OUTFRONT Media Inc.

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Outfront third quarter 2023 earnings conference call. My name is Sam and I will be your moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you'd like to ask a question, you can do so by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. I'd now like to turn the call over to Stephan Bisson with Outfront. Stephan, please go ahead.

Thank you, Sam. Good afternoon and thank you for joining for 2023. third quarter earnings call. With me on the call today are Jeremy Mayle, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Matthew Siebel, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. After a discussion of our financial results, we'll open 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, outfront.com. After today's call has concluded, a replay 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 but not limited to our 2022 Form 10-K and our September 30, 2023 Form 10-Q, which we expect to file tomorrow. We will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures on this call. Any references to OIDA made today will be on an adjusted basis. Reconciliations avoidance 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 on prior period reconciliation. Let me now turn the call over to Karen.

Thanks, Stefan, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We're pleased to be here today reporting our third quarter results, which came in pretty much as we indicated when we spoke three months ago. As you can see on slide three, which summarizes our headline numbers, total consolidated revenue was slightly up during the quarter. Adjusted EBITDA declined 5% year over year, principally due to weaker transit and other results. And AFFO was down primarily due to higher interest and lower EBITDA. Slide four shows our revenue results by segment. Total U.S. media revenues were slightly up on a reported basis year over year. Other, which consists mostly of Canada, was up 2% on an as reported basis and 4% on an organic constant dollar basis. While we're speaking of Canada, I want to briefly discuss the pending sale of our Canadian business, which you may have read about in our press release last week. On October 23rd, we announced that we entered into a share purchase agreement for the sale of our Canadian business with Bell Media. As previously disclosed in our NK, the purchase price is Canadian dollars 410, subject to adjustments, and we expect to close the transaction in the first half of 2024. This strategic transaction will provide our front with additional financial flexibility through the leveraging of our balance sheets. We look forward to continuing to work with our Canadian colleagues on the great business we've built together until the deal closes. So turning back to the quarter, you can see the components of our US media revenues in more detail on slide five. Billboard, which remains about 80% of revenues, grew 2.6%, with solid performance in most of our markets. Transit revenues were down 8.6% year-over-year, given lower national revenues, which I'll discuss in a bit more detail on slide six. Here you can see our local and national revenue performance. Our local business was strong, up 6% year-over-year, but this was largely offset by our national business. As we noted on the last call, national faced some headwinds during the quarter, with the writers' and actors' strikes curtailing entertainment ad spend and technology's year of efficiency pushing some advertisers to scale back their ad campaigns. As a result of the weaker national revenues, our local-national split was 58% to 42% on the quarter, more locally skewed than our typical 55-45 split. Slide seven illustrates our U.S. billboard yield, which grew nearly 3% year over year to $2,800. This improvement was driven primarily by an increased number of digital faces, which typically generate more dollars per board than our static inventory. Slide eight highlights our digital performance, with digital revenues growing 5.3% in the quarter and representing over 31% of our total revenue, up 150 basis points from last year. Digital billboard revenues were up nearly 7% versus the prior year, primarily because of new inventory. We added 57 digital billboards during the quarter, raising our total to 2,105. Digital transit was up 1%, again, due to an additional inventory compared to last year. On slide nine, you can see the results of our static revenues, which were down 2% year over year, with slight growth in billboard being offset by a decline in transit, which was largely driven by lower bus revenues, a result of the national headwinds we previously discussed. Though static billboard growth remains modest, the fact it continues to grow is notable given the challenging ad environment and the fact that we continue to convert many of our best static boards to digital. With that, let me now hand it over to Matt.