit. There were certain important categories that simply weren't in the out-of-home market, entertainment and travel being the most obvious ones. Slide nine shows an 11% decline in our total billboard yield, which was another solid sequential improvement Driven by both static and digital. In fact, our digital yield decline was only in the single digits. Digital is hugely important to our growth strategy. Guide 10 shows that digital was over 25% of our total company revenues in the quarter, a record level for us. We built some new locations and are starting to see some early benefits from programmatic, which we are bullish on. Digital in transit remains a story of the low ridership levels. As audiences bounce back, we expect to monetize it as well as we have historically. Our full motion video screens were one of the most in-demand media products in the market before the pandemic, and there's every reason to believe they will be as audiences return. To complete our revenue picture for the quarter, slide 11 shows our other business. The key takeaway here is an 18% decline in Canadian billboards and their recovery has somewhat mirrored what we've seen here in the U.S. So let me now hand over to Matt.