OUTFRONT Media Inc.

Hello and welcome to the Outfront Fourth Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Harry and I'll be coordinating your call today. If you'd like to ask a question today, you may do so by pressing style 1 on your telephone keypad. And I'll now hand you over to Stéphane Bisson, Vice President of Investor Relations at Outfront to begin. Stéphane, please go ahead.

Good afternoon and thank you for joining our 2023 Fourth Quarter Earnings Call. With me on the call today are Jeremy Mail, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Matthew Siegel, 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 slide presentation that you can find on the investor relations section of our website, outfront.com. After today's call has been concluded, an audio archive replay will be available there as well. This conference call may include forward-looking statements, relevant factors that could from these forward-looking statements are listed in our earnings materials and in our SEC files, including our 2022 Form 10-K, as well as our 2023 Form 10-K, which we expect to file this week. We will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures on this call. Any references made to OIDDA will be on an adjusted basis. Reconciliations of OIDDA and other non-GAAP financial measures are in the appendix of this slide presentation, the earnings release, and on our website. also includes presentations of prior period reconciliation. Let me now turn the call over to Jeremy.

Thanks Stefan and good afternoon everyone. We're pleased to be here sharing our fourth quarter results and 2024 outlook. Before digging into Q4, I'd like to quickly highlight some of our accomplishments from 2023. Revenues finished up 3% year over year on an organic basis with both US media and other, which is essentially our business in Canada, up by the same rate. Our US billboard business, by far our largest in terms of revenue, was up 4% for the year on an organic basis. As has been the case for the last couple of years, this growth was predominantly driven by higher rates resulting from robust demand for billboard advertising and our expanding digital revenues. Also contributing significantly to our billboard growth was the continued impressive performance of our automated sales platforms, including programmatic. These channels comprised approximately 16% of our digital revenues in the fourth quarter, up from 10% in the first quarter in single digits in 2022. In October, we announced the sale of our Canadian business to Bell for 410 million Canadian dollars, or around 300 million US, subject to certain adjustments. We expect this transaction will close in the first half of this year. I'd also like to mention the achievements of our creative team, X-Labs, which was awarded two Cannes Lions, one gold and one bronze, at the International Festival of Creativity. for our partnership with Google and Gorillaz. The awards honored the team for transforming Times Square into a live stage for a revolutionary music performance by the award-winning virtual band Gorillaz. This event truly showcased the evolutionary potential of the out-of-home industry. So now let's turn to our fourth quarter results, and you can see the headline numbers on slide three. Consolidated revenues grew 1.3% towards the higher end of the guidance we provided in November, while OIPDA was $152 million and AFFO was $108 million. Slide 4 shows our segment results, with total U.S. media revenue increasing 1.1% year-over-year, other, which consists mostly of Canada, was up 5.9%. On slide five, you can see our U.S. media revenues in more detail. Billboard revenues were up 3 percent with growth in all four of our regions, but stronger performances in the east and the south. And I'm pleased to call out our New York, Houston, Dallas, Orlando, Kansas City, and national teams as these markets displayed exemplary growth leading our billboard geographies. Transit revenue was down 4 percent versus the prime year. The entire decline in the quarter was due to weaker tech, financial, and entertainment. Though the media strike finally ended in early November, the fall primetime TV season was effectively pushed entirely out of the quarter. On a consolidated basis, our best performing categories in Q4 were CPG, legal services, education, and retail. On the weaker side were technology, government political, financial services, and, of course, entertainment. The breakdown of local and national revenues in our U.S. business can be seen on slide six. Local grew 4.5 percent during the quarter, while national, which was more heavily impacted by the weaker tech and entertainment verticals I noted earlier, declined by 3 percent. As a result, 43 percent, 57 percent national-local split during the quarter, was a bit more locally skewed than our more typical 45-55. Slide 7 shows our solid US billboard yield growth up around 3% year-over-year and topping 3,000 a month for the first time. The largest drivers of this yield growth remain our digital conversions, rate, and higher programmatic and other automated transaction revenues. Slide 8 highlights our strong digital performance, with revenue growing 9% in the quarter, digital revenue representing nearly 36%, but total digital revenues up 33%, up from 33% last year. Digital billboard was up about 10.6%, again fueled by our automated sales channels and new inventory, while transit was up 4.5%. Let me now hand over to Matt to review the rest of our financials. Thanks, Jeremy, and good afternoon.