OUTFRONT Media Inc.

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

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining our 2021 fourth 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 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 on the investor relations section of our website, outfrontmedia.com. After today's call has concluded, an audio archive will be available there as well. This conference call may include forward-looking statements. Relevant factors that could 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 and our 2021 quarterly reports, as well as our 2021 Form 10-K, which we expect to file this week. We will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures on this call. Any references to OIBDA made today will be on an adjusted basis. Reconciliations of OIBDA 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, Stephan. And thank you everyone for joining us today. We just heard from Stéphane Bisson, our new Vice President in Investor Relations, who we are delighted to have joined us in mid-November from sell side research covering out of home. Seems like Stéphane has chosen a good time to join out front and indeed our industry. It's great to be here today and share my enthusiasm for our recent results and optimism and confidence for 2022. Our fourth quarter was even stronger than we expected and communicated on our call in November, as momentum continued right through the end of the year and indeed into 2022. Billboard and transit were sharply ahead again, and our diversified portfolio of clients enabled us to keep demand high, even as certain parts of the economy reacted to short-term changes in consumer behavior and municipal guidelines. You can see the highlights on slide three. Total revenue grew 38% above our low 30s expectation. Business continues to book later within each quarter, in particular due to the flexibility of digital inventory that enables us to write business on very short notice. Once again, this growth was seen on all products across our company, with the U.S. billboard up 27% from 2020 and transit and other revenue doubling year on year. We are seeing strong performance in almost all of our geographies, large and small, in both billboard and transit. We were especially encouraged by gradual ridership gains in various transit franchises during the fourth quarter prior to mid-December when the Omnicom variant concerns quite reasonably put a short-term pause on that trend. We are pleased to see audience improvement resuming again as more companies and employees return to their offices. This strong revenue performance further demonstrates our attractive operating leverage with OIBDA and AFFO growth rates more than double and triple, respectively, that of our revenue growth. We also far surpassed our full year AFFO guidance about which Matt will go into in more detail and also provide our outlook for 2022 AFFO. And I also want to make sure everyone noticed our earlier press release announcing that our board of directors has raised our quarterly common dividend to 30 cents per share starting this quarter. Our performance and outlook for 2022 encourages us to bring the dividend closer to our pre-pandemic level, and this is a major step towards that goal. Slide four highlights that our revenue growth was driven by our U.S. media segment, which grew 39% for the quarter. Other, which consists almost entirely of Outfront Canada, grew almost 24% despite some continued lockdowns. On slide five, You can see a more detailed look at our US media revenues. Billboard grew by 27% from last year, but even more impressively, it was up around 11% versus the same quarter in 2019, a significant widening compared to the 2% achieved in the third quarter. Transit also accelerated its year-over-year performance, more than doubling prior year revenue, which was obviously impacted by lower ridership in 2020. In New York, our largest transit market, daily subway ridership eclipsed 3 million people again, and we're also pleased to see transit revenue recovery outpace the ridership recovery when both are measured against the same periods in 2019. Turning to slide six, where we can see US media sources of revenue. We noticed that national business growth again laid our overall growth and was up almost 47% from last year. This represents larger advertiser interest in our billboard inventory with national transit revenue almost more than double 2020's level. Our local US business, which has been less volatile through the pandemic, also performed extremely well. growing 34% this quarter, with impressive growth in both billboard and transit. Notably, our mix returned to our more typical 55%, 45% local-national split in Q4. Another really positive indicator for our company is the large increase in yield that you can see on slide seven. $2,750 represents a 29% increase from last year, and almost 15% above the comparable quarter in 2019. Strong demand for our billboards is helping us push both occupancy and price higher, and we think there's further room for improvement in both. Focusing further on digital on slide eight, Digital revenue grew more than 70% in the quarter to about 31% of total revenue as a result of increased yield, new inventory, and the opportunity for later incremental bookings. Billboard Digital grew an impressive 46% and Transit Digital continued its acceleration from last quarter and more than tripled its pandemic impacted level from last year. Transit was led by New York MTA performance with improving demand and more digital inventory above and below ground. Our digital opportunity is hugely exciting and a great indicator for our future. To complete the revenue picture on slide nine is other, primarily Canada, where we had good growth in the quarter, that was, again, somewhat impacted by government restrictions. Let me now hand it over to Matt to review the rest of our financials.