Comscore, Inc. Q1 FY2021 Earnings Call

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to comScore's First Quarter 2021 Financial Results. At this time, all participants' lines are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. Please be advised, that today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Jackie Marcus. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Elaine. Before we begin our prepared remarks, I'd like to remind all of you that the following discussion contains forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include comments about our plans, expectations, and prospects and are based on our view as of today, May 6, 2021. We disclaim any duty or obligation to update our forward-looking statements to reflect new information after today's call. We will be discussing non-GAAP measures during this call for which we have provided reconciliations in today's press release and on our website. Our actual results in future periods may differ materially from those currently expected because of the number of risks and uncertainties, including those related to the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic impact. These risks and uncertainties include those outlined in our 10-K, 10-Q and other filings with the SEC, which you can find on our website ir.comScore.com or at www.sec.gov. I'll now turn the call over to comScore's Chief Executive Officer, Bill Livek, Bill?

Thank you, Jackie, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. The completion of the recapitalization transaction in the first quarter has substantially eliminated our outstanding debt and provided us with the financial flexibility to invest in next-generation products. And we are doing just that, comScore is capitalizing on the opportunity to help the media business across both traditional and new direct-to-consumer platforms to more effectively use comScore's services to run their business, acquire new customers and sell their advertising. We believe that we have the best information needed to leap to the forefront of video measurement in the digital and television industries. Our results are stable, predictable, and reliable. In comScore's approach to cross-platform measurement, we leverage intelligence from various data collection techniques, including our digital census, set-top box devices, smart TV data, and our panels. Each of these sources provides different information about content consumption and advertising exposure. Additionally, we are taking action to enter new markets that I will be sharing with you on future calls. We are also recapturing customers given our substantially more advanced, privacy-focused solutions. We believe our potential to deliver improvements in both our revenue and our bottom line has not been fully appreciated and in fact expect that to change during the course of 2021 and beyond. The renewal and expansion of our ViacomCBS agreement with comScore, as a currency, best demonstrates the marketplace appetite for currency diversification in advertising sales. In many areas, our business is beginning to see improvements, while movies continue to be impacted by the pandemic in the first quarter. We are optimistic that we will begin to see recovery as soon as the coming quarter. Our local and national television business continues to perform well. We continue to gain momentum with advertising agencies who are increasingly embracing our advanced audience metrics and rallying around our TV currency because of our innovation, stability, and precision, as well as the inclusion of Comcast's de-identified set-top box data. We continue to focus on improving our digital offerings. Much of the decrease in our digital business is from non-US customers, but we expect our US-based customers, primarily our large enterprise and mid-market clients, to offset the decline as the year progresses. Additionally, as I mentioned earlier, we are making enhancements to our suite of products that should result in new customers, as well as the return of previous customers later this year. We also received video viewability accreditation from the Media Rating Council, also known as the MRC, for integrated third-party measurement on Facebook and Instagram, which should benefit our digital product suite. Turning to our first quarter financial results, we continue to be encouraged by many products that experienced solid growth year-over-year while simultaneously reducing many operating expenses. In the long-term, we believe our investments in data inputs and the new commercial relationships that we have signed will generate increased adjusted EBITDA from higher revenue and expanded margins, Greg will cover the first quarter results in detail later in the call. On the national television front, we are excited about new opportunities presented by the addition of Comcast's de-identified set-top box data. We expanded the number of highly targeted networks in our national service, and we signed two new networks deals this quarter. Our efforts to expand our connected television measurement footprint are starting to bear fruit. We are squarely positioned to take advantage of the opportunity the connected TV marketplace presents. We expect to expand into additional markets in the second quarter, which should increase revenue in the back half of 2021. CTV information is very important, but it is the combination of CTV information integrated with our full census media footprint that contains the real power of unduplicated reach and frequency for planning and buying. We saw a double-digit year-over-year increase in the first quarter in our activation products, and we're excited about our connected TV contextual advertising solutions for both on-demand and live-streaming. With all of these new and exciting products and our partnerships, activation revenue should continue its fast-growing trend and even pick up momentum as the year moves along. We are also focused on the expansion in new areas of measurement to increase our revenue and bottom line in 2021. In the first quarter, we partnered with the Outdoor Advertising Association of America and the Digital Place-based Advertising Association, known as the DPAA, to measure out-of-home media, which is a natural extension of our impression-based currencies. We signed our first client, Lightbox, and we expect to sign more in the near future, which we believe will contribute to revenue in the second half of 2021 as we ramp up services. We have announced and recently signed an important partnership with Dish Media Sling and have signed another cornerstone agreement that we're announcing on this call, an aggregator of credit and debit card transactions that we believe will begin to generate revenue during 2021 and will help our customers prove that their advertising is working. On Dish and Sling, the agreement includes the continued cross-platform measurement of advanced advertising and content via comScore's TV products. Lastly, in movies, while the first quarter showed lower revenue, we expect to see a rebound shortly now that US theaters are beginning to reopen at scale, as well as in countries such as the UK, Ireland, and France, which are expected to be reopened in the next couple of weeks. We also continue to see encouraging signs in areas that are open. In early April, for example, 'Godzilla vs. Kong' posted the highest box office sales since the pandemic started while the film was also released direct-to-consumer at the same time. We expect to benefit as both increased theater openings and new content bring people back to theaters. As I see it, this theatrical industry is now firmly positioning itself in recovery mode as is our revenue. In addition to the ongoing recovery, we continue to make good progress this quarter in bringing next-generation measurement products to the movie industry. We are now demonstrating our new delivery system to our customers and we expect to see benefits in late 2021 from our ability to combine information and analytics in one place, wherever consumers engage with a movie, whether it's at home or in a physical theater. Finally, I'd like to note some recent success we've had with our customer renewals and our wins across our product suite. In the first quarter, in digital syndication, we signed agreements with a number of customers. In national TV, we have new agreements with the Filipino Channel and Lightquest's Victory Channel and secured long-term renewals with NBCUniversal and ViacomCBS. In local, we signed new agreements with Sun Broadcasting, Fork Monitors Broadcasting, and others, and renewed agreements with the Television Advertising Bureau, CoxReps, Katz Television, KDOC in Los Angeles, Quincy Media, Sagamore Hill Broadcasting, and Independence Television. In summary, we made strong progress in all areas of our business in the first quarter. We now have the financial flexibility to invest in future growth products and are moving quickly to bring to market products that should increase our revenue in 2021. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Greg Fink. Greg, please.

Thank you, Bill. Today, we reported first quarter revenue of $90.3 million, up from $89.5 million in the first quarter of last year. The first quarter of 2021 marks the first quarterly year-over-year increase since the fourth quarter of 2018. Revenue from ratings and planning in the first quarter was $65.8 million, up from $63.5 million reported in the first quarter of last year. The increase compared to the same period in the prior year was the result of higher TV revenue and services related to our international cross-platform offering, partially offset by syndicated digital. TV continues to experience higher revenue compared to the prior year from new partnerships and delivering TV data as part of an expanded relationship with an enterprise customer. We also recorded $2.4 million in revenue for certain cross-platform services delivered in Europe related to the renewal of a multi-year agreement. Syndicated digital revenue was lower compared to the prior year quarter, primarily from lower international business. For the first quarter, TV revenue comprised 46% of our ratings and planning revenue, compared to 42% last year, while syndicated digital revenue comprised 45% of our ratings and planning compared to 50% in the first quarter of 2020. Revenue from analytics and optimization in the first quarter was $17.7 million, up from $15.5 million in the first quarter of last year. The increase was due to higher custom solutions revenue compared to the first quarter of last year and increased activation revenue. The first quarter of 2021 benefited from delivery of projects that customers delayed last year. Movies reporting and analytics revenue in the first quarter was $6.8 million compared to $10.5 million in the prior year quarter. Revenue continues to be impacted by theater closures and delayed releases due to the pandemic. As customers continue to hold off restarting services globally until further certainty of content and theater openings is clear, we believe revenue from our movie business has bottomed and will see revenue increase from this level starting in the second quarter. Turning to operating costs, our core operating expenses, which include cost of revenues, sales and marketing, R&D, and G&A, increased $4.7 million year-over-year in the first quarter. Cost of revenues increased by $6.9 million in the first quarter compared to the year-ago quarter due primarily to an increase of $3 million in data costs and $2.4 million related to the multi-year cross-platform services contract I described earlier. We do expect cost of revenues to continue to increase in 2021 from higher data costs as well as our additional data required to support our international expansion. However, we expect margins to improve over the course of the year as revenue increases. Selling and marketing expense declined $1.4 million compared to the year-ago quarter from lower travel and marketing costs, while R&D expense was flat. G&A expense for the first quarter decreased $1.1 million compared to the prior year quarter from lower operating costs in many areas of our administrative functions. We do expect our operating expenses to rise slightly from these levels as we invest in new product offerings that should lead to higher revenue later this year. In the first quarter, we reported a net loss of $36.4 million compared to a net loss of $13.2 million in the same period last year. The first quarter of 2021 includes a non-cash charge of $15.3 million we took upon closing of the transaction related to the extinguishment of debt. The first quarter of 2020 included a $4.7 million non-cash impairment charge related to certain properties. For the first quarter of 2021, adjusted EBITDA was $5.6 million compared to $6.4 million for the same period last year. Adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter was impacted by higher data costs, but benefited from generally lower operating costs as compared to the prior year. We ended the first quarter with total cash of $33.9 million compared to $50.7 million at December 31, 2020. The decrease in cash reflects the repayment of debt in the quarter as well as transaction costs associated with the completion of the recapitalization. Yesterday we entered into a $25 million revolving credit facility that will provide us additional liquidity and financial flexibility. Looking forward, we continue to expect 2021 revenue will increase between 3% and 5% over 2020 and that the increase will take hold beginning in the second half of 2021. In addition, we expect adjusted EBITDA margin to be between 6% and 8% for the year. Now let me turn it back to the operator to take questions.

And your first question comes from Dan Medina from Needham.

Good morning Greg. Thanks for taking the question. Just given where the first quarter came out, I was wondering if you can discuss how we might think of revenue growth cadence over the next three quarters and what will be the key growth drivers in each quarter? Thank you.

Thanks Dan. I appreciate the question. Look, we're really pleased with where the first quarter came out and we're very optimistic about the back half of 2021. While we haven't provided specifics regarding the 2021 quarters, we are very focused on revenue growth and continue to believe it's going to be in the back half of 2021 as we have outlined in our guidance to achieve the 3% to 5%.

Great. Thank you.

And now I would now like to turn the call back over to Bill Livek for closing remarks.

Thank you operator. We remain excited about the future and we'll continue to see our progress as it evolves through 2021. We look forward to sharing with you our progress on our next quarterly call and with press releases in the interim. Thank you for joining us today and trusting us with some of your investment dollars. Thank you and have a great evening.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.