OUTFRONT Media Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Outfront Media Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Linda Murad, Vice President of Financial Planning and Analysis. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon and thank you for joining our 2021 Third Quarter Earnings Call. With me on the call today are Jeremy Mail, 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 the lines up 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. After today's call is concluded, an audio archive will be available there as well. This conference call may include forward-looking statements, relevant factors that can cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements, are listed in our earnings materials and in our SEC filings, including our 2020 Form 10-K, our second quarter 2021 Form 10-Q, and our September 30, 2021 Form 10-Q, which should be filed tomorrow. We will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures on this call. Any references to a WBITR made today will be on an adjusted basis. Reconciliations of a WBIDA and other non-GAAP financial measures are in the appendix of the slide presentation, the earnings release, and on our website, which also includes presentations with prior period reconciliations. Let me now turn the call over to Jeremy.

Thanks, Linda, and thanks to you all for joining us today. I'm excited to be on this call and sharing the results of our continued recovery and the positive outlook we have for our business. This quarter, we've hit a key milestone with our billboard revenues surpassing our 2019 third quarter level and transit showing very steep quarterly growth. As you can see on slide three, total revenue grew 41%, which was again above our expectations. This impressive growth was across the board, with U.S. billboard up 32% from last year and transit revenue up 95% from last year, markedly higher than our earlier expectations. Our recovery was initially led by our midsize markets, and we are now seeing acceleration across all of our regions, with very few exceptions. While transit isn't yet back to 2019 levels, we're encouraged by ridership gains and national advertiser interest in reaching the millions of people who utilize our various franchises. It's good to see that our key transit markets revenue return is starting to over-index the gradual ridership recovery. This revenue improvement carries through our financial statements as OIBDA and FFO posted growth rates well above our revenue growth percentage. With this performance and current Q4 visibility, we now feel confident we will outperform our previous full year guidance by a significant margin, and we expect this momentum to continue into next year. I'll leave Matt to give you more details on that good news in a few minutes. Let's turn to slide four for a more detailed look at our U.S. media revenues. As mentioned earlier, billboard revenues were up 32%, reaching 102% of third quarter 2019 level. Transit revenues were up 96%, almost double the third quarter of 2020, which was heavily impacted by the pandemic. Transit ridership in New York City and Boston has now passed 50% of equivalent 2019 levels with return to school and people starting to return to their offices again. This improvement in audience has driven a steady improvement in revenue. Turning to slide five and to look at U.S. sources of revenue, you can see that national business growth has accelerated with a 55% gain. This is the first time since the start of our recovery that national grew faster than our local business. This is a great indicator for the future as our asset portfolio is strategically built to meet the growing demands of large advertisers and agencies. We expect this trend will continue over the next few quarters. Our local U.S. business also performed particularly well with a 33% increase this quarter. And more importantly, the billboard portion of our local business is 7% above the comparable 2019 third quarter level. This robust revenue recovery and shift in business mix towards national advertisers has driven yields higher across our billboard portfolio, as you can see on slide six. We were delighted to see a total yield of over $2,400, up 34% from last year, once again, above our 2019 third quarter level. We anticipate further yield improvement for the remainder of the year. Our digital business continues its strong recovery, as you can see on slide seven. Digital billboard grew 65% in the quarter, more than 2.5 times the impressive static growth rate of 23%, and digital transit grew almost 200%, albeit from a very low base in 2020. These growth rates are eye-catching, and we firmly believe digital will be a key growth driver of our business in the future. To complete the revenue picture on slide 8 is our other segment, which is primarily Canada. Performance across the board almost matched our U.S. business with growth of nearly 40% as Canada continues its rebound from tight government restrictions. Let me now hand it over to Matt to review the rest of our financials.