OUTFRONT Media Inc.

Good day and welcome to the second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Greg Lundberg. Please go ahead, sir.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our 2021 second quarter earnings call. With me in person on the call today are Jeremy Mayl, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Matthew Siegel, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. After a discussion of our financial results, we'll open up the lines for a question and answer session. Our comments today will refer to the earnings release and a 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 and relevant factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements are listed in in our earnings materials and in our SEC filings, including our 2024 10-K and our June 30, 2021 Form 10-Q, which should be filed tomorrow. We will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures on this call, and any references to OIVDA made today will be on an adjusted basis, and reconciliations of OIVDA and other non-GAAP financial measures are in the appendix of the slide presentation, the earnings release, and also on our website, which also includes presentations with prior period reconciliations. Let me now hand the call over to Jeremy.

Jeremy Leffler Thanks, Greg, and thank you for joining us today. It's great to get on an earnings call when the numbers are back in growth mode and when all the talk is about marketers racing to reach people emerging from their homes. Our numbers certainly proved this out for the second quarter, and we're feeling very optimistic about the rest of the year. As you can see on slide three, Our revenue grew 53% on an organic basis, well in excess of our expectations. The drivers of this impressive growth were U.S. billboard, especially digital, and transit, which was also stronger than we expected. This robust top line right across the board flowed nicely to adjusted IRBDA, which was up nearly fivefold, and AFFO moved well into the black. The strength of our business is continuing, and as we look at the second half, we have increasing confidence for the balance of the year. In fact, I'm going to steal a little bit of Matt's thunder here and tell you that he'll be raising our AFFO guidance later on this call. This confidence and positive outlook also allowed our board to resume a common dividend, which was announced this afternoon. Matt will also be talking about that later on the call. Let's turn to slide four for a more detailed view of our U.S. media revenues. Billboard revenues were up 50%, reaching 95% of our 2019 level. Transit revenues were up 56%. While this is certainly large in terms of percentage, remember, it's off very low numbers from last year, and transit ridership does continue to lag. But the audience is now recovering, and notwithstanding any possible impact from the Delta variant, we expect a further step up after Labor Day. Turning to slide five, it's nice to see 50% growth in both local and national. You may recall that national revenues led our decline last year. We expect them to lead our recovery this year. In fact, in our billboard business, national grew faster than local this quarter. As expected, our local business has been steadier throughout, and I'm pleased to say that our local revenues this quarter surpassed our Q2 level in 2019. This strong revenue growth naturally pushed up yields across our billboard portfolio, as seen on slide 6. We were pleased to see a total yield of over 2,200, up 53% from last year, and this is 99% of our 2019 second quarter level. We anticipate further yield improvement for the remainder of the year. You can see the recovery in our digital business on slide seven. The business came back strongly on both billboard and transit. Even more important than the growth rates you see here is the fact that we have more than recovered our 2019 second quarter digital billboard levels. In fact, our total growth on a two-year basis in the U.S. is 10%. Digital has been and will continue to be a great growth driver for this business. To complete our revenue picture for the quarter, slide 8 shows our other business, which primarily comprises our business in Canada. The recovery there was also very strong, with organic billboard revenues up 91%, which was great to see. It's worth noting that the reported decline was impacted by the sale of our sports marketing business last year, and we will lap this next quarter. Let me now hand over to Matt to review the rest of our financials.