OUTFRONT Media Inc.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Outfront Media first quarter 2024 earnings call. My name is Harry, and I will be your conference operator today. If you'd like to enter the queue for questions, you may do so by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. It is now my pleasure to hand you over to Stefan Biesmann to begin. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining our 2024 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 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 our 2023 Form 10-K and our March 31, 2024 Form 10-Q, which we expect to file tomorrow. We will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures on the call. Any references to OIBDA made today will be on an adjusted basis. Reconciliations of OIBDA and any 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 Jared.

Thank you, Stefan, and thank you, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. We're pleased to share our first quarter results today, which came in broadly as we expected when we last spoke in February. As you can see on slide three, which summarizes our headline numbers, the year is off to a solid start, with total consolidated revenue growing 3.2% during the quarter, reflecting steady growth in billboard and impressive return to growth in transit. Adjusted EBITDA was up more than 10% year over year, driven by healthy improvements in both billboard and transit. Much of this improved EBITDA converted to AFFO, which more than doubled to 23 million in our seasonally smallest quarter. Slide four shows our segment results, with total US media revenue increasing 3.5% year over year. Other was down 2.6%, given much lower digital equipment sales during the quarter, which offset solid Canadian revenue growth of 5.7%. On slide five, you can see our US media revenues in more detail. Billboard revenues were up 2.5%, but would have been higher if you take into account condemnation revenues from both periods that we highlighted on our last call in February. Local continues to perform exceptionally well, with particularly strong performances at Atlanta, Dallas, and signs of recovery in San Francisco. Further, our recently acquired assets in Portland have picked up a nice head of steam. Transit revenue was up 7.7% versus the prior year. The improved revenues in transit were led by the MTA and broad-based in nature, driven both by local and national, a wide array of ad categories spanning across all regions. The breakdown of our local and national revenues in our US business can be seen on slide six. As in recent quarters, local was the primary driver of growth up 7.5% during the quarter, while national declined by 2.3%, primarily due to weaker billboard trends in a couple of our larger markets. Given this, our local-national split of 62% to 38% was more skewed towards local than the more typical 55-45. On a consolidated basis, our best performing categories in the first quarter were legal services, retail, service providers, government political, and entertainment. On the weaker side were auto, utilities, real estate, travel, and health and medical. Slide 7 illustrates our solid U.S. billboard yield growth, up 3.3% year-over-year, reaching just under $2,600, the first quarter record. The largest drivers of this yield growth remain our digital conversions, rate, and higher automated transaction revenue. Slide 8 highlights our strong digital performance, with revenue growing 8.3% in the quarter, representing 31% of our total revenues, up from 30% last year. Digital billboard was up 5.6% while transit was up 16.7%, obviously fueled by the MTA. Automated revenues in the quarter represented 14% of our digital revenues in the quarter, up from 8% in last year's comparable quarter. With that, let me now hand it over to Matt to review the rest of our financials.