Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, Inc. (CCO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, Inc. Investor Day, which we are hosting here in New York City and streaming live by webcast. My name is Laura Kiernan, and I'm the new Head of Investor Relations for Clear Channel. As a reminder, this event is being recorded. Before I pass it over to Scott Wells, our Chief Executive Officer, to begin the presentation, I would like to read our safe harbor statement. During this presentation, we will make forward-looking statements regarding the company, including statements about its future financial performance and its strategic goals. All forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, and there can be no assurance that management's expectations, beliefs or projections will be achieved [Audio Gap] will not differ from expectations. Please review the statements of risks contained in our press release from this morning and our filings with the SEC. During today's presentation, we will also refer to certain measures that do not conform to generally accepted accounting principles. We provide schedules that reconcile these non-GAAP measures with our reported results on a GAAP basis as part of the presentation. When reviewing a presentation, it is important to reiterate that all European and Latin American operations are reported as discontinued operations for all periods presented. This includes our current businesses in Spain and Brazil, as well as our former businesses in Mexico, Chile and Peru, which were sold in February, and our former Europe-North segment, which was sold in March. The reported consolidated results include America and Airports segments in Singapore. Also, please note that the information provided during this presentation speaks only to management's views as of today, September 9, 2025, and may no longer be accurate at the time of replay. And now I will hand the presentation over to Scott.

Thanks, Laura. And I'll add my welcome to hers as well. It's great to see you all here. We're very excited to share with you what we've got going on in the business. And to that point, this is our agenda for the day. I'll be kicking off and giving an overview of the strategy and vision of the business. We'll then have three different operators come up and talk about different parts of our business. Bob McCuin, our Chief Revenue Officer, will talk about progress that we've been making and what we're doing with our sales structure. Morten Gotterup, our President of Airports, will share the progress, that business has been making and the direction it's headed from here. And then Erika Goldberg, our President of Markets, will come up and talk about what's happening with the America Roadside business. Once the [Audio Gap] a whole bunch of proof points on why we're excited about the business, Dave will come up and fill in all the number details and give everybody a feel for the implications of that. We've got a couple of Q&A breaks that we're going to do, so there'll be a chance for interaction. And we will have a general break kind of midway through as well. So going to be a fun morning. And I think the goal overall is to help you all understand why we're as excited as we are about the opportunity in our derisked and simplified business. So we've heard you. We've spoken with our investors a lot, and we have gathered some of the themes, and I think we're going to speak to the topics that are on all of your minds. And certainly, Q&A, I'll give you a chance to drill down if we didn't go deep enough on any of them. But growth and how we're going to drive growth, the role of technology in our business, how important it is, the core digitization that we're doing, as well as what we're doing with measurement and analytics, programmatic and ultimately, AI. How we're going to bring leverage down and what our goals are in terms of bringing those metrics together. So I'm going to start by just giving a quick snapshot of where we are as a business, talk a little bit about the opportunity as we perceive it ahead and then really drill into how we're attacking that opportunity. So we've got a lot to be proud of as a business. I think one of the things that most people don't realize is the scale that we bring to bear as a company. With nearly 50,000 large-format signs that reach about 1/3 of U.S. adults every week and 13,000 airport signs [Audio Gap] of Airport travelers, we have a tremendous footprint, and we are just scratching the surface in terms of what's possible in monetizing that footprint. We've been on a journey, and it has not been the simplest journey. Our long holders in equity have seen us deal with COVID and deal with interest rate rises and the divestiture process. But the good news is that in that journey, we have set the foundation for a really growthful, really attractive, really easy to follow business, and that's what we're here talking to you today about. And we've been performing while we've been transforming. I think these numbers might be a little bit different than what many of you are thinking, but I assure you, they're correct. And this is looking from 2023 to our 2025 guidance. It does reflect removal of the international operations that. So there's no international operations in there, and it does reflect that we've taken abatements out, but that's something we've tried to give a very clear picture of what those were along the way. And they were very helpful while we got them. So we're not ungrateful for the abatements, but we don't think that they're appropriate for thinking about the go-forward business and the trajectory. So we've been growing at about 5% on the top line and growing the bottom line at 8% these last several years. And the business that has been transformed has been a very fundamental transformation. And I don't think, as investors, you maybe appreciate that because you're looking at the dollars and the outputs, but the simplification of this business and what we're going to be able to do with cost as a result of that, as well as what we're going to be able to do with agility and focus is a huge deal. The amount of time that Dave used to spend overseeing capital allocations on businesses that we hadn't taken a dividend from for a very long time is real time that we're getting back. The time that I spent working with those teams on building the right team and doing the things that we had to do to stay competitive in the markets that we were in was real time. That time is now all going to be focused on that nice big country right in the middle, the old U.S. of A. And in addition, we're shifting our focus very much implicit in doing that is we aren't focused on just being a big company. We are focused on being a cash-generating company. That is what we are all about. That is like the top focus and using that cash to pay down debt to deliver on the public LBO vision that has been out there for us to get and has been challenged by things like COVID and the interest rate changes. While those things have been going on, we've been developing our sales engine. And you're going to hear from all of our presenters, some of the things we're doing in that area. But building that sales engine that has positioned us for a moment that we think is a very exciting moment where there's $200 billion of ad money, basically half of the ad market that is in play as a result of technological and consumer behavior changes, and we'll get into the proof points around that as we go. But we think we are matching a great moment right now with what we've done in the last several years in transforming the business. So what is that opportunity? How can I dimensionalize it for you? This is something I think everybody in the room has seen a variant of. It's the Magna forecast for various relevant chunks of advertisers. The blue circle is us. We are the $1.6 billion, representing about 15% of out-of-home spend, which is the magenta circle there. While the $400 billion of ad spend is relevant, that number in between, the money spent by advertisers that use out-of-home is the thing I'd focus you on. So all of out-of-home, all of that magenta picture is about 4% of the $253 billion that you have in the black circle. That is the close-in opportunity for us because these are advertisers that know out-of-home, they're advertisers that use out-of-home, and they're advertisers that we can convince to use more out-of-home. And when we talk about some of the dynamics, I think you'll see why we think there's an opportunity to do that. And I think one of the things that maybe doesn't get observed enough is the progress that out-of-home has been making as a category when you think about it relative to traditional media. If you look from the window from 2010 to 2024, out-of-home nearly tripled its share. And traditional media would be television and radio and print and cinema, those kind of media. But that marketplace still matters because that is where core advertising, big A advertising happens, brand advertising, things like that. So nearly tripled the share through 2024, and we're expected to continue. And what's important about that share gain is that was happening at the time that so much was changing in the ad market. So you had the rise of mobile in that period. iPhone got introduced shortly before the opening of that window. You had the rise of social media, you had the rise of streaming services and sort of the maturation of -- I mean, you guys remember, there was a long stretch of time where Facebook and -- at the time, Facebook and Google were taking all of the ad money during this window. And yet, while they were taking all that money, out-of-home just kept moving along and grabbing share and evolving and improving. And we think that we're going to be able to continue to do that and, frankly, maybe be able to accelerate it. This is not our forecast. This is Magna's, but they're forecasting it on the basis of digital conversion. I think there's more to it than that, and we'll talk about some of the levers as you think about other things that are changing in the marketplace that might make this even a conservative view. And why is that? What are the big factors that give us confidence in the growth? First off, unlike all other traditional media, our audience is growing. It is not fragmenting, it is not shrinking. That's because the population is growing. That's because people spend more time outdoors. It's because people are more focused on experiences. And we are very central in the experiential world. Our signage is prominent in that world. I think the second thing that's very relevant is that technology is typically an enhancement to our medium as opposed to something that is disintermediating us. So we have this core digital conversion engine. But on top of it, analytics getting better, automation getting better and our ability to be agile getting better as a result of technology. And that ultimately is what has led to the share capture. And I think the number that pops out here is that what was the last thing you saw in the U.S. that 61% of people agreed to, but 61% of people agree that out-of-home is great. So a lot of great tailwinds, and this is a medium that has thrived even as the rest of the ad market has evolved. And we think that there's an opportunity for us to actually pick up some share, and we'll talk about the drivers of that. From a Clear Channel-specific perspective, we're coming from a place where we have a tremendous basis that we're operating from. If you start at the bottom of this, the foundation of our business are the tremendous assets that we have that are incredibly difficult to replicate, whether that's because of relationships with landowners, whether that's because of the Highway Beautification Act or the other regulatory protections that are around there are challenge in terms of how fast we can digitize, but they're also a protection of the business, they provide that hard to replicate basis. We have long been a technology leader as well. We were very early to the digital conversion effort and led the conversion of many of the markets out there. We were the first to have a measurement planning and attribution solution in our RADAR suite, we were the first to have a programmatic team out actively cultivating that space, and we anticipate being a leader in the use of AI in making our medium even more powerful. And finally, that reach that I referenced before that's the outcome of all these other foundational things allows us to reach 81% of the people in our markets and more than 1/3 of total U.S. adults. It's a really powerful place we're starting from. And in regards to AI, if you think about -- it's this middle point on the last page about tech being a helper. This is a business that as new technologies have come out, we have not just survived, we've thrived, and we've demonstrated how we have lifted them up. And what's interesting about AI -- and if I had given this presentation six months ago, I would have had a different spin on this one because the evidence wasn't quite as strong as it was. But what's interesting is how much AI is degrading search. And that is a huge opportunity for us because search is a 15x bigger market than out-of-home. And what you're seeing if you're a CMO right now is that your cost per conversion -- if you're anchored, the core skill of almost every marketing organization in America is search engine optimization, search engine marketing, SEO, SEM. And the statistics coming out of that now are a lot worse for most customers, things where they're seeing their costs per conversion or whatever it is that they're measuring going up by a factor of 5, a factor of 10, maybe a factor of 30. That is going to create opportunity for us. I don't think it's well understood in the investor community. It hasn't flowed through into Google's numbers because Google still is making a whole lot of money from it. But from the marketer's perspective, what used to be the magic in that space is not so magical anymore. So we think there's a real opportunity there, and I'm going to drill even more into that because I think it's one of the most important things you take away today. The thing I would have talked about six months ago is that we won't have bot wars, like you can already, in the halls of marketers, hear the conversations about how am I going to make my bots convince their bots that they should tell the boss. And that is like absurdity, especially if you're getting paid per interaction. Do you really want to pay for bots to be talking to each other? That would have been my six months ago thing, and that's still true. So both of these disruptions are things that we think are going to help us, in addition to the fact that AI and the tools around it should enable us to continue to improve our measurement and our attribution tools. From a revenue perspective, AI is great in a couple of ways. First off, it's a fantastic new vertical. We have had a whole bunch of new advertisers arise in the AI companies as they're busy trying to build their brands and trying to build their visibility. So that's a fantastic opportunity. Couple that with the fact that it's going to help make our salespeople more productive. And probably the most exciting thing -- and those of you who listened to our earnings calls have probably heard me talk about this -- is that AI is going to help us deliver on the dynamism of our digital networks. So today or a year ago, say, if an advertiser wanted to have all of their digital signs customized to where that location was, what they had to do is they had to hire a bunch of creatives to actually go through and figure out, okay, what would be a relevant statement for Boston? What would be a relevant statement for Chicago? And how do I get that folded into my creative. Now if you use the tools that are available, you use some of the things that Adobe is making, some of the things that are also available in the market, you could actually provide a basic message of what you're trying to do and then try to do that customization, and it can do a draft of it very quickly for you. And all of a sudden, something that we've talked about since the first days that we were doing digital, but no one ever did because it was expensive becomes accessible and become something that become mainstream. It hasn't happened yet broadly, but I fully expect this is going to be one of the things we see that really transforms how we sell. Finally, on a cost perspective, this is the part that I think everybody kind of overestimates how great AI is going to be. But I do think AI is going to help us because we have a lot of things that are kind of repetitive, administrative tasks that we should be able to automate that we should be able to streamline, get first drafts on RFPs, things like that, that should be helpful to our cost levels. And so I've talked a lot about this disruption. There's two big disruptions happening in marketing world. And the first one isn't, I think, widely proclaimed yet, but I'm going to put the marker out there that it's happening. And that's the degradation in search. If you were paying attention to the Google lawsuit, one of the things that was most interesting that came out and one of the reasons why the judge ruled the way the judge did is that Apple -- an executive from Apple reported that for the first time in 22 years, they had seen search shrink year-over-year in their Safari, the browser that they have. That search change, we actually can deliver a lot of the kind of benefits that search historically has delivered in a very cost-effective way. And Bob is going to talk about how some of our retailers are experimenting with that right now. But I think this is a potentially huge opportunity for us. Likewise on linear TV, a degradation that's a little bit more well known and a little bit well understood. I think the thing that's getting better understood right now is that CTV is not the answer. And we'll talk a little bit more about our performance relative to CTV, but marketers that have built careers on doing linear TV are realizing that they need to do different things. So collectively, $210 billion and more of spend is accessible to us in a way that it wasn't even six months ago, largely because of what's happening in search. And against this backdrop, our tools just keep getting better. And I'm going to take you to Australia for a minute, and I'll explain why. Australia did something really interesting in 2022. Their out-of-home community aligned on a new measurement system that made their measurement more compatible with other marketing measurement systems. I think you've heard from all of the public companies in the U.S. and out-of-home, various complaints about how our measurement system isn't all that it could be. The Australians went and did something about it. And what you see on the left-hand side is the outcome of that. So in 2021, they were about 1 point more of media spend than in the U.S. They had actually expanded that by 130 basis points as of this year. So it has been a big win for them shifting to this. But it wasn't just measurement. Measurement in and of itself. And I know this is a topic that is hard to wrap your heads around and hard to follow. So I'm going to try to make it come together as best I can here, and I'm happy to go deeper on the Q&A. But first and foremost, they have a very digital base. So this is something that is not the same as the U.S. The U.S. is probably around 1/3, at least at the roadside level. In our Airports division, we're north of 60% in terms of digital penetration. And we have seen the dynamic of the advertisers building on top of it. Advertisers really like digital because they like how agile it is, and they like the fact that they don't have to spend a bunch of money on production because there's no printing. It's just putting it on the screens. And so that digital migration was a critical enabler. Likewise was the audience measurement, which is a project that officially launched in 2022. The interesting thing here, if you think about the U.S. analogy, is that we are right now as an industry in the U.S. working on what next-generation measurement looks like. So I chair the OAAA, the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, which is the media owner nonprofit in the U.S. And we are working with Geopath, which is the comScore, the kind of currency provider in the U.S. We have a small team that's working on designing what that next-generation measurement could look like. And I think the industry is actually aligned that this needs to happen. And this is something that I can't promise you is going to be ready in Q4, but I think it's something you'll see roll out over the course of 2026. So that is something that was a critical enabler. And then the last piece -- and it's interesting. The last piece actually interacts with the first piece because we've seen it in the U.S., we have a few markets that are more than 50% digital in the roadside markets. Obviously, we have a lot of things in Airports that are, but Airports is a little bit of a different buy. From an audience buy, the roadside markets, when they get over that kind of 50% digital penetration in the market, not for an individual company, we see behavior change by the marketers, and out-of-home becomes a much more necessary part because it's very easy to activate and it's very easy to get scale. And so our focus is making these enablers happen, and you're going to hear a lot of proof points as Bob, Erika and Morten present their pieces of what we're doing on that. But the bottom line here is that we very much believe -- we know the industry has talked about share gain and share shift for a very long time. We actually think the enablers are lining up well right now and the environment. And one of those things there is that we've talked about how we've been doing RADAR for some time. One of the benefits of that is that, that has created a fount of data that different groups can use to do research and analytics. This was a piece of research that we had a release on just a couple of weeks ago that Kantar actually put together. And Kantar is an independent media measurement company. I'm not sure, media analytics company. I'm not sure how familiar people are with them, but they are kind of a gold standard on analytics. And the message that came out of this research, leveraging lots of analytics across basically every kind of measured media is that out-of-home impacts brand metrics in ways that are superior to digital and CTV products. For instance, in purchase intent relative to digital ads and CTV, we moved the needle 4x to 5x, exposure to an out-of-home ad, moved the needle 4x to 5x relative to what those media do. And for the gold standard on brand impact linear TV, we were comparable. So this is like, huge news. It's something that we are absolutely putting in all of our messaging to our teams because this is not Clear Channel tooting its own horn. This is Kantar tooting out-of-home's horn, and that is a big differentiator and very, very important. So how are we going to capture this opportunity? Our vision for the future has a strategic part which is all about digitization, measurement and analytics and customer centricity, but it also has a tactical part, which is driving the thought process through to the front line, so that the front line is executing on the vision that we're putting forward. Both of these are critical, and both of them are things that we are really, really well positioned to do. One of the concepts Bob is going to talk about while we talk about our growth strategy is discontinuity. Discontinuity may be a buzzword. It may be a little unfamiliar, but let me define it for what we mean by discontinuity. It is all about the proactive and aggressive pursuit of new revenue. That could be larger budgets with existing advertisers. It could be new advertisers. It could be something like the measurement initiative where you're just trying to change the playing field. But when we talk about discontinuity, that's what we mean. And discontinuity can happen in small ways where you start to bring a vertical in or you make progress on some particular type of measurement. Or it could happen in big ways where marketers change how they think about a category. If you go back, I was on the buy side at Dell in the early days of social media, and nobody wanted to buy social media in the early days of social media until social media figured out how to actually package itself and make it a compelling offer. We need to do something similar. Marketers have bought us, but they haven't necessarily bought us for all the things that we can do. And so that's a transition that our strategy is designed to pursue. If you want to visualize it, think of this kind of 4-pillar house of the focus on customer centricity, accelerating tech capabilities and driving sales execution is everything you're going to hear from Bob and Erika and Morten. They're going to give you a bunch of examples and proof points. Dave will then talk about how that translates to strengthening the balance sheet. And it's based on a foundation of people taking ownership for their results and accelerating innovation. Those are things culturally within our organization that we've inculcated over many, many years. So this is the visualization of what we're doing. And what it will allow is for us to very cleanly explain our cash conversion flywheel. If you think about accelerating revenue growth with our business, that will translate to expanding margins because of the operating leverage we have within our business, which will then allow us to grow AFFO. AFFO is adjusted funds from operations. We are using that as a proxy for cash flow because it's a comparable measure to a number of other companies in our space. But think of that as the cash flow part of the equation, which we're then going to take to pay down debt. And paying down debt for us in the position that we're in right now is a really fantastic thing to do because it pays us twice. It pays us in reduced interest expense, which then just feeds back in and accelerates that flywheel, but it also pays us by doing the conversion of debt to equity, which is something that we know many of our investors have been looking for, and we feel we're on the cusp of being able to do at a pretty strong level. Dave will give you more color on these numbers in a minute. But the punchline from it is that we expect that we're going to be able to grow AFFO to the $200 million range by full year 2028 from the $14 million you see here in 2023. And it's on the back of that growth and then also the debt pay down. This is presuming, call it, $115 million of EBITDA increase. And when you put all those numbers together, and again, Dave will spend more time drilling into the math behind this, but when you put those numbers together and you get AFFO into that range, you get EBITDA into that range, it would bring our leverage levels down to 7x to 8x from the 10x that we're at right now. So on one level, it's like, oh, that's a couple of turns, whatever. But if you think about this, we're talking about $115 million, give or take, of adjusted EBITDA increase. If you just hypothetically applied our current multiple to that, that's $1.3 billion roughly of value creation. And you couple that with we're planning to, in this plan we're presenting to you, pay down another $400 million of debt. So all in, you're talking about $1.6 billion, $1.7 billion of value creation in this plan, that is a meaningful amount for, I think, anyone. I think anyone, any business contemplating that at this point. And this is not taking into account anything that I talked about in terms of major discontinuity. This only has the small discontinuity in it where we're bringing in some verticals at a small level, and we're making progress. If we have a big discontinuity like getting measurement to shift, like getting the marketing base to embrace us as an alternative for search, like the Australia example that I shared, like us landing something very interesting in our creative solutions, you could imagine this being something even more. And again, Dave will go into some of the fundamentals on this. But even if you just brought up the growth rate into that 6% range, that would actually get our leverage down into the 6x to 7x in this time horizon. This is not our base plan, but this is eminently possible. And some of these enablers will have to happen for it to come together. And this is something that would be an enormous value creation opportunity because if you get down into that 6x or 7x leverage, all of a sudden, the REIT conversation is not a theoretical one. It's a matter of when. And at that point, you also open up your institutional investor base pretty meaningfully because there's a lot of people who won't invest at 10x levered that would invest at 6x. So that is something that is truly transformational if we get to it. And we think that it is well within the range of possible outcomes. So that is the vision and the strategy and some of the high-level proof points. What you're going to hear from the rest of the speakers today, you're going to hear more about the focus that we have on the United States, but also on the transformation that we're aiming to drive. You're going to hear about how we take being a market leader very seriously, and we intend to continue to be a market leader, driving digitization and driving better analytics. We are very energized by the marketplace that we're in. We think the opportunity in front of us is unique and tangible, and that we're committed to executing the strategy we've talked about and to strengthening our balance sheet. So with that, I'm going to hand things to Bob McCuin, our Chief Revenue Officer.

Okay. Good morning, everyone. It's great to be here with you today and talk about how we are going to drive revenue growth in our company. So here's what I plan on covering today, beginning with our momentum and recent success we're seeing in our business. And then I'll go through key revenue growth drivers that we're going to put in place for our companies to drive that growth. But first, let's begin with Clear Channel's innovation story. It seems like an appropriate way to begin. Clear Channel is an out-of-home innovator. In fact, Clear Channel has delivered so many firsts to the company, you've seen many of them up here on this slide here now, and I am very proud of our entire team for delivering these firsts, many of which have changed the way we do business. But there's one in particular I wanted to highlight. It is the launch of our RADAR data and analytics platform that has fundamentally changed the way we can work with customers in our marketplace. What RADAR in its simplest form allows us to do is understand audiences that are exposed to an out-of-home billboard and what happens after exposure. You put it in terms of what marketers care about today, it's audiences and outcomes. So let me give you an example of how we're using that today with a customer to understand the market opportunity we see. So we work with a large national grocery chain. It's a very big customer of ours. And when they buy their out-of-home from us, they typically buy their out-of-home between 1 to 2 miles of their locations, very typical execution. And as I said, they're a very good customer. But because we have this RADAR data tool, we can have a conversation and we are having a conversation with the client differently. We're showing them an audience that they're missing in their marketplace because we understand journeys. In fact, this client now knows that more than half of all the people that go to their supermarket store has traveled more than 5 miles to get there, and 1/3 of them have traveled more than 10 miles. So what that's done for Clear Channel has now allowed us to do more business with this client. We now have inventory out in that area to capture that marketplace opportunity. This is a really, really big change. And it gets us in the conversation not just about locations, but about audiences. So we've done a lot since we were here three years ago for our Investor Day, we've accomplished quite a bit. We've enhanced our RADAR toolkit. We stood up an inside sales team. We've launched a national vertical strategy that we're active in the market right now. We've grown programmatic and our programmatic platform at a very rapid rate. And we've launched a sponsorship model in Airports that allow us to provide exclusive access to advertisers who covered that space. So turning to some recent wins. Major clients are embracing our digital platform and our innovations today in a big way. And I'll take you through each of these because I do believe they demonstrate the way we are working in our markets today with these customers. And it's important to note, these are all campaigns that we executed at Clear Channel exclusively that represented incremental ad spend by this client, and it also utilized existing out-of-home inventory and capabilities. So starting on the left, we worked with the CPG brand. We worked with CPG brand who was focused on owning that 30 minutes, that key 30 minutes before people made the decision of what they're going to have for dinner. So we executed a 5-market roadblock, locking down 653 of our digital units across their five key cities so we made sure that brand owned that moment. It was very, very powerful and had not been done before. Or the exclusivity I mentioned earlier that we're doing in Airports, where we provide a local brand like this healthcare company who knows they want to own their airport because this is their home market, the ability to be the only one in their category to advertise. If you think about this, this is the same type of concept that happens in sports where they own stadiums. We're doing this today with multiple clients in Airports. Well, the last example, which is a local example of how we're working with a key category or customer in a key category like auto to make sure their ad stands out above all rest by giving them the ability to build content into our digital screens so their ad has resonance with drivers who are stuck in traffic at this point, and they know how long it will take for them to get from one key location to the other, all made possible because of the digital capabilities. And in the case of the auto client, a very good customer of ours, this is above and beyond anything they've ever done with us. So it is unlocking new revenue and new opportunities. And it's really important to know that all of these are scalable. We can repeat these with multiple clients, and we are. So I'm going to turn now to our revenue growth drivers for the company. So we have three revenue -- key revenue growth drivers that will get us to our 2028 goal. I'm going to cover each of them individually, and I'm going to begin with our core sales execution. And I want to thank Scott for doing a great lead into the marketplace opportunity. If I'm going to revisit the opportunity in front of us by executing in our core sales strategy, focusing on our key customers, Scott shared this just a minute ago, and we shrunk this in here, that's $253 billion opportunity with advertisers that spend in out-of-home today. And out-of-home as an industry only received 4%. And we think that's something that is a problem and something that we feel like we can fix and address in this marketplace today. The market is open to this. Clients are leaning in, in a big way. You just saw the examples I shared with you. But it's incumbent upon us to focus on these key customers. One of the other things I want to mention on this, these are our loyal, solid customers who are generally happy with their out of home. They use out-of-home consistently. It is how we return existing customers at a high rate. We are going to open up our dialogue with them in a different way. And we're going to use the tools that you see here on the right to have a different conversation. That is why audiences are critical to us to expand the business we do. And I'm proud to say we are making real progress in this area. So to do that, I'm going to take you through our customer strategy. And in its simplest form, we've aligned the right sales talent with the right customer set to give clarity of focus and to provide experts in each area talking to the right customer. So they have that clarity, they have that focus as they go to market. So beginning with the top of this pyramid, I'll start with our largest customers, our national sales customers. Those national customers are handled by a dedicated group of experts who work with large holding companies who understand the intricacies of that and are very, very skilled, and they're supported by many tools. All the way down to our largest sales team, which is our local sales group, working in our local markets today with those deep relationships and our newest sales team, our inside sales team, working with those hyper local long-tail customers that have plagued us over the years. And it's important to note that our vertical team and our inside sales team are new in the last couple of years. And we set both of them up to address a market need. In fact, with inside sales, it was interesting because we looked at our business a few years ago, and we were challenged with the churn rate, the turnover rate of the lowest spending customers. In the aggregate, they added up to quite a bit, and we wanted that money, but it was problematic for our local sellers to handle that business. So what we did was we stood up an inside sales team, a centralized team, armed them with different tools, and we moved all of that business over to them. These customers had low upside in their spend potential. So not only do we find an efficient way to work with these customers, but what we also did is we freed up our local teams to work on their key customers, and that is critical for us. So this is a big development for us as we move forward in the sales organization. All right. I'm going to turn now to our second key revenue growth driver, digital acceleration. Scott did an excellent job explaining the benefits of digital. What I will say to you is this, digital acceleration and digital growth is at the core and central to our growth plan. Scott talked about what it's done for opening up new customers. It does bring in new customers who want to work with digital and at times may not be as comfortable working in the other formats we have. So accelerating that digital is critical, and what it can do for the industry is really powerful. And this is just a quick overview or snapshot of where this industry is going to -- is projected to go by Magna by 2028. Moving the out-of-home industry to an $11.3 billion industry. I'm really, really proud to be in this industry at that time with that kind of growth. But what I'll call your attention is the outsized contribution that they forecast digital out-of-home to contribute. Right? The digital out-of-home is going to grow at a much rapid rate, and it will get to 42% of all advertising spend by 2028. So you see the importance. You see that digital is the engine that is going to continue to drive our industry forward. So let's look at how we're doing in that marketplace. So Clear Channel's digital is on a very, very strong trajectory. In fact, if you look at our forecast for 2028 for the total company, we expect that 46% of our revenue by 2028 to be coming from our digital assets. So we see that acceleration is even greater with Clear Channel. And I'm excited to say that we're going to continue to push forward our goal of $810 million to $860 million is aspiration, but we are moving in that direction, and we're going to keep pushing. So one of the questions that we get often and this happens a lot when I'm out speaking with national marketers, national advertisers who use some of these ad platforms that Scott talked about that are challenged is they asked me the question, well, how large is your digital audience today? And I don't think they think about it the right way, candidly. So we've kind of pivoted a bit. And I want to just put it in context of some of the -- our audience today versus some of the national advertising options that are out there today. Clear Channel's digital audience today is greater than 5 of the top streaming services, including Netflix. And our monthly audience is twice as large as all the people that tuned into the World Series, the NBA Finals and the Stanley Cup combined. And today, our audience delivery in the U.S. is 34%, so over 1/3 of the reach in the entire population and over 80% in our market. So we have the platform, and we are going to continue to build this powerful digital network. And it's incumbent upon us to continue to tell the story at a moment where we feel like there's an ad market that will support it. So we're not just focused on growing our digital audience. It is critical that we identify new channels to unlock value for our company. And once you get that digital scale like we saw with programmatic, we can work in different channels. And our growth in programmatic, as Scott mentioned, we were one of the leaders in bringing a programmatic solution to the marketplace -- has grown at a rapid pace. In fact, from 2019 to 2024, our programmatic revenue has more than tripled. And this is exciting. But I want to mention one of the parts that is really critical about. In addition to the revenue, it's the learnings that go along with working with these sophisticated marketers, understanding how they're thinking about media transactions, what they demand in terms of measurement, planning, attribution and execution. You'll hear Erika speak later today about some of the ways this is informing our overall road map. So working with them has been incredibly helpful for us, along with the revenue we see. We do believe that we see other channels that we're going to continue to develop to leverage that digital scale. So turning to our third key revenue growth driver. As Scott mentioned this just a moment ago, the discontinuity opportunity. As Scott said, these are the series and sets of strategies that are different, that are disruptive that we are focused on putting into the marketplace to drive us to that differential revenue growth that we need and we see as an opportunity in the company. So I'll touch on them in just a moment, and you'll see that each of them here incorporates something different than we're currently doing in our core sales strategy. So it includes the work we're doing in verticals. We've been working on pharmaceutical now for a couple of years, but we've expanded our focus because we're seeing the success in verticals. It also includes the work we're doing and identifying different ways to use that massive digital scale that's in our marketplace, identifying new products we can bring to market. It is foundationally built also on accelerating our client solutions team and our direct to client opportunities and working with our agency partners who are going through some challenges at this point, being a good partnership to understand how we can maybe work differently with them and thinking about different agency models to support them. All of these discontinuities are in market right now. We're making progress. We're not sure exactly how or when they'll pay off, but we do believe that driving discontinuities at a time when this market is absolutely disrupted is a critical part of our growth strategy. So I touched on verticals as our key. And again, we went to market a number of years ago focused on pharmaceuticals. And since then, we've expanded our vertical focus as part of our discontinuity. In fact, today, we're active with four verticals you see here, two of them are existing verticals that are pretty familiar to out-of-home. That would be automotive and beverage. What we've done differently is we've looked at the revenue opportunity beyond what we're currently doing. We've assembled tools and data solutions to work differently with those marketers. And we've hired experts who know the category who can help us have that conversation. So it's very, very powerful. The two with the white space opportunities, CPG, we're exploring through how we leverage the programmatic platform. And in pharmaceutical, we are very proud of the work that we're leading for the industry and the results that we're driving by having that dedicated team stood up. In fact, let me bring that to life and make it real for everybody here to demonstrate what is possible with a vertical focus and with our data capabilities. So our dedicated pharmaceutical team worked alongside a national pharmaceutical brand. They worked with that brand to understand out-of-home's ability to drive script lift, which is the common KPI that all of these pharma brands are looking for from the media, how many scripts are written by the media that we purchased. So because we were in market with RADAR and because we had this work with this client going on for the last couple of years, we've identified a way to work with them in the way that they expect to be worked with as they do with other media companies. We built an audience-first plan, and it's important to -- we use their audience segments across our inventory. So we planned an audience-focused plan to identify the highest returning people who had this condition they were going after. We executed the plan, and the results blew away the client. It was phenomenal. I can just say how that works, we did the measurement through RADAR, and then we handed the data to them to do the measurement. They measured it on their own. But because we had RADAR, it enabled us to do this work. And what they saw was people exposed to our out-of-home campaign converted at a 76% higher rate than those who weren't. And I want to be clear, this was out-of-home working with their measurement partner, incredibly powerful. Multiples on what they were seeing from their existing channels. And as you expect, it caused them to lean in, in a material way. So since then, we've executed multiple campaigns in this category. We're leading the industry on this, and it is absolutely something that we're proud of and we're going to continue to work on and build on. It is important to note the fundamentals of how we worked in this category apply to the other categories I'm talking about as well. That is the power of RADAR. Having that as a platform allows us to use the exposure with other media, and that is exciting. So in summary, we are very excited about the opportunities to drive meaningful top line growth this year. We are well positioned to compete in the digital era. We have these major wins and innovations that are building, that are driving our performance forward. And making sure our team is hyper focused on driving our key revenue drivers, our core sales execution, our digital acceleration, and we are working hard on those differential discontinuities that we need to land in our marketplace to growth -- drive our growth. So with that, I say thank you very much for your time. We appreciate it. And I'm going to hand it over to Morten Gotterup. Morten?

Good morning. So I get the privilege to talk to you a little bit about Clear Channel Airports and the journey that we have been on over the last five years. And it really has been a transformation. We created a business model, which is our playbook, which has led to this, that we reach 1 billion travelers annually. More than 50% of all U.S. travelers are engaged by us. And last year, we contributed $361 million to Clear Channel, about 25% of total revenue. So how did we do that? This is the most important slide that I'm going to be sharing with you. And we call this the playbook. It starts out with the best airports. Best airports doesn't mean all airports. It means airports that we want to work with that want to work with us and that advertisers are interested in. Following that, we invest in the right assets, which I'm going to show you in a little bit, some of the great assets we've invested in. Sales strategy is critical. You have the assets, you have the airport, you have to have the right sales strategy. And then as we all know, you have to execute flawlessly, which the team does. None of this is possible without the excellent team that we have who are completely committed to our process. Sorry, I'm going to jump a little quick there. So this is where we were in 2019. We lacked focus. We had 114 airports. We -- at that time, still, we're around 1 billion in travelers, but we only delivered $200 million. Again, this isn't about being with all airports. So we got focused. And we got focused to the tune of dropping to -- here we go, 63 airports. 63 airports has led to $361 million. Working with airports that value what we do is critical. It's critical that they support us. It's critical that they approve the builds, they approve the special requests that we have. But having those partnerships has allowed us to grow this way. If I stood here in 2019 and I told this group that we would be cutting airports by 45% and this growth would happen, I'm pretty sure some people would question my sanity, but that is exactly what's happened. We've cut the airports. We've grown, as you can see, the numbers are quite impressive. EBITDA at 19% CAGR. And our digital revenue is -- we talked about the right assets. This is what good looks like when you invest in the right assets. We're going to hit -- obviously, we had $200 million last year. But that's because we're investing. And I think many of you have commented that you've seen some of our advertising in airports. There are things -- there are places where advertisers cannot miss. They want to be there. And they're sometimes -- what I'd like to say is they're almost emotional in the sense that they capture social media attention. They're not just ads. Sometimes they are dominations, which I'm going to show you in just a second. Ready? So I'm going to show you what that looks like in airport now. [Presentation]

So that's the playbook. Best airports, best assets, sales strategy, flawless execution. What is it going to look like in the future? We're benefiting from a rebirth in travel. I think most of you, if you've traveled, you've seen that there's been a tremendous amount of construction going on in airports. Why is that beneficial to us? Well, more amenities, more gates, more travelers, more experiences, longer dwell times. People go to the airport a little bit earlier now so that they can have a meal. All of those things are tailwinds for us. So we're going to grow at about just under 3% CAGR over the coming years. That's a great tailwind. This is an important slide. We have scale, and we have relevance. We reach more than half of all U.S. travelers. If you are interested in speaking to U.S. travelers, we're the first phone call that needs to be made. On the right, we have 3 of the top 5 airports. And I want to give you a little context on this. If you took Atlanta, Denver or Chicago and just pick any market and you looked at 2024 total professional sports attendance, any of the markets, we are between 10x and 20x bigger in one airport. Just think about that for a second. Think about the money that's invested in sponsorship and those professional sports teams. And any of those cities that you see there, at least 10x more will go through that airport. That's the opportunity. So how are we going to drive revenue? I'm going to walk through these three quickly. I think you'll find, hopefully, some of them engaging. The first one is port authority. Many of you have been there. The top 3 screens are how we've already invested, beautiful assets, and we'll continue to do that. As part of our contract, we're going to continue to invest. I'm going to call your attention to the bottom two on the left. The bottom all the way on the left is new Terminal 1 in JFK. If many of you have traveled to LaGuardia in the last five years, you know what old LaGuardia looks like compared to new LaGuardia, old Terminal A at Newark, new Terminal A. This will be the most important terminal in all of America. It is a massive, beautiful terminal, and we are going to invest, obviously, to capture that audience as well. Same thing in terminal -- new Terminal 6, beautiful terminal. They're both opening in 2026. Here's how we invest in high-growth assets, and a couple of you actually mentioned you saw the Disney Tunnel. This is part of that stadium sponsorship model. This is known as the Disney Tunnel. Disney programs this throughout the year through across all of their brands. But this is a moment where people stop and take pictures and they share it. And Disney is very, very pleased here. They will continue with -- for many years, this sponsorship, but it's also a great tool for us as we attract other airports that we execute in a way that is -- the Holy Grail for us is creating an advertisement sponsorship that provides some benefit to the traveler experience. That's what this does. And this is one I'm really proud of. We spent a lot of time with our sales teams talking about hometown pride. If it wasn't for a company, that airport would not be what it is. and vice versa, if it wasn't for the airport, the company wouldn't be what it is. This is [ Gibson Guitar ]. And we went and toured with them, and they just couldn't find anything that really resonated with them in the Nashville Airport. And one of our marketing team members was looking at some of the drawings and videos and said, "You know what, we can do something with that stairway and that escalator." And it literally looks like it was made for this ad. This was not -- this is best airports. This was not one of our -- within our contract, a sellable space. We went to the airport because they're the best airport. We asked for approval. Of course, they're going to approve this. And this is a moment that captures people's attention. And I can't commit, but I'm pretty sure Gibson will want to be here for a very long time. And then finally, nontraditional revenue. These are new opportunities. We are spending significant time focused on exclusivities, like Bob mentioned. We've had significant progress also with -- on the health care side, on the crypto side and others. And you can see that on the health care and crypto, both of those include out-of-home. Why is that important? Clear Channel offers something in a market that no other company can. The airport, the out-of-home mix, no other company in that market can offer that. And then if you capitalize with category exclusivity, it's a very compelling offer to brand marketers. And the last one is Rutgers. This one is very important to me personally, but Rutgers, I would argue, was the only major school in the United States when you walked into the airport, you couldn't buy a single piece of Rutgers gear. And all of you have traveled in senior schools, whether it's in Detroit with University of Michigan, et cetera, you couldn't buy anything from Rutgers. We created a partnership with them about three years ago. I'm sure some of you have seen it if you traveled through Newark, proud to say you can buy a hat and a sweatshirt. And they are now renewing multiple years, and they're thrilled with the performance. So the playbook is the key to our success. We will adapt the playbook for future opportunities, but that is the secret sauce for us. We're going to continue to invest, and we're going to invest in the right assets to meet the advertisers where they want to be. And we are going to find multiple new revenue drivers to continue to feed into our playbook. So with that, I appreciate your time, and thank you very much.

All right. Well, thank you so much, Morten. If Scott and Bob please join us for the Q&A session on the stage.

So please focus your questions to just what has already been presented with Bob, Scott and Morten. And after the second half of the presentation, there will be another longer Q&A session when you're going to have a chance to ask additional questions of all of the speakers. [Operator Instructions] After the Q&A session, we will take a 15-minute break. So please return here, I would say, around 10:35. We're running a few minutes ahead. It's 10:35 for the presentation by Erika Goldberg, President, Markets. Thank you.

Can you give us the timer for this just so that we manage? It's not running right now. All right. We're ready for our first question. Sean's got a microphone. Sean, why don't you come up to the front, so you can see folks? We've got a couple of folks in the front line here. Do you want to hit Daniel first?

Thank you. Daniel Osley with Wells Fargo. And maybe a question for Scott. I thought it was particularly interesting, the tease that you made on the measurement side. What changes you potentially have in conjunction with Geopath and the OAAA. So maybe can you give us a bit of a history lesson on why it's been such a big challenge for the out-of-home medium to get the measurement right? And maybe what's exciting about this potential change that you have coming?

Daniel, that's like asking to give a history of the Middle East in two minutes. But I'll strive to give you the basics. Our measurement is provided by a nonprofit entity that is a joint industry company, a JIC. It's a very unique structure. And so its governance is a Board that has media owners on it, it has agencies on it and it has advertisers on it. And unfortunately, it has -- as media has evolved, it has gone down rabbit holes in choices that were made that have made the output of the product not very timely and not very compatible with other media. And it's been a major trend in marketing the last bunch of years for measurement forms to be compatible, unless you have scale and are a walled garden yourself. And that is not, I think, looking at the scale of our business, we're not going to be successful being a walled garden by ourselves. And so there have been a few iterations between the trade associations to try to make progress on this. And there are a lot of competing priorities because not everyone -- I mean, it's unclear what the final cost structure of proper measurement is going to be. It's not clear that the existing budget of Geopath will cover it, although it's possible that the existing Geopath budget will more than cover it. We don't know. And so the progress that's been made this year is that both Executive Committees, both Boards, frankly, have said, this is a big deal, and we're going to take a small team that has a few people from the media owner side and a few people from the JIC, the broader community. And we're going to do the work on like unconstrained, not thinking about what we have, but like what do we actually want. And then what would that actually cost? And that's what we're in the middle of right now. We've got a couple of RFPs that are working their way through the industry has kind of defined the parameters of what they want the thing to look like. But honestly, the hard work lies ahead, and I can't promise you it's going to work. That's why we put it forward as one of the things that we think is a potential tailwind, but we can't promise it's going to happen because it is a very involved process with a lot of people with opinions. Hopefully, that answers your question. Thank you. Jason?

Jason Bazinet, Citi. I just have a question on pricing of billboards. When I've looked at this in the past, it's been highly correlated to just the number of people that see a particular display. Like, I don't know if that's still true today. But is the ultimate mission, if you can get this measurement right, that the industry might be able to move closer to value-add as opposed to an impression-based way to price to your displays? Or is that wrong?

So it's a great question. So thank you for it, Jason. Fundamentally, the audience is going to drive what the value of the sign is. But if you look at what a sign in Times Square commands, it probably is a significant multiple of a sign that delivers a much larger audience. And so your hypothesis is sort of proved frankly, the Airports business proves your hypothesis as well is that when the audience is attractive enough, the value of it is high. I mean, in marketing circles, you can actually go -- some of you will know -- this is a finance group, so you probably won't be queasy about this. But humans are queasy about the idea that you would have a different CPM based on who your target is. But like somebody who decides what equipment a hospital installs is a much more valuable CPM than somebody who's just a routine consumer. And so as measurement gets better and more targetable, value will go up. What I'm talking about with the transformation, we can actually do that without transformation of the measurement system. All you have to have is you have to have an audience that's understood like the Airports audience. You don't have to have amazing measurement to know in Airports that it's an affluent, attractive customer base with business decision makers as well as people who are interested in certain products, that if you go walk through LaGuardia, you'll see. So as measurement -- as the count gets better, it's more about integrating with other marketing and being part of the main buy. Because like literally right now, one of the tools that marketers use is a thing called -- I always get this -- it's the MMMs, media market -- media mix modeling. Thank you, Bob. The MMMs, media mix modeling. Our analytics do not work in -- out of homes, not Clear Channel's, out of homes, analytics do not work in media, mix, modeling. It's one of the most common modeling tools. And so literally, a brand that is making decisions on allocations based on media mix modeling is putting the finger in the air and saying, well, I believe in out-of-home, but I don't have metrics to help it. That's what the industry thing is to get after. It's less about being able to define how attractive a particular audience is. I think Avi had one or David had one? Avi is going to just pile on. I could see this is like the JPMorgan filibusters.

David Karnovsky, JPMorgan. Scott, you laid out some large buckets of spend for the industry to go after. And some of that, I assume you'll go direct to the declines. But a lot of that spend is controlled by agencies. So I'm curious when you look at those large buckets, whether it's search or whether it's still television, linear television, what's the approach that you need to take with the agencies in order to make sure as that spend leaves those areas, that it comes out-of-home?

Yes. I mean, it's a great question, David. And certainly, that's true with our largest national advertisers, kind of about 1/3 of our revenue. But the approach is going to be the same, whether we're working with a local agency or a local advertiser themselves. And it's education. It's helping them see not just the problem, because I think the problem at this point is starting to get understood. They were just -- people were just starting to really talk about it at Cannes in June. And I think now the problem is getting more broadly because people are seeing it in their reporting. What we need to do is then present how we can solve that problem, and we need to educate them on why we're credible to do it. And it's not going to be true for everything. I mean $165 billion, there are infinite versions of search that you could imagine outdoor isn't going to be helpful in fulfilling. But for a lot of things in terms of driving brand awareness, in terms of driving visibility to financial solutions, you absolutely could see us fulfilling that. And so it's getting our sales teams to have the right messaging to talk with people about it. And frankly, work with some of our good customers on give us a try. Like, let's work together on experimenting with taking some of your budgets from that and putting it into this and seeing how it plays out. And we do that pretty frequently. It's often how we discover some of the things Bob talked about. Because we are always trying to experiment on like what's the proposition for our medium that connects with people. Hopefully, that cleared up. And Avi, we'll let you.

Avi Steiner, JPMorgan. So you spent a fair bit of time talking about the digital opportunity. I think the growth for digital is 3x what it is for kind of traditional. And I think your target is 46% in 2028 from digital. Could you talk about the barriers, considerations to your own digital conversion plans and what you might do to maybe lift that up?

Yes. No, it's a great question, Avi. And if you looked at all of our markets and kind of stacked them based on digital penetration, we've got kind of 2/3 that are north of 30% and kind of 1/3 that's below 30%. And we want to get all of them substantially higher. I don't think we've really named a target, but we talk about getting north of 50%. We talk about thinking 75%, maybe a kind of good landing spot to balance things that people really love about printed with digital. The barriers to it really are regulatory. And it is a matter we have, unfortunately, in that 30% group, the sub-30% group. There are three pretty good-sized cities that the regulatory environment that are key cities for us, very important parts of our mix. But they are constraining digital development much more than cities like Atlanta or Phoenix, for instance. And so we are working diligently with those cities to change the ordinances. I think the fact that there are cities like Phoenix where there's been really great digital competition and evolution of the market where digital plays a different role in Phoenix that it does in a lot of other cities is something that when we go and talk to mayors and we talk to city councils, we give those examples. So that's really the rub on it. And we are absolutely committed if we turn any of those cities and get an ordinance that is more friendly that we will step up our CapEx and do the investment, we can absolutely do that. But what we don't want to do is just spend wildly everywhere that we can. We have to -- our capital as a 10x levered company -- and I think you all will appreciate that we have this mindset on it -- our capital is something that we husband very, very thoughtfully because we need to be ready when that next big airport comes in. We need to be ready when that next big city comes in. And so while our kind of typical cadence is 80 to 100 conversions in a year because that's what we're kind of optimized to do, we will scale that up if the door opens, as it were. And we can absolutely do that. There's one -- I'm sorry, go ahead.

Pat Sholl, Barrington Research. Just going into the categories of advertisers that you had earlier with that large portion that don't currently spend with out-of-home. Is there anything kind of specific about those advertisers? Are they like subsets of current out-of-home advertisers? Or are they different industries that make it more challenging to get that spend?

So you're talking about the $253 billion that we talked about? Is that...

The $253 billion is what you said we're currently spending with -- and then like the other...

And then there's the -- the $414 million. So it's the group that doesn't spend at all? Yes, it's not that we ignore them. But that is the toughest group to ultimately gather, and we get one or two of them every year and bring them into the black circle, as it were. And so we are working on that. Our Client Solutions team works on that. And it is -- it's just a less fruitful group to go after, and there's not a structural thing. If you looked at the demographics of non-out-of-home spenders and out-of-home spenders, they wouldn't be wildly different. There are probably a couple of categories that would be in the orange that maybe are just very difficult. But I mean, frankly, pharmaceuticals was in that category a few years ago, and we've -- the target was big enough to -- and the analytics were clear enough that it made sense to go after it. So we just are of the mind that the people who are already spending in out-of-home are going to be a heck of a lot easier to get -- to do bigger budgets for out-of-home than people who haven't ever spent on it at all. That's sort of the crux of what we're trying to communicate. Cameron, over here.

Cameron McVeigh, Morgan Stanley. Scott, I was just curious if you could maybe talk about the RADAR and how much of a driver of that is to digital appetite among advertisers, where you see that helping to expand it, the 46% digital revenue contribution?

Yes. So RADAR works with everything. It is not a digital only, but to your hypothesis, it does play very, very well with digital. So if you think about RADAR, RADAR has a planning element to it. It has a retargeting element to it. It has an attribution element to it and it has a data integration element to it. The planning, our salespeople use it all the time. I mean, it's probably not -- it's certainly not 100% used in our proposals. But it's in 1/3, a half of our proposals easily, and the number of log-ins that we're getting from the salespeople is basically constant. And that's free. And that is something that is used for both printed and digital. I think to the heart of your question is where has it helped us grow. And that's -- Bob talked a lot about how we use RADAR in our targeting verticals, and it has been central to what we've done with pharma. It's been central to some of the things we've done in automotive as well, where if you think about it, every vertical has its own kind of ROI language. And so if you're an app developer, you care about app downloads and activations. If you're an auto dealer, you care about foot traffic to your location and interest levels. If you're pharma, you're interested in script uplift. That's really where RADAR plays a big role. But with pharma, a lot of what we're doing are actually printed ads because they're taking advantage of our massive footprint to get into very specific areas where they think the patients that are relevant to the drug are concentrated. So that's kind of how it plays. It's not centrally driving digital exclusively, but it is helping us in bringing those new advertisers in. Hopefully, that helps. Yes. I think we've got time for one more of this go around, and there will be another bite at the apple. Do we have any last questions? All right. Well, we'll take our break then, and thank you for the interest. And thank you for the interest. And Laura, you said 35.

10:35.

10:35. Okay, please be back then. [Break]

Okay. If everybody could please take your seats. We -- I would like to introduce our next speaker. Her name is Erika Goldberg, and she is President of Markets.

Hi there. Good morning. So I'm going to be speaking to you today about CCO America and how we're set to accelerate the growth. We're not only just set up to accelerate that growth. We're going to lead it, and we're going to do that by deepening our competitive advantage and driving that revenue to the extreme. Let's just look at the Americas today and an overview in case you're not familiar of who and what we are. The Americas is a visual media powerhouse. We have 48,000 billboards across the country. That includes some transit hubs and lots of spectaculars. And altogether on those U.S. roadways, we reach 122 million people a month. Reaching all those people earns us $1.1 billion in sales and makes up 76% of the total revenue of CCO. Diving a little deeper, you can see on the map where we're located in states and cities. We have a strong presence in a lot of the major metropolitan centers and the largest populations, specifically along those coasts of the country. With all those displays, the impressions that we reach were located in those populations of the largest DMAs, the top 10 DMAs and 16 of the largest 20. And then diving a little deeper into some of our cities, you can see that we're in the most dynamic, fastest-growing cities with a strong presence in cities like Orlando and Fort Worth, where we're growing at 4x to 5x the national average. As people are moving to these cities and they're growing in their population, the advertisers are competing for visibility. And because we have the locations in the Sunbelt or these large cities, we're able to capitalize and earn a larger part of that U.S. share of the advertising spend. So how are we going to -- let's look at how we can look at scaling all of that revenue with our key presence in most of those cities. We want to look at -- what most people misunderstand is that we don't really have to invest a lot given our presence in all these cities, we can leverage the opportunity for occupancy growth with the inventory that's already in the marketplaces. So if we look at this graph when we look at our revenue in 2024, we can see all of our products, and specifically, we pulled out digital. But the ombre bar next to it is really just a best practice. It's a best practice of what's -- of our potential of what's possible if we just leverage the inventory that's already there. If we look at a benchmark or set a goal for ourselves of our top-performing markets and the occupancy they've been able to achieve, and we could do that across all of our markets, we can see instantaneous growth on just existing inventory. We can see a growth of 18% across all of our products, and we specifically pulled out digital for 14%, although we know and we've spoken a lot about that the potential on digital is almost unlimited. This is just leveraging inventory that we've already been able to secure and just driving the revenue on those displays. So let's talk about how we're going to drive that revenue. This is what we look at -- this is what we call our revenue engine. This is actually our operating cadence that we've been using recently to launch all of our initiatives across the Americas. I'm going to walk through each of them, and I'm going to go through some of the initiatives that we have, but I want to just cover off that we have inventory. We have inventory and the portfolio that we keep. We have people and their productivity. There's customers and the advertiser potential, and then there's planning the strategic execution. We have lots of different activations happening all at the same time, and I'm going to be able to cover a few today that we're doing across America. Starting with inventory and one of those greatest accelerators that we've spoken about a couple of times today, we're going to talk about digital expansion. And this is the conversion of our displays from printed to digital. Once we convert to digital, we know that we can recognize 4x to 5x the revenue uplift. And of course, that comes with margin improvement over -- margin improvement over those printed assets that they were before. Scott mentioned -- so some people ask -- let's start here. Some people ask, why can't you just convert them all to digital at once, right? I think somebody asked that question in the audience, which is exactly what we try to do. But we know, and Scott mentioned that we have regulatory concerns, we have permits to consider. We've municipalities. But we do try to keep to that plan that we have every year of converting digitals on a regular basis, and we've been able to see that growth in that revenue. We'll continue to do that into the future and grow our digital assets. If we just look at the mix to understand the economics a little bit better, we see how the premium value of those digitals outweighs its volume. It's 1/3 of the revenue of our CCO Americas business is driven by 5% of the assets, 36% of our revenue driven by 5% of our inventory. This is why we continue to focus on digital. Continuing with inventory. We also have examples of expansion. We have examples of display acquisition with our award of the MTA billboard contract. With the award of this contract, we've been able to expand in our New York DMA and transform our business in the area. More printed assets, more digital assets and even the opportunity to develop over the next 3 to 5 years. We have more coverage with 250 additional displays. This doubled our reach in the New York DMA alone with another 250 million weekly media impressions, ensuring that our brands are visible in the city that never sleeps. And totaling up all of our additional inventory for over 800 unique assets across the New York DMA. We've been out of the gate running, hitting all of our revenue targets since the beginning of the year. And we're well positioned with our ramp to hit that 8-figure boost in 2025. Continuing with inventory, we look at a way to sell, creative ways to sell all of that inventory at scale, all the new inventory, all the digital conversions. And this is why we've developed a new tech to reach those digital buyers to sell digital like a digital medium. CCO Clear Cast Digital, one of those disruptors that Bob mentioned, is a network buying opportunity that gives us coverage across the marketplace for almost like a broadcast buy. It's a network automation that allows us to deliver on the entire campaign. It's automatic for speed and efficiency in its placement. And we have proof of performance entirely led by data that helps us earn credibility with this new tech. Let me give you an example of a network buy, of an impression buy of where we've been able to cover the marketplace and deliver the same solution for immediate results. This is an example where a credit union came to us a little while ago, and they asked us to promote their new branding. They wanted to drive traffic to their company website where they had all the information. So we leverage this type of approach of covering the marketplace by using all of our inventory across all those high-traffic locations to dominate the marketplace with all of our displays. This increased reach, this increased campaign exposure, and the result is in the numbers. They saw the lift by 36% in web visits for people who drove by those billboards than those who did not. They not only saw those results to their web visits, they saw it immediately. It was within days of seeing the ad that they have the results that they need to be able to drive people to their company website. This is an example of what something like CCO Clear Cast can do and why we're investing so much in these technologies. Changing to our second pillar of the revenue engine, I'm going to talk about the people. I want to talk about the local sales team and how the local sales team -- Bob kind of hit on this as he talked about the introduction of the inside sales team. We used to be within the local organization, a group of people that were all considered outside sales, everybody focusing on the whole breadth of advertiser base that existed within the local and regional market. In order to drive productivity and maximize advertiser retention, we've added in groups like inside sales. Inside sales focuses on those dormant accounts, those accounts that haven't returned to reduce that churn. We also added an account representatives. They are solely focused on small, medium businesses and seasonal accounts to make sure they get the attention that they need. We're also going to be adding in AI agents that I'm going to talk to you about a little bit later, but all this to drive the productivity and make sure we're attending to all of the customers that are in the local marketplace. Adding a little bit of standardization and operational cadence like a simple find, win, keep approach, we're really able to maximize the customer retention. Find, prospecting, adding -- building up our pipeline. Winning, solution selling and managing those accounts for growth. And then, of course, keeping them, retaining that business, altogether applying the sales segmentation, we're able to increase our productivity and reduce churn. We were able to recognize $30 million of reduction in churn in 2024 alone. Moving on to the next pillar, customers. I'd like to focus on a local vertical approach and talk a little bit about the legal services vertical. The legal services vertical with our local team is a massive opportunity. With their total addressable marketplace at $7 million, we can already see that the out-of-home share is pretty decent. That's because the legal services vertical already values a lot of what out-of-home can provide by building that top of mind awareness. We can leverage this as a playbook for other verticals for the similar execution to drive home the value that out-of-home brings. A couple of other verticals that might be able to leverage this top of mind awareness are things like technology. And while that's already present in out-of-home, they're still -- it's still underpenetrated. And education and home improvement, a hyper local vertical definitely relies on that top of mind awareness and that brand awareness as well, while retirement care can leverage out-of-home like legal services for credibility and for trust when decisions need to be made. These are just a few examples of some verticals that we're going to be able to attack in the local market, but again, ones we wanted to make sure to call out the possibility exists. Keeping with customers, it doesn't just take potential alone in the marketplace. We need to add in execution. And so this execution has driven us to grow our direct advertiser business, which we know is so important for those stickier, more tangible relationships. By applying a structure to each one of these sales segmentations we talked about, things like prospecting, building up that pipeline, in-market field visits, customer needs analysis, we've been able to grow our local direct-to-customer business by 20% from '23 to '24 alone. We need to continue to drive this direct-to-advertiser business to get those inquiries to help the customers directly make those decisions before the strategy is even formed. And turning to our last pillar, this is planning and the strategic execution of all of the plans we just said. This is where we're able to look at some of our investments in workflow and automation and the transformation of the sales cycle. The sales cycle was pretty manual years ago, took a lot of time to get a lot of our work done just to reply to a customer. With a little investment, we've been able to speed up and automate a lot of our sales processes. Plans, we can now generate over 10,000 plans monthly automated within the same day and deliver those to our customers. This is a process that used to take up to a week in the past. Additionally, with posting, we can post our digital campaigns almost instantaneously, with 70% of our printed asset posting posts in 2 days. This is versus an industry standard of 5-day guarantees. This is very impressive customer service. We also do 160,000 automated proof-of-performance photos delivered directly into our customers' inbox. This drives credibility and trust that we're performing on the services that we provide. Nobody matches this customer service like Clear Channel can deliver. And finally, I'd like to go back to that agentic AI and talk about our investment in Salesforce.com and its agents. A lot of people talk about AI and what it can do for your workflow. But we want to talk about how it can make up some money. And so we're going to be leveraging Salesforce.com's Agentforce and adding an agentic AI into our sales process, where we have a sales person on the front end and the back end prospecting and closing deals, but putting an agent in the middle to direct that communication and that conversation to keep the customer interested and satisfied. The agent will lead the conversation and use natural learning to continue the dialogue until we're ready to reengage. This allows our account executive to focus on more value-added tasks that only they could do like prospecting, having meetings and closing deals. This type of automation will only add to the productivity of all the sales teams we just mentioned. I'm super confident in our -- in all of the pillars that we talked about as they operate in parallel to get our local teams up and activated. We know that we have a base of a strong platform with our scale and our inventory, and we know that we're leading with that digital technology far above our competition, and that allows us to execute on those new opportunities to accelerate growth like the MTA and other opportunities that we have. This is our time in the CCO America business, and we're going to take this moment. Thank you very much. I'm going to introduce David Sailer, our Chief Financial Officer.

Good morning, everyone. I want to thank everyone for coming today, everyone in the room, everyone on the webcast. I do appreciate your time, as I'm going to talk about our financial road map over the next couple of years. The company is really at an inflection point right now, and we're positioned for growth and to delever the business. So here's what we're going to talk about today, a simplified and stronger platform, our focus on cost and that cost discipline to drive margins, our capital allocation focus on deleveraging, and at the end, we'll go through our goals and that financial road map. So let's turn to the portfolio. We have derisked and simplified this business. And what I mean by derisking the business, if you step back a couple of years prior, we were a global company with operations in Europe, in Latin America. And I'm pleased to say today, we either have closed or signed every business internationally. So that is a great milestone with the announcement of Spain yesterday. But on a derisking point, when you think about those businesses internationally and in Latin America, during financial downturns, COVID, those are businesses that really burn cash. So by divesting them, we have derisked this business to focus on our U.S. footprint. Our margins when we were a global business were roughly 24%. Where we are today with Airports in America, we're at 31%. And as I talk about this financial road map going forward, we're going to expand those margins to 34%. Here's our scorecard. Over the last 3 years, revenue growing at 5%, getting that operating leverage with EBITDA growing faster than revenue at 8%. I will remind you that the adjusted EBITDA does include the COVID relief that we received coming out of COVID, just those abatements. And really the reason for those adjustments is really just to show a like-for-like comparison. And really, when I look at this slide, the focus I want people looking at is the AFFO growth, where we were in 2023 and where we stand today with our guidance at $75 million to $85 million. And what that translates into is growing cash flow. And we're going to have positive cash flow in 2025, and that is a significant milestone for the business. I'll also add our guidance, the third quarter. We're reconfirming our guidance that we have for the third quarter as well. This is truly a resilient business model. It's a model that's able to perform through economic cycles. The revenue streams that we have across our Airports and America business, second to none. We have a hard-to-replicate footprint. When you look at the Americas business, we were in the top 10 DMAs. If you add Airports on top of that inventory for America, we're in the top 20 DMAs, just great coverage for the advertising landscape. The relationships we have with our advertisers, it's a strong diversified base. And that 1 advertiser is more than 2.5% of revenue. You talk about the resiliency of the out-of-home space. A little bit of an eye chart up here, but this is covering over the last 40 years of our space, and the average annual growth rate is 5%. If that's not a resilient medium, I really don't know what is. And on top of that, if you look where there are economic downturns, the bounce back of this industry after that downturn is very quick, showing the resiliency of this medium. Costs. I'm going to talk about the cost discipline of the business. Here's a slide that I talk about with a lot of folks in this room as we started making those divestitures of our international operations, what our corporate costs are going to look like, what cost reductions are we going to get? We have line of sight of $40 million of reductions in our corporate cost. The ultimate goal is $50 million. And I'll break that down in 3 steps. One, as I mentioned, as we divested our international operations, Latin America and Europe. Those direct corporate costs are going to come out of the business. And that's going to get you a little over $30 million. As I mentioned earlier, we were set up as a global company. As we start looking at our cost structure to focus a business -- as a U.S. business with Airports and America, we're going to get additional efficiencies from the business. These are some outside services, taxes, things along those services that will come out of the business that we no longer have to support in international operation. That's going to get you additional cost out, which is probably in the high 30s in addition to the corporate costs on the international businesses. Then we have talked about 0 basing our plan from a corporate standpoint, really looking at the business and 0 basing, what do we need to run our new business. Because I do feel this is a new Clear Channel with more of a pure play business. And as we 0 base that budget, we'll focus on that optimization of our cost structure, streamlining the business. Scott talked about AI earlier in the presentation. There will be costs associated with that. That's just an example of it. And you put those altogether, and we will get to that target of $50 million of corporate cost reduction or a 37% reduction from where we were as an international business. But the cost discipline is not just going to be at the corporate level. We're going to look at this throughout our operating segments. Airports, our Americas business currently have $1.1 billion of cost, a majority of that in site lease and payroll. The goal is going to be to grow that an annual growth rate in the 3% to 3.5% range. And really, what that's going to enable us to do, as we scale revenue, you'll get that operating leverage, which is going to grow EBITDA in addition to our free cash flow as we're positive this year, we're going to build on that and compound that growth on cash. And that gives us options, the ability to invest in the business and to pay down debt, which is an absolute priority of the business. Which is a good segue into our capital allocation focus on deleveraging. This is a question I get asked all the time, definitely by folks in this room. When you become free cash flow positive, how are you going to utilize that cash? What are you going to do with it? And they'll say, is it invest in the business or pay down debt? I don't look at that question as an or, I look at them together. It's a balance of investing in the business and paying down debt because both of these will reduce our leverage. We invest in the business, and to be clear, as of today, we're 10x levered. Any project we do from a capital allocation process is going to be the highest returning project. And the projects that we're doing, it's going to grow the top line and EBITDA, and that will help us organically delever the business as we're growing adjusted EBITDA. Debt paydown on the other hand, that's directly going to reduce our leverage as we're generating free cash flow, and it does two things for you. It's going to reduce leverage. It's also going to reduce our interest expense, which will free up cash flow to further this cycle. Investing in the business. absolutely going to invest in the business to grow our cash flow. Digital transformations, we've talked a lot in this presentation about digitals. It's a great investment, converting our boards from print to digital or organic builds. It's a 30% IRR. We've been running that playbook for over a decade. That is something that we will continue to do going forward. Our sales channels, absolutely, we're going to invest in our sales channels. Our local sales channel, it's been growing for 17 straight quarters on our Americas business. That takes investment to continue that growth. We invest in training of our local sales team, hiring new AEs where it's applicable. Our verticals. Bob talked about pharma. That takes investment. We didn't bring a vertical that wasn't in out-of-home historically into the medium without investment. We invested to bring that vertical in. Inside sales, we talked about inside sales very early on at our last Investor Day. That's now a reality, and it's bringing in material revenue to the business and it also helps from a productivity standpoint, helping our local AEs in the field going after bigger deals as the inside sales. We still want the smaller deals. We want that money. It makes us more efficient. So absolutely investing in our sales channels. Our Airports investment. Morten went through the beautiful signs that we're selling and the playbook that, that team is running. That takes investment. As we extend airports or we go after a new RFP for an airport, we're going to install a new program into that airport. That takes investment from a capital standpoint and also investing in the team. And the Airports investment, as everyone has seen, has been a great strategy and is a great return for the business, and we will continue to do that. The balance sheet. I am proud of this slide in front of you today. I know my team is and as a business. In July, we refinanced $2 billion of debt, pushed out those maturities to 2030 and 2033. Our near-term maturities right now, our average years maturity is roughly 5 years. Our cost of financing at 7.6% for our capital structure is an efficient use of capital. And what I mentioned earlier, what I'm proud about on this page is really the runway that the business has to grow organically. We don't have a significant maturity until 2028. And that's going to give the team to grow the playbook that we have to increase EBITDA to organically delever and pay down debt. And paying down debt is not a theoretical conversation anymore. We are paying down debt. We have paid down debt in 2025, $375 million of the -- prepaid on the term loan and the BV, $230 million of senior note buybacks that we've done in 2025, which has saved us $30 million of interest across those 2, in addition to the yield on the senior notes in the 12% to 13% range. And it's not going to stop there. This was not, we sold our international operations, it was a onetime thing. This is going to be a continued approach. The sale of Spain, the proceeds that come in, that's further going to be utilized to pay down debt. And I mentioned earlier how we're free cash flow positive in 2025. And as we move forward, we'll be generating cash flow to continue that cycle of reducing our leverage. So here are the targets that we're going after from a debt reduction standpoint. Net debt in 2024 was $5.6 billion. As we start paying that down, the ultimate goal through 2028 is $1 billion of debt paydown. And that's going to be done -- that will be accomplished through what I was just talking about. Remaining international asset sales. We sold Spain, we still have Brazil. I talked earlier about derisking the business. In the past, when we had that international operation, which -- we would keep more cash on the balance sheet when we had a cycle that was a downturn and able to cover the burning of cash. That no longer is the case. We'll have less cash that we'll have to have on hand, and we can utilize that additional cash to pay down debt. As we grow the business organically, utilizing that cash flow to pay down debt. So I think you get the idea. It's a priority of the business to continue to pay down debt. And when I look at that net debt of $5.6 billion going down to $4.6 billion, really, what that makes me think about is the value of our business and you look at the value that is in debt and how do you start transforming that into equity. Every $0.5 billion of debt pay down is about $1 worth on the equity side. That's exciting to me. Goals. Let's talk about the goals, probably the area that everybody has been waiting for to talk about. So let's get to it, and talk about that financial road map. Here are the assumptions that we have within our model. The digital investments, it's a great investment, continuing to do that 75 to 85 digitals per year. Our Airports portfolio, the assumption is we don't lose any airports, nor do we gain. So it's kind of status quo from a modeling standpoint. I talked about expense growth in that 3%, 3.5% range. And CapEx, yes, we will continue to invest in the business in addition to reducing debt with CapEx in that $80 million to $90 million range. Here are the key revenue drivers. Bob went through this page, I'll do a summary of it. Core sales execution. I think about that, our national sales, our local sales, inside sales. How do you optimized the inventory we have today to sell better. It's a lot of the stuff that Erika was talking about. Digital acceleration. Converting our digital. I've talked about what a great investment that is, 5% of our inventory on the Americas business, 36%, 38% of our revenue, a lot of room to continue that playbook. Programmatic, another great area of growth, part of digital acceleration. Discontinuity and the opportunities there. When I look at that 4% to 5% growth over this time period, that's expanding that vertical strategy. Bob talked about the roadblocks on digital and things along those lines to get to the growth rates that we have here. Here's the cash flow flywheel. Scott introduced this page earlier in the presentation. I like my page a little better. I held back some of the metrics for the end here. Accelerating revenue growth, 4% to 5% growth, we just talked about it. As you have that cost discipline with your revenue growing and you have that cost discipline, that's going to give you that operating leverage to expand our margins with our higher-performing margins in America and Airports up to 34% in 2028. That in tail is going to grow AFFO to $200 million or $120 million more than we have today. And that's where you get that conversion into cash and building on the cash flow generation in '25 and compounding that going forward, which, again, you can utilize that cash to pay down debt, and that's the cycle as we're growing that top line. Here are the goals that we're laying out today. Obviously, I've mentioned the 4% to 5% on revenue, adjusted EBITDA, getting that operating margin flow-through at 6% to 8%, which is then going to result in AFFO growing to $200 million in cash and cash flow generation. When I look at that adjusted EBITDA, and I'm going to go back to the value of the business and the debt to equity transfer. Adjusted EBITDA, we're going to grow adjusted EBITDA north of $100 million, roughly $115 million over that time frame. You look at the multiple that we have today on this business, that's $1.3 billion of value to the company on the equity side. In addition to paying down another $400 million of debt, that's $1.6 billion of value to the business to the equity holders, and that is exciting stuff. And here's how we'll measure it. The same growth rate, just in a different format, revenue growth at 4% to 5%, the CAGR on adjusted EBITDA and the AFFO growth. And what does this translate into from a net leverage? Going from 10x where we are today to 7x to 8x by the year-end 2028. Potential upside. Look, the plan we have laid out, I think, is a responsible plan. Not an easy plan to get to, but a plan that we can absolutely get to over this time period. However, is there a chance to overdeliver that plan? I get another question asked to me a lot from this group on our leverage. You're 10x levered, how do you get that much lower? How do you get there? And the answer to that question really is there's not one thing to do to go from 10 to something a lot lower. There's not one idea because if there was, we would have done it. It's really going to take a bunch of singles and doubles to get there. When I look at this page here, it's very similar. To get to our plan, we're going to be hitting singles and doubles. And if we can get some of the singles and doubles on the left side of this page to hit and the environment is right, we could overdeliver this plan. The discount annuities, where my head goes when I think about that phrase is the pie that Scott went through. The ad market in the U.S. is $400-plus billion. The companies that are using out-of-home is $250 billion, but we're only getting 4% of that. With all the data analytics that we have with this business, I think we can get additional share. And we don't need a ton of share to really make this pop. We talk about creative commercial solutions that we're working on. If we get one of those to hit, that will add here. And then on the cost side, we're always going to be disciplined. But if we can get more out of the AI initiatives, that will translate on to the other side of this page from a revenue growth standpoint and obviously, leverage. I talked about that debt to equity, the multiples, the value that we can do on the equity side. If we get some of these ideas to hit on the left, we can get into that 6 to 7 range on leverage. And then that's really exciting to the business. So let me wrap up with just a few thoughts as I end this. We do have a very resilient business model, able to perform through cycles. The focus on America and Airports to accelerate growth, I wanted to just explain that focus, as we've divested our international businesses, I've seen that focus over the last 6 to 8 months as the business has been simplified and derisked. And I like what I see. Looking forward to more of that over the next 2 to 3 years. You can look at the example that Morten gave when we had 120-plus roughly airports, and we focused that down and what that translated into, that same analogy holds true for the America and Airports business. The metrics that we've laid out. AFFO, the growth of going to $200 million, converting that into cash flow, net leverage at 7x to 8x. Look, I'm excited about where we are today with this business, where we're positioned. I mentioned we're at an inflection point. I really believe that I know the management team is energized, and we are committed to delivering on the vision that we've laid out today. Thank you.

All right. Thank you so much, Dave. If the rest of the speakers could please come up to the stage now. We will move into our second Q&A session. And after the second Q&A session, Scott Wells will make some closing remarks. Just a reminder that we have mic runners. So when you ask a question, please state your name and your firm.

And then now let me pass it over to our speakers. We have Bob, Erika, Scott, Dave and Morten.

Thanks, Laura. All right. So our second question section, who wants to lead us off? Aaron, you've got one for us? Do you have -- oh, we actually -- sorry, Aaron, we'll get you next.

Jonnathan Navarrete from TD Cowen. Assuming you hit all your 2028 targets, what is the end goal? Is it to become a REIT by 2028, 2030? How are you guys thinking about that? And separately, what kind of moat do you guys have to defend and renew your Airport contracts for the next 3 years, since you guys are assuming that stays up the same?

Okay. Let me start off, and then I think I'll ask for help on that as well. Look, on the REIT conversion, I think that is probably not a 2028 thing. That is probably a beyond 2028 thing because we think we probably need to be more in the 5x levered range. But you get into that range and especially if we're at a point where we're -- there are a lot of things converging. There's the level of debt that we're at. There's what our status as a taxpayer is, which is directly impactful on the value of the REIT conversion. And then there's how we think about what our cash uses are at that point, which is a central part on the REIT. And I think companies that go into REIT over-levered have had a hard time. And I don't think we want to put ourselves into that situation. So I think it's a possible destination that we see at that point. It's not necessarily -- we are certainly not thinking it's happening with a 6x to 7x levered or 7x to 8x levered. I think it's further out. On your question around moat, I'm going to start on this, but then I'm going to ask Morten to put in. The partnership level that we're achieving with airports now is different than what the partnership level was 5, 10 years ago in terms of really jointly thinking about how to imagine their space. And I think that, that creates, if you execute well, and this gets to the whole point Morten was making around the playbook, that can create some stickiness. But as government entities, I don't think that the dynamic of them putting them up for bid every 8 to 15 years is unlikely. But perhaps if you do a good job on that, you can get it closer to the 15 year, which gives you a lot more confidence in that portfolio. I don't know, Morten, what you would add to that?

Thank you. I think the moat is really executing the plan. It's a procurement process. So it's all ultimately out in the public domain. I think we execute well. We -- as we recently won MWAA, which is the 2 D.C. airports. And I think our history and track record is very strong.

Now also I would add on top of that, I also look at -- and you talk about the moat, I look at that as the opportunity to gain airports with the playbook and the experience that, that team has, is the kind of the flip side of that question.

Aaron? Let's get the mic over here.

Thank you. Aaron Watts from Deutsche Bank. Dave, I wanted to dig in a little bit more on the leverage progression. Thinking about the math behind bringing leverage down to 7x to 8x by year-end '28, it sounds like your plan is driven by fundamental growth and using excess cash to pay down debt. In the past, you've discussed various ways to potentially accelerate deleveraging. Maybe you can refresh us today on tools that are in your kit that have -- that aren't necessarily in the plan, but that you could use towards moving that progression forward more quickly?

Sure. I mean, what's in the plan is the growth on adjusted EBITDA and the paydown of debt. I mean the other tools that could be out there as far as refinance -- could we refinance our debt at a certain time? As we grow this business, I talked about that debt to equity transfer. Could you utilize your equity as a currency? That is definitely a tool that we have out there. We talk about creative commercial solutions, is that a way to bring additional cash into the playbook? Absolutely. So there are a lot of tools that are out there. I'd say the base plan from a leverage standpoint and kind of how we're calculating our interest and what I was probably a little conservative -- so I think we can probably get -- we'll absolutely get there. But there are other tools that would be available to us in addition to what's in the current playbook.

Daniel Osley with Wells Fargo. Maybe a few Airports follow-ups for Morten. First, over the next 3 years in the plan, are there any airports that you have currently under contract that are coming up for renewal? And then conversely, are there any airports that you see an opportunity to go after that may be renewing in the next 3 years? And then secondly, I think you mentioned the new JFK terminal coming out, Terminal 1, next year, do you expect any material uplift from that new terminal?

So I'll take your -- thank you for that. I'll take the second one first. It's all built into the plan. Regarding the first question about RFPs, both from incumbent and nonincumbent airports, it's the business. When you have 60-some-odd airports with averaging 8 to 10 years on contracts, a number come up for renewal every year. So we -- I mentioned MWAA which was 1 of our -- 2 airports, actually, Dulles and Reagan. And then the part about other airports out there that we want -- and -- of course, and the discipline to put forward a plan that wasn't just chasing a deal but getting it for the playbook, that's going to be the plan for '26.

David Karnovsky from JPMorgan. For David, you've given the CAGRs out to 2028. I don't know if there's any added detail you can give around cadence. For instance, there's a major event next year with the World Cup. Should we assume that, that creates any kind of acceleration and deceleration obviously thereafter? And are you willing to kind of break down the rev or EBITDA rates at all by Airports versus America that we should assume in there?

Look, the events will definitely have -- it's helping us get to our plan. We actually have that played in from the Olympics standpoint, the World Cup as well, which will be in some of our markets, which is great, which will help us kind of get to our numbers. As far as breaking out Airports and America, we'll see how that settles over time. Obviously, Airports has accelerated over the last couple of years. And the growth rates that we've experienced in our Airports segment, it's great where we've been. I think they'll come down to kind of what we're projecting going forward. But they're all in the same, I would say, same area as far as that revenue growth. And from an EBITDA standpoint, that flow through that you're going to see.

Jason has one over here? [ Shawn ]?

I have sort of a philosophical question. So your equity right now is in an interesting position, right? You talked about all this [indiscernible] you can see a lot of upside in equity. Philosophically, have you thought about doing something like maybe more radical where the employees might participate in it where they would have an option to toggle their compensation to get more options to participate in that, if it works? Something that's sort of outside the customary norms. And I'd be also interested, same idea, sort of philosophically how you think about convertible bonds, same idea where the bondholder could participate in some of the upside? Because it's just -- given how levered you are, you've said you're publicly listed LDL, one of my favorite quotes. It just sort of puts you, I think, in an unusual situation relative to a lot of other public companies. I don't know if there's a right or wrong answer, I'd just be interested in your perspective.

Yes. It's an interesting -- it's a really interesting question because it is something we talk about at the Board level at least once a year in terms of should we have a stock purchasing program or should we broaden our long-term incentive. We actually have a pretty robust long-term incentive. A good proportion of our management ranks participate in our long-term incentive and get restricted units or in the case of me and my direct reports, a lot of performance units that are anchored on actually hitting different metrics. We have a pretty robust set of hurdles that we have to get over to see those delivered. I think the thing we wrestle with -- and I think every company that is highly levered would wrestle with this philosophically is if you actually make it part of your mainstream employees' compensation and something bad happens. Like if we had -- at the time of this in September of '22, when we were dealing with rate hikes and we were dealing with the war in Ukraine and we hadn't yet sold any of the international assets. That could have been pretty tough on our rank-and-file employees if we've made that an expected partner comp. It was tough on the people sitting next to me and myself. I'll just tell you that from looking at our performance units and how we didn't receive the payouts on them. So I think you have to balance that as you think through it. But it's an interesting idea. I'm sure that as a Board, we'll have another conversation as to whether we should broaden it, particularly as we start to see the leverage level. Because I mean, frankly, we trade like an option right now. We should trade more like an LBO, and we don't charge a 2 in 20. So that should be how the bankers like that -- that should be something that brings a niche of investor out to us. But as we trade less like an option and more like a securities analysis stock, I think the conversation of employee participation becomes more relevant. Because it is very risky, where we are right now, how we just...

Had the opportunity [indiscernible] ?

Yes, could be. We'll think about it. We definitely think about it. Avi?

Thank you. Avi Steiner, JPMorgan. Great presentation. One of the slides had MAGNA's forecast for growth, and we haven't really had a dip since 2010, can't remember what the exact year was. But I guess, how do you feel your portfolio now that you are U.S. centric is positioned today in case we have an economic blip? How do you view the construction of it, how quickly do you think we will bounce back if that happens?

It's a great question, Avi, and I'll give you the normal smart aleck answer on this one, and I'll let Dave pile on with maybe the -- a more analytic answer. You tell me what the downturn is, and I'll tell you what the snapback was? We did have one that was pretty major. I mean, I think 40% down counts in 2020. And it took us about 2 years to recover that as an industry. I think the thing that was very notable for many of our investors, and it was certainly very notable for us, was how much cash the America business, in particular, generated despite being down 40%. And that's what gives us a lot of the confidence that we have in doing what we're doing to have a lower cash balance that we're going to manage going forward and things like that. But I think that -- absent -- talking about a downturn in theory is very difficult because I actually think with all of the disruption in media, it is possible that we could go through without actually seeing a big impact on it. That would be largely on the back of excellent local execution. And we have a number of our regional presidents in the room today, and they know I'll be looking to them to help in the event that something like that happens. But I obviously can't promise you that because we don't know what the trigger would be and what the magnitude would be. I don't know if you have other thoughts?

No. I mean as a derisked business, I mean, this is when I talk about being a new Clear Channel, we have a very different financial profile today than we did just a few years back. And I can utilize -- we talk about in theory of a downturn, but I can talk about COVID. I mean, the pain that we experienced through our international businesses in Europe because of that downturn, they weren't able to weather the storm Scott mentioned. If you exclude interest, the U.S. business was still generating a lot of cash covering CapEx, both here and overseas. By selling those businesses, the burn that they had, I mean, France in particular, we are very different. So moving forward, yes, no one wants to experience that, but as a business, we will be able to weather that a lot easier. We Can manage our CapEx to a certain extent. Our cost base is more fixed than not, but there are some levers there as well to really manage that downturn than we could just 2 years ago. Very, very different. Got a follow-up. I think...

I just want to throw a quick follow-up. And yes, it was 2020. But Scott, you touched on cash, the cash position. I'm just curious, David, what is the minimum cash position you can run at in a kind of steady-state environment?

Yes, we can definitely operate, I want to say, more as a normal company. We can utilize our revolvers, our ABL. In the past, they were there more for the LCs that we have on our contracts. So when we were a global business, we always had at least $150 million of cash. That's no longer the case. And that was to your prior question, why we did that. I mentioned the number of $50 million to $75 million, we can operate at $50 million and utilize our revolvers even less than that. So it's very different than where we were before.

Fernanda Lima, Morgan Stanley. Can you guys offer some early thoughts on how you're thinking about refinancing some of the unsecured? Because I know you're going to pay down another $400 million of that, but I think that's still leaves some outstanding balance on the unsecured and I think if you are close to your target by 2028, there's probably some appetite for more unsecured, but I think that also comes at a certain cost in terms of interest expense. So is there anything else you would consider any changes to the document so that there could be more secured capacity you're doing ABS debt. Anything you can offer in terms of like a framework for the next maturities that are upcoming?

I mean, sure, I'll take that. You mentioned a lot kind of in your answer, yes, we will look at something like as an ABS. I think all the options are out there. Will we continue as the Spain proceeds come in and we're generating cash, we'll obviously use that to pay down debt. And yes, there will be a balance out there. We talk about creative commercial solutions, could that help from a cash flow standpoint to further chip away at that debt, yes. I think opportunistically, we will look to refinance that debt. If I -- I was giving you an answer literally 3 weeks ago, the rate I would have given you to refinance that debt would have been higher than if I calculated that rate today. So we'll see how rates go over time that, that actually could be a headwind -- tailwind for us.

Just to interrupt for a second, Dave, it's in there, like the old spaghetti -- so our plan actually reflects refinancing the 2028, yes, and half year's impact to the 2029 using the yield curve that's current. So you actually -- one of the weird things you'll see as you look through our numbers, is it looks like our interest is flat from today to there, but it kind of goes through a little valley because it's in there. So I had to get that part out.

I mean, to Scott's point there, you talk about the senior notes, your interest is going to go up. In our modeling, I think our modeling is actually pretty conservative. As I mentioned, what we put together a month ago, the rates would be lower. But even with that said, to refinance that debt, our interest is roughly flat over the time period while refinancing that debt, which I think is actually a very positive statement. As we grow the business, if we get to certain leverage ratios, we'll actually free up additional secured capacity. So there are avenues that we can utilize in addition to paying down debt to really go after those senior notes over time. And you talk about focus of the business. Morten talked about focus of the business. I talked about it in airports in America, also a benefit of refinancing our secured debt is all pushed out to 2030 and beyond, that focus now is now going to be looking at those senior notes, and there are a lot of options out there over the next 2 to 3 years to really -- to go after those senior notes. And I feel very confident today having saying that statement than I probably would have just 2 years ago

Aaron Watts, Deutsche Bank. Scott, bigger picture question for you. There is a lot of M&A activity across the media landscape broadly, cable, spectrum, TV broadcasting and outdoor too. There's been some transactions recently. Curious how you see the out-of-home ownership landscape evolving going forward, whether that's large sale combinations, international buyers stepping in, PE interest, ebbing and flowing in the space and appreciating where your leverage is at today, how could Clear Channel participate and benefit?

It's a great question, Aaron. And it is definitely an interesting media marketplace. I mean, the TV folks have certainly gone all in on pursuing each other. I think within out-of-home, one of the principal creative commercial solutions we've talked about is the idea of us partnering with an external partner who would bring capital for us to participate in acquisitions jointly where we would contribute some assets, they would contribute cash. We would go out and acquire something, get synergies from it to create value at the outset and then grow it to create more value and do that in a way that we would consolidate it. So that would be a potential way. Now I can't promise you that, that's going to work, but we are in dialogue with people about it. It's something that is a possibility of how we can participate. I think we would unquestionably continue to participate in the tuck-in part of it because sometimes there are just assets that it makes sense for us to do. I would love to buy more of our ground leases, but I think we need to get moving on our journey. But I think the answer on that is we're going to look -- we have, even when we were 160x levered at the worst part of COVID, on the LTM basis. And yes, that is true. So we've gone from 160 to 10. So hey, come on, guys. But even when we were 160x levered, we looked at anything that was being shopped in the marketplace. So we will continue to look. And I think the thing we've really taken away from the dialogue we're having with people is that there are people that are interested in participating in what we're trying to do as a company. And so that's exciting. And I would expect you'll see us participating. I don't think you're going to see a lot of large-scale combinations just because of where the different parties in the marketplace are and what their individual incentives are. So -- but anything is possible. And the one thing I can ensure you is that anybody who is interested in us, we will listen to dialogue, and we do get lots of suggestions and lots of ideas, not typically for buying our whole company, but usually for some sort of creative financial thing or -- and we'll always listen. But we're always going to be looking at striking that balance of what's good for the business, what's good for the equity, what's good for the creditors, and we try to balance that out, which is not always easy, but we do try. So thanks for that. Daniel.

Daniel Osley with Wells Fargo. Question on digital conversion. You've consistently in the past, have mentioned the 4 to 5x revenue uplift in IRRs and 30% on digital conversion. So assuming you've worked through or assuming the highest return inventory kind of gets converted first, do you expect those same returns and revenue uplift to uphold as you work through your digital backlog?

Do you want to take that one?

Sure. That is an area we've been doing for over a decade. And it really has to do with -- you say, oh, you'll convert your best boards. It's really about coverage. When you're thinking about your digital conversions in a market, it's not I'm going to look at that board or this board. You look at the entire market and where can you get your best coverage, and we're going to be -- we will convert boards that make the most sense. Some boards make sense as a printed sign. And it's going to stay as a printed sign and there's value there. Scott talked about do we get -- what do we get to ultimately on a percentage of digital versus printed, there is a lot of runway. We look at those conversions. It's a very, I would say, detailed process we have as we're converting it and also we'll build organics as well, but that's one where we have the runway. I mean it's 5% of our assets. I probably have a different conversation with you if it was 25% or even 50% of our assets, but it's at 5%, there is a lot of runway to continue that process as our digital revenue grows from 38%, 45% over time. And there's also a regulatory factor that kind of plays into that. But that 30% is a good return.

We got one over here. Okay.

Just on your longer term guidance. Could you maybe talk about your view on CapEx is like the current level would be where you'd love to maintain it? Or like what mixes between growth versus maintenance of the digital board footprint?

Really has to do. But from a maintenance standpoint, we probably have a pretty good playbook as far as maintaining our asset base and the team does a really nice job. So that's pretty steady state. From a growth CapEx, it really depends and I'll talk about at airports in America. From America, it's very similar to -- you talk about your sales pipeline, for converting digital boards, you have a digital pipeline that board that we're putting in the ground last week, we probably cultivated that 3 years ago. So it really has to do with that pipeline and how that's going to translate into your capital plan from an Americas standpoint. On airports, that's probably more driven by the RFPs that are out there. And when you -- when an airport comes up for bid or you're renewing, that cycle is really going to dictate. Morten spoke about opening new terminals in JFK, that will have an impact in that year on your capital plan. So really, it's balancing those 2. But the guidance we put out, we've been doing this for a while. It's going to be in that range. And look, a new airport might come out that makes sense, and we're going to go through that process of what makes the ultimate sense for that for the business? And is it a good return? That could have a difference on our capital plan. But overall, we'll kind of be in that general range. I guess the last thing, I guess, I'd mention, I probably said this too as well. When I think about our capital planning and kind of where we are as a business with the focus on deleveraging and paying down debt, there is a high bar, we talk about the digital conversions. There is a high bar on where we're going to put that capital. So I don't want to that -- I don't want to say it lightly that if an airport comes out, it has to meet those thresholds across airports, a digital conversion. When I talk to Eric and Bob about putting money into the sales team, there is a return that we want to get before we put that capital there.

All right. I don't think I am seeing other questions. Last chance. All right. Well, thank you all for the questions. We appreciate you all taking the time and you're joining us today. Just to wrap up, I hope that we've accomplished the mission of helping you understand why we're so excited about our simplified and derisked business. I feel like we've delivered a lot of proof points on that, and that, that should be very clear. We are interested in your feedback. So you all have access to this presentation online with the QR code and the link in there. We're always interested in getting better at running these things and getting feedback on whether we cover the things that you valued. So please do take a minute to do that. But I'll just wrap up where I wrapped up my earlier segment. I contrast this with when I was on the stage in September of 2022, where we were very early in the Ukraine war, we were in the middle of the rate uplift cycle. We had just started to pivot our sales process to subsets of Europe. There was a lot of unsettled, a lot of noise on us at that time. What you're hearing from us today is that we have put that behind us. We are focused on the U.S. We are excited about the opportunity. We see lots of opportunity out there. We are committed to our market leadership. We're going to continue to innovate. We're going to be very creative with what we do with AI. This is an energized group. We see the opportunity in front of us. We talked about the $200 billion of ad spend that's in play, half of the ad market is in play. They may not admit there in play, but they're in play, and we're going to be talking to marketers about them. And we're committed to strengthening the balance sheet. So I know I speak for this management team in saying that we're very excited. We're appreciative of you all's interest and don't underestimate the fact that we are that public LBO that's not going to charge you 2 in 20 as you participate in these next few years in all this value creation. And with that, we'll wrap it up. Thank you all so much. And have a great rest of your day.