OUTFRONT Media Inc.

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Outfront Media First Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Stephan Beeson, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining our 2022 First 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 2021 Form 10-K and our March 31, 2022 Form 10-Q, which we expect to file 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. 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. It's great to be here sharing our first quarter results, which came in stronger than we anticipated when we spoke last in February. Many of the positive trends we previously noted continued into the start of 2022 and indeed through to today. Demand for our billboards has never been hotter. And given the flexibility of digital, we continue to book late, incremental business. This is reflected in our increase in billboard yields and transit revenues continue to improve as employers increasingly encourage their teams to join them in the office, at least part of the time. These trends, combined with the terrific efforts of our employees, led to our strong revenue results, the details of which can be seen on slides three and four. Total revenue grew 44% ahead of our low 40s expectation. U.S. media was up an identical 44% year over year and 5% ahead of our 2019 level on a consolidated basis. We continue to see strong revenue growth in virtually all of our regions for both billboard and transit, but our performance in large markets was exceptional, with New York and L.A. being two of our best performers in Q1. Other, which consists mostly of Canada, was up 40% versus the prior year. Our strong revenue growth led to a nearly 60 million year-over-year improvement in both OIVDA and AFFO, which grew to 70 million and 36 million respectively. On slide five, you can see a more detailed look at our U.S. media revenues. Billboard grew by 33 percent from last year, but even more impressively, it was up around 20 percent versus the same quarter in 2019. Transit also accelerated its year-over-year performance up 115% in Q1 compared to the 101% observed in Q4. Transit revenues continue to face the headwind of lower ridership, but we were again pleased to see the New York MPA's revenue recovery outpacing ridership growth when both are measured against the same period of 2019. Indeed, the positive gap between these two widens, which is a trend that gives us further confidence in our expectation of 2019 transit revenue levels being achieved next year. Turning to slide six, we can see the breakdown of local and national revenues in our business. National growth outpaced local again this quarter, up 59% year over year compared to local's 36%. National transit was up an outstanding 154%, as large advertisers return to the subways and buses in force. Billboard was strong across both sets of advertisers, with national up 39% and local up 30%. One of the most encouraging trends for our company is our impressive US billboard yield growth, as seen on slide seven. Over $2,300 is a Q1 record, a 35% increase from last year and 25% above Q1 2019. While occupancy has improved from last year's first quarter, the largest contributor to our yield growth is rate, which was significantly ahead versus both 21 and 19. Looking deeper into digital on slide eight, Digital revenue grew more than 90% in the quarter and was 29% of our total revenue versus 22% last year. Digital revenues continue to be held by increased yield, new inventory, and incremental late booking revenues, which expand our selling window. This trend was well illustrated in Q1, as we booked a large contract on March 24 that added nearly half a million dollars to our first quarter revenues. Billboard Digital grew 65%, and Transit Digital continued to accelerate versus last quarter, and more than quadrupled from the soft comparison last year. Unsurprisingly, Digital Transit continues to be led by the New York MTA, with demand returning and increased digital inventory at the stations and the beginning stages of rail car deployment. We continue to be especially excited about the digital future of the New York MTA. Let me now hand over to Matt to review the rest of our financials.