Earnings Call Transcript - SCOR Q1 2022

Operator, Operator

Good day ladies and gentlemen and thank you for being here. Welcome to the ComScore First Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. All participants are currently in a listen-only mode. After the presentations, we will have a question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. John Tinker. Please proceed, sir.

John Tinker, Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, operator. Before we begin our prepared remarks, I would 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 10, 2022. Our actual results in future periods may differ materially from those currently expected because of a number of risks and uncertainties. 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 or at www.sec.gov. 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 the score for which we have provided reconciliations in today’s press release and on our website. Please note that we will be referring to individual slides on this call, which are also available on our website. I will now turn the call over to ComScore’s Chief Executive Officer, Bill Livek. Bill?

Bill Livek, Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, John, and thank you all for joining us today. I’m very proud that we delivered another solid quarter of results in our first quarter. As a reminder, this is our first quarter operating under our new Solutions Group. Our focus is on measuring content and ads, with the goal of enabling the planning and activation of media in a privacy-forward way across all screens: television, connected TV or CTV, digital, mobile, and of course, the movies. We are pleased to report that we grew revenue 4% year-over-year to $94 million and adjusted EBITDA grew by 22% to $6.8 million versus $5.6 million a year ago. Some of the highlights in the quarter include NBCU certifying ComScore as a local TV currency provider across all of their owned and operated and affiliate group stations. Additionally, effective immediately, comScore will be used for local TV measurement currency. We also inked an enterprise deal with Sinclair for the licensing of our CCI service, ComScore Consumer Intelligence for local markets. This provides an unrivaled cross-platform view of consumer retail visitations and online shopping tied to television viewing behavior at the local market level. Our momentum continued in this current quarter with the expansion of great television for 10 of the recently acquired markets. We also continue to make progress in accelerating our privacy-forward offerings, including predictive audiences. We are partnering with IRI to bring their CPG audience segments into our activation solution. This provides best-in-class audience targeting within contextually relevant digital experiences in a cookie-free, privacy-forward manner. We are also happy with our progress to date on ComScore Campaign Ratings, or what we refer to as CCR. With CCR, advertisers can truly understand their audiences and advertising campaigns across platforms with deduplicated reach and frequency metrics that allow them to align their spend and achieve more specific and accountable campaign-specific KPIs and a higher return on their overall investment. Our CCR partnership with YouTube continues to progress. One highlight this quarter was a program where we measured cross-platform advertising performance around the Super Bowl. This included PC, mobile, and connected TV. The program involved 10 major brands across cars, travel, software, dining, and food service. ComScore CCR was the primary measurement used to specifically identify incremental advertising reach across YouTube before, during, and after the actual Super Bowl TV broadcast. On the digital side, with the integration of our social media service Sharable into our digital offerings, we have named Tanya Yuki as our EVP of Digital to focus on expanding our product solutions and driving revenue growth in this key strategic area for us in 2022. As most of you know, Tanya rejoined ComScore when we acquired Tracelytics in December of 2021. In the quarter, Warner Brothers Discovery announced that they would be launching their joint upfront with ComScore as an alternative currency provider with three very large national agencies. Also in the quarter, NBCU named ComScore as a certified provider for local currency measurement, the only provider they certified for local. In April, Comcast Cable’s ad sales division effectively announced they would use ComScore for local TV measurement as a currency, joining the growing ranks of TV players offering measurement alternatives to right deals on. In connection with our charter arrangement, Spectrum Reach has rolled out ComScore as their preferred television currency in all 89 markets, including New York and Los Angeles. With this, we believe more ad agencies and brands will switch to ComScore to buy TV advertising. Local stations continue to subscribe to ComScore for stable and reliable currency. It is also worth pointing out that local TV stations should benefit this year from an estimated $3 billion plus bump in political advertising, and many of them continue to be very vocal about actively looking for our new currency to base their advertising inventory transactions on. Also in the quarter, we expanded our relationship with Vizio TV, entering a multiyear agreement to continue our access to their unique CTD viewing data at the glass level. Within digital, our partnership with IRI brings their CPG segments into our activation offering. We believe this is a big win for both of our businesses. It provides IRI with a privacy-forward way to activate key segments in a cookie-free manner, and it provides ComScore with a key segment of CPG audiences that can be transacted on across the programmatic ecosystem at scale. Our ability to deliver a holistic view of both content and ad consumption throughout the home is a critical differentiator of what ComScore delivers for our clients every day. The combination of our census-based TV coverage, which includes more than 70 million TV sets, 35 million households, and nearly 13 million smart TVs, along with our census-based digital coverage and the industry’s only Total Home panel, is what sets ComScore’s ability to serve our customers apart. Regarding our CTV capability specifically, there are two ways in which you can get connected TV information at scale: one is directly from publishers via tagging or server-to-server integrations, or through ACR technologies from smart TVs. We do all of them. Unlike others who try out their CTV capability, ComScore measures both ad and content consumption. And because we have a combination of set-top box, panel, and CTV, we are able to deliver an unduplicated view of consumption. This isn’t a new offering for ComScore; we introduced our over-the-top measurement capabilities in 2015, and we have been collecting and reporting on a holistic view of media behavior for years, continuing our history of innovation and giving ComScore a leadership role in delivering a holistic product suite across content and ads. This is ComScore's competitive advantage: complete coverage in content and ads, and a very large installed base of both buyers and sellers of media that use our services every day to run their businesses. Despite all of the press in the marketplace regarding newly launched currency offerings, the reality is, there are only two companies that deliver the full suite of capabilities across the media landscape, period, and ComScore is one of them. Our census-based TV and digital scale, coupled with our Total Home panel, means that ComScore can deliver what no one else can: the ability to get a cross-platform view of digital, CTV, and linear consumption, where our clients can precisely reach their desired audiences in contextually relevant experiences. This can be done in a privacy-forward way through our activation products, allowing our clients to optimize their ad delivery as well as the measurement outcomes because of our ability to deliver deduplicated audience reach. It is clear that we have the most complete cross-platform offering along with the highest coverage of CTV, video content, and video ad inventory available in the market. Taking this a step further, in today’s privacy-forward market, the ad tech industry has struggled, finding cookie-free tactics that will allow them to maintain campaign performance and KPIs that advertisers have become accustomed to. Building on the contextual targeting foundation for brand safety, IAP category in keyword targeting, ComScore is reinventing contextual targeting with the addition of predictive audiences—contextually delivering targeting, making it privacy-forward and providing a crosswalk between audience behaviors and contextual signals. This is a massive step forward for the industry, enabling advertisers to maintain their KPIs without cookies. ComScore is leveraging this technology not only for our own audience information but complimentary for our data partners, providing them with a cookie-free path to surface their segments in the marketplace. Before turning it over to John, I want to reiterate that we are laser-focused on executing against our key priorities aimed at delivering profitable growth. ComScore measures content and ads. It is what we do best. The success that we are having across the markets we operate in with new client wins, new partnerships, and renewals with our long-standing media and agency clients gives us confidence that the opportunity is large for us. We are developing world-class products that are privacy-forward and cookie-free. We will be ready when the market shifts with our product offerings in this space. Returning to growth in digital is a key priority for us, and it is critical to our growth story going forward. Our product and our commercial focus here, aligned on the new Solutions Group, is just the beginning. Our currency efforts and momentum were evident in the market under parallel leadership that led us to the NBC announcement on local and our double-digit growth to start the year with our cross-platform Solutions Group. Finally, as I transition from CEO, I’m confident in our team’s leadership efforts and their ability to continue delivering against these priorities as we move throughout the year. And I could not be more excited about the opportunity that is in front of us.

Jon Carpenter, Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Bill. And it is good to be with everyone this evening. As Bill mentioned, we turned in a solid print for the quarter. Revenues of $94 million were up 4% versus the same quarter a year ago. Adjusted EBITDA of $6.8 million was up 22% versus a year ago. Diving into the Solutions Group a bit further, cross-platform solutions grew by 10% from $37.3 million in the first quarter last year to $40.8 million this year. Growth here was driven in large part by double-digit growth in our TV measurement efforts. Within that group, we also accelerated growth in our movies business, which grew by 20% year-over-year from $6.8 million in the first quarter last year to $8.2 million this year as the business continued to see strong recovery following the pandemic. Digital ad solution revenues of $53.1 million were essentially flat versus the same quarter a year ago, which included a one-time upfront revenue item. Growth in our activation offering was up 20%. Our custom digital offerings as well as execution were certainly key highlights in the quarter. All in all, we are pleased with the way we started the year from a revenue and EBITDA perspective, as well as from a cash perspective. And we are reaffirming our 2022 guidance for both revenue growth and the adjusted EBITDA margin rate. With that, I will turn it back over to Bill.

Bill Livek, Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, John. And I thank all of you for your support. And I thank you for trusting us with some of your investment. Operator, with that let’s open up the line for questions.

Operator, Operator

Our first question or comment comes from Jason Kreyer from Craig-Hallum.

Unidentified Analyst, Analyst

Hi guys. Colin Kelly here for Jason. I just had a couple of questions. So starting off, as you head here into upfront, what are your thoughts on ComScore’s ability to be more visible and transact this year?

Bill Livek, Chief Executive Officer

Well, that is a great question. There has been a lot more press releases, I think, than actual activity. I think, coming through the upfront, you are going to see ComScore playing a far more important role in the transacting of advertising. We are pretty excited about what we are hearing from our clients on that. I don’t know if there is anything else I can add to answer that question.

Unidentified Analyst, Analyst

And then just my second question here. So given the back end weighting of the year, what’s your confidence in the ramp-up here in 2022?

Bill Livek, Chief Executive Officer

Jon.

Jon Carpenter, Chief Financial Officer

Yes, I think like I said in my comments, we feel good about the way the year has started, delivering against what we said we would, which puts us in a good position to continue executing as we go throughout the year. So I would say we have got some real encouraging momentum here as we head into the last three quarters of 2022.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. Our next question or comment comes from the line of Matthew Thornton from Truist Securities. Your line is open.

Anthony Duplisea, Analyst

Hey, guys, it is Anthony Duplisea on for Matt, thanks for taking the question. How should we think about the impact of the Comcast NBC Universal deal on the full year guidance? Just in terms of normal impact, as well as cadence? And then apologies if I missed this already, but can you give us an update on the MRC accreditation process? And kind of where that stands?

Bill Livek, Chief Executive Officer

Yes, I will start with the MRC first. The MRC is progressing well. As you know, we are in the process for the accreditation for local and national TV services. Regarding how the announcement in local is affecting our guidance, clearly, it is positive. We see a lot of momentum in the local market. We are not just excited about it. I just came back from the National Association of Broadcasters conference. It was nice to meet station groups that we hadn’t seen since the lockdown in person, even though we have been on Zooms with them all the time. In the field, the momentum of the shifting not just with subscriptions, but to do deals, we see more local agencies signing on with us, and we see the usage in national agencies. So we feel really good. When it comes to guidance, I always turn that over to Jon to answer.

Jon Carpenter, Chief Financial Officer

Yes, look, I think the momentum we are seeing there with new business wins across both the local and national landscape have been encouraging. As you saw in the first quarter, we started the year strong with a nice double-digit print there, and I expect the momentum to carry forward as we go throughout the year.

Anthony Duplisea, Analyst

Thanks, guys.

Operator, Operator

Our next question or comment comes from Surinder Thind from Jefferies. Your line is open.

Surinder Thind, Analyst

Good afternoon. A question about the re-segmentation of the business into digitalized solutions and cross-platform solutions. Can you talk about the decision to change the presentation format and then maybe what your expectations are for the outlook for each of the segments for the remainder of the year?

Jon Carpenter, Chief Financial Officer

Yes, I think we provided a range in the operating materials in terms of what our expectations are on the guide, Surinder. In terms of the rationale, look, this is a way that we are operating our business day-to-day. It aligns more with the competitive landscape that is out there on the digital front, with our syndicated digital business really competing against a different set than our cross-platform set of solutions. So the way we think about aligning that is along those lines. Like I said, I think the guide for cross-platform solutions is in the high single-digit to low double-digit range. On the digital solution side, it is really about a guide towards what I would call low single-digit to mid-single-digit, if you will.

Surinder Thind, Analyst

Fair enough. And then in terms of just as we think about changing economic conditions, can you maybe talk about the sensitivity to ad spend, and how revenue being back half weighted? How should we think about the sensitivity of your outlook if there is a slowdown in ad spend?

Bill Livek, Chief Executive Officer

Great question. The only good thing about being retirement age is that I have seen similar situations unfold in the late 70s, when we had super high inflation and an economy that was strong, but it set us off into an awful recession. It did affect ad spending. I hope we don’t go into a recession. But if we do, one thing I did learn is that the information services business becomes far more valuable in that environment. And let me explain why: the sellers of media who pay us a great deal of money need us actually more because they are fighting for every dollar—not just the incremental dollar, every dollar—to transact on. I believe ComScore is a must-have in this current environment. Going into that environment, I think we are well-positioned to thrive. An ad recession is awful, make no mistake about it for customers. But I think we are well-positioned with our offerings that are essential.

Jon Carpenter, Chief Financial Officer

The only thing I would add to that is we feel good, given the largely syndicated nature of the contracts that we have. Beyond that, just to add what Bill said, our offerings, in many ways, help buyers and sellers of advertising get the best ROI and outcomes. If you think about our product offerings, they provide return on ad spend, clarity, and outcomes that our clients are looking for. In a scenario where there may be a little bit of pressure on ad spend, we feel good about our product offering and the syndicated nature of our contracts.

Surinder Thind, Analyst

Got it, that is helpful. And then maybe one final question here, just on the cost of revenues. I think we have talked about it a number of times in the past—over the past year plus—obviously it starts off high in the year. Can you talk about the trajectory of how we should think about that line item over the course of the year and how much is embedded in—is just seasonally higher this quarter?

Bill Livek, Chief Executive Officer

Yes. I think, look, our cost of goods line was essentially in line with our expectations. I don’t expect a lot of variability here as we move throughout the year, Surinder. So I think we feel good about where we are at, again, in line with what we had expected for the first quarter.

Surinder Thind, Analyst

Okay. That is it for me, guys. Thank you.

Jon Carpenter, Chief Financial Officer

Thank you.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. I’m showing no additional questions in the queue at this time. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks.

John Tinker, Chief Financial Officer

Thank you very much, operator. We appreciate it. And thank you all for joining us today. We look forward to our next earnings call. And like always, I want to thank you for your investment in ComScore. Have a great evening. Take care.

Operator, Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today’s conference. This concludes the program. You may now disconnect. Everyone have a wonderful day.