Playmaker Capital Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Playmaker Capital Inc. Q1 2023 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Playmaker Chief Operating Officer Jake Cassaday. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much, and good morning. As mentioned, I am Jake Cassaday, and I am joined today by our Chief Executive Officer, Jordan Ganat, and our Chief Financial Officer, Mike Cook. Before I begin, I would like to remind you that today's call will include estimates and other forward-looking information from which our actual results could differ. Please review the cautionary language in yesterday's press release regarding various factors, assumptions and risks that could cause our actual results to differ. Furthermore, during this call, we will refer to certain non IFRS measures. These measures do not have any standardized meaning under IFRS and our approach in calculating these measures may differ from that of other issuers, and so these measures may not be directly comparable. Please see yesterday's press release for more information about these measures. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded and a replay will be available on Playmaker's website. An updated investor overview presentation is also now available on the website, inclusive of Q1 details discussed here. At this time, I would like to introduce Jordan Gannat, Chief Executive Officer of Playmaker.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our first quarter 2023 earnings call. Before we get into the first quarter discussion, I want to give a huge shout out to the Playmaker family for winning North American Sports Media Company of the Year presented by SBC last week in New York. SBC is an industry-leading events company that also operates the largest B2B news publisher for the sports betting and iGaming industry. We have started 2023 where we left off in 2022 with another strong quarter of organic growth and a keen focus on the integration and optimization of our teams. On our Q4 call, we highlighted that 2023 is about the pursuit of excellence and laid out the key areas of focus for the company this year against that objective. Those areas are cross-brand collaboration, integration and optimization, innovation and scale. While we are early into the year, our teams are delivering on all four of these areas. The scale of our overall audience continues to drive positive results across our various platform businesses, and the more we integrate them, the more value we will create. We have been focused on increasing our overall scale in the North American market, and in Q1 2023, North American user sessions on Playmaker Web properties increased 66% over Q1 2022. Yardbarker saw its average monthly sessions increase to over 20 million in Q1, an increase of over 100% versus Q1 2022. Daily Face-Off saw an increase in its traffic by more than 25% in Q1 2023 compared to Q1 2022, driven by enhanced performance since migrating to Playmaker-designed and managed front-end technology. We have been leaning into the diversification of our content, particularly with video podcasts. This ensures we are able to reach more fans more often in the formats they prefer, while increasing available inventory for advertisers. The Nation Network's podcast had an incredible quarter with record streams of 3.7 million, an increase of 197% over last year. The quality of the product has improved and our team's ability to monetize them with great partner integrations has continued to improve. Additionally, in the pursuit of additional cross-brand collaboration, we have now taken this playbook for launching video podcasts to Mexico, Chile, and Brazil with the launch of new Cracks, Red Goal, OneFootball, and Bull of the IP video podcasts that are already beginning to garner strong audience numbers. We continue to focus on moving up the value chain in terms of revenue generation from our properties by leveraging our scale. Direct sales in Q1 2023 were up 32% over 2022 and accounted for 49% of core media advertising revenue compared to 37% in 2022. The fastest growing segment for direct sales has been iGaming and Sportsbetting. Direct sales from this segment grew more than 71% in Q1 2023 versus Q1 2022, accounting for approximately 33% of core media sales in the quarter. New key partnerships with companies like Botano, MasterCard, Amazon, Betway, Athletic Brewing, and Boston Pizza continue to validate both the quality and relevance of the content that we create and the value of the audiences that we deliver across the entirety of our ecosystem of digital media assets. We mentioned in our Q4 call that the cyclicality of the affiliate business is such that Q4 and Q1 are the biggest quarters as they map closely to the sports calendar. Our affiliate business had a strong quarter benefiting from the launch of Ohio sports betting in January, the NFL playoffs and Super Bowl, March Madness, and the launch of the Massachusetts sports betting in March. We have high expectations for our affiliate business as we begin to look at leveraging Playmaker's geographic diversity and as new states launch in the US for both online sports betting and iGaming. Our teams have begun integration efforts with our media businesses and Wedge to unlock value by combining our vast audience with Wedge's user acquisition and conversion expertise. From an integration and optimization perspective, we created a new revenue operations center of excellence. The strategy here was to centralize our teams to drive revenue synergies across our ecosystem of media and affiliate brands. Led by Mike Bellum, the revenue operations team has direct oversight over all paid affiliate and web monetization activity. On innovation, during the quarter we successfully broadened our partnerships with the Argentine Football Association and the NBA and are leveraging our best-of-breed technology to support growth initiatives. The revenue operations and monetization team is actively tracking performance to ensure we are delivering for our partners and that the value of our audience is maximized. Our teams hit the ground running in 2023 with no let-up. Still lots to do, but I am encouraged with how the team has started out. I'll turn the call over to Mike to discuss our financial results in more detail and then come back to wrap up the call. Thanks, Jordan.