iHeartMedia, Inc. (IHRT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Great. Let's get started with our next session. Thank you, everyone, for taking the time to join us today. We are excited to welcome back to the Communacopia + Technology Conference this year, Bob Pittman, the Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia; and Rich Bressler, President, COO and CFO of iHeartMedia. Bob, Rich, thank you for taking the time to join us today.

Thank you. Glad to be here .

Great. Before we get into results and some of the operating trends that are playing out in the ad market, I thought we could start off by talking about iHeart strategy to leverage its assets across content, distribution and ad tech to drive growth in the business over the long term. Could you maybe just start out at a high level by talking about the strategy and where we are in the arc of that execution?

Sure. Look, I think our strategy has been pretty simple, it is build a lot of engaged relationships with consumers and then do 2 things with it. Monetize that by renting that relationship to unaffiliated third parties called advertising and the other is to use that relationship to build other platforms. We've done, I think, a great job of building out the engaged relationships. Our broadcast radio reaches 90% of America every month. That's more than Google and Facebook, put that in contrast, I think the biggest TV network reaches about 38% of America. TikTok for all of its wonderful PR reaches about 30% of America. Spotify is probably in the 30s. So we are sort of alone in terms of the reach. We've used that reach, and we've used that audience to build new platforms. We are the number one digital streaming radio service by a mile. We built out podcasting. We're bigger than the next 2 podcast publishers combined. And we are, in terms of social, I think we're 7x the social of the next largest audio player and we built out influencers, we've built out events, et cetera, all off of that platform. In terms of the monetization, I think we've done an extraordinarily good job in terms of monetizing the new platforms, podcasting, streaming, et cetera. I think our big focus has been on broadcast radio, which is really, for us, it's very clear that the ad market wants to buy and sell advertising consistent with the way they buy and sell digital. So we've spent probably the last 4 or 5 years in earnest building out the tech capabilities, going to your point about ad tech, capabilities so we can offer programmatic trading, real-time bidding. We can offer data-infused buying. We can do targeting and attribution and we think that's necessary for that. And I think the best progress report on that is to look at what happened in the last downturn in 2020, when the downturn came, we lost about 50% of our broadcast radio revenue, multi-platform group revenue immediately. This time and this downturn is only down 7% or 8%. So we're making progress in terms of making us more of the mainstream in advertising. And again, our expectation is that as the recovery comes, that broadcast radio and the multi-platform group goes back into being a positive contributor in terms of revenue growth, smaller, much smaller than digital, but still growth that we're not a business that's going through a transition. We're a business that's adding new pieces to our existing business.

By the way, just maybe one or two quick things, I might just build upon what Bob said right on to. If you go back to the last downturn, and Bob talked about the multi-platform group, but just also look in the audio, what we call the audio tech stack and the technology Bob described, but if you just also look at our revenue composition, in addition to the revenue stream that we have coming out of multi-platform and broadcast radio, we also now have the digital audio group. And back during the last downturn, digital revenues were, let's say, about 10% or a little less than 10% of the overall revenue. We're now over $1 billion in terms of total revenue. And so -- and that's in addition to what we have on the multi-platform group. And in that digital pie, which is podcasting, streaming, websites, extensions in terms of social extensions and additional things, to meet the needs of our consumer -- I'm sorry, our customers. And I think the important takeaway from all that is just we are a company that's evolved to meet the needs of both our listeners and the advertising community. So we are a different company coming out in terms of this recession than we were back in 2019.

That's a great overview. I want to dig into a lot of that. But maybe starting first with what you're seeing on the multi-platform side of the business and terrestrial radio. On a top line basis, last quarter, revenue declined 3.6% in the second quarter, which was towards the high end of your guidance. That said, your guidance for the third quarter calls for a bit of a deceleration in revenues expected to decline mid-single digits in the third quarter, July, I believe, it was pacing down 5%. And I know there's some political in there as well, but perhaps more broadly, could you maybe touch on some of the trends you're seeing in the advertising market that are playing out between the second and third quarter and really any major trends worth calling out and all those.

Well, look, I think the biggest trend is -- I mean we're at Goldman Sachs. So let's talk about Goldman Sachs. You guys for a while were kept increasing the odds that we're going into a recession. Now you're decreasing the odds we're going into a recession. I think the same thing is probably happening in the ad marketplace that people have seen the bottom and they're getting more optimistic about things. We not only see it in numbers, but we see it in conversations we're having with our advertisers about '24. We said at the last earnings that we see the year continuing to improve sequentially. We're looking at absolute dollars. And there's a lot of noise in the percentages from prior year, et cetera, but are we making more money, both revenue and bottom line going quarter-to-quarter. And again, we projected that we would again do that. I think Q4 will be the biggest quarter of the year as it usually is. And so I think from a trend line perspective, we are seeing what I think everyone would call the recovery. And the question is, when is it fully recovered? We've not put up a pin in that. But I think -- and I think if you listen to other people talking about the advertising world, whether it's the agencies, or the other media folks, you're hearing the same thing.

You mentioned some of the conversations you're having. And I think from investor standpoint outside looking in across the advertising landscape. A lot of companies are saying 4Q is the year or is the quarter that ad will recover. And it's a little bit hard for us to gauge the probability of that without some visibility into these conversations. Could you maybe elaborate a little bit more on those types of conversations you're having, maybe the pipeline, anything you're seeing in the pipeline that really gives you the confidence that 4Q will materialize?

Yes. Well, look, I think no one said Q4 is recovery. I'm not sure what that moment is, but we're saying it's going to be the biggest quarter of the year, and I think you're going to begin to see the folks who sat on the sidelines are held back the first 3 quarters, the one quarter that usually advertisers can't avoid is Q4. It's their big sales quarter. There is a reason the year after year, Q4 is that monster quarter for the advertising business. And we see every evidence that that's coming in. We also see on the consumer side that consumers are actually talking about doing their holiday shopping earlier. Many people report they actually started the holiday shopping in August. So I think that bodes well for not only the economy, but for advertising as well. And again, I think most of the discussions at this point in the year are also beginning to focus on next year. What are we going about next year and what are the plans for it. And I think -- I'm trying to think almost every discussion we're having is about a sort of recovered economy from the standpoint of the advertiser. And so that's positive news for us, obviously.

How does that sentiment differ between different ad verticals thinking local versus national, smaller markets versus larger markets, end markets, in particular, think auto housing, I think, have been under some pressure this year, but it sounds like there's...

Auto has been big for us. I mean, insurance, obviously, is look at the marketplace is down some. But I think we saw in the beginning of the year that a lot of the big advertisers who could afford to sit on the sidelines and hold their money and they're doing the same thing we do. What are we going to do this quarter to hit our number quick? Cut out advertising. And they cut out any of the discretionary item they could. I think those folks, we're not hearing somewhat standing on the sidelines as they were. The small advertiser that really has to have advertising or somebody doesn't come in the door, spent through this, which is why I think you saw the smaller advertisers probably doing better than the super big advertisers. And they weren't gone from the marketplace, but being a lot more selective. And I think we're seeing that trend evaporate.

And one thing, by the way, one of the great assets we have as a company is that we've got -- just as a reminder, we have no more than -- no category that's more than 5% of our overall revenues. Every once in a while, we'll kind of go above that 5%, 5.5%, Bob alluded to insurance, pharmaceuticals, in particular, has been very strong for us. And we have no individual advertising that's more than 2% of our revenue. So I think it's an important conversation from a trend standpoint. But the great news is because of that diversification, we're not overly dependent on any category or any advertising.

Let me make one connection to your first question. The reason I think we have such diversity is we have such a large audience. We reach 90% of Americans. Everybody is in our tent. So no matter what you're trying to sell people or what audience you're going after they exist within iHeart. There are very few companies that have that. And therefore, I think there are very few companies to have the kind of diversity we do in terms of ad revenue.

Absolutely. Bob, you mentioned this in your opening remarks on the long-term trajectory of multi-platform. I think there's a broader debate amongst the investment community on the trajectory of that business over the longer term, really the question of can multi-platform terrestrial radio advertising get back to be in a long-term growth business? Or is it for some reason, secularly impaired as a shift to digital and you see some of the listenership trends on linear distribution. I'm curious what your thoughts are on all that. How do you see audio advertising progressing over a multiyear period? What gives you the confidence that it could perhaps return to normalized growth?

Look, I've been doing this a long time. Back to cable networks, back to AOL and a bunch of other businesses. And the one thing I know in looking at it both as an investor and as an operator, is you follow the consumer. And there has been no degradation in the reach of broadcast radio. The degradation has been in a lot of other media, but not radio. And I think the reason it's not been is because what we do is fundamentally as important or more important than it's ever been, we keep people company. If you look on our website, our mission statement is to give everybody in America friend anytime anywhere. We're not playing music. We're not in the music business. We haven't been in the music business since music was in the car with a cassette tape or an 8-track, we're in the keep people company business. The reason 75% of our stations play some music is because if we're hanging out with someone what we often do is play music together. But we're the people that tell people about the music. If you look at the music streaming services, which really replace CDs and downloads, not radio at all, you find that probably the vast majority of any service say, the main way they discover their new music is FM radio. So they listened to our personalities talk about the songs. They're on for interviews. We're explaining it to them. We played in new music and then you wind up putting it into playlist or look forward on a playlist. And I think that fundamentally hasn't changed and it's not going to change. So I don't think there's a risk in this business that we're not transitioning from something. I mean if you look at TV, they're transitioning from linear TV to on-demand TV. And if you go -- I was there in the beginning when we launched cable networks, they were a poor man's on demand. If you remember the concept, we called it narrowcasting back then. And the idea was that we knew the consumer didn't want someone telling them, you get news at 6:00, you get music Friday nights, you get cartoons Saturday morning. That we put together these 24-hour networks and the idea was the consumer could pick and choose what they want and when they want it. So if you want your news at 3:00, you go to your news station. If you wanted your cartoons at 5:00, you go to the Cartoon Network, and that you were putting something out. When on-demand came, the cable networks were going to unravel. It was just a matter of time. Because what we're really doing is giving them poor on demand. Remember when on-demand on pay per view used to be they run the same movie over and over again, and you joined it in progress because we didn't have the ability to start and stop it for everybody. But once that came about, the world changed. We don't have that dynamic going on radio. There's nothing close to that. They're not leaving us for something else. And as a matter of fact, those people they listen to every day on the radio are their friends. They ride to work with Ryan Seacrest. They ride to work with Steve Harvey. They ride to work with Charlamagne tha God. They ride to work with Bobby Bones or Alan Kay and they're not going to change that habit. As a matter of fact, if you look at radio, it's very hard to displace and establish morning personality because people have to have it. That's who I ride to work with. That's my carpool. I know that person and I like them and they're part of my daily routine. So we've seen no evidence of that. And I think when people are trying to make an argument for transition, their only argument is it happened in another industry. It's a very imperfect analogy, and it's nothing like what went on in other industries. So I think you really have to go back to the consumer, say what's going on. So for us, in broadcast radio, it's just a matter of monetization. Radio got out of sync with the advertising community that we were still selling them spots, and we were calling a radio buyer, we didn't notice as an industry, that the world had changed, and there were now these people say, I don't -- as an agency, I don't want a lot of buyers. I want to electronically trade. I want some of that data. I don't want the Nielsen audience. I want to find auto intenders. I want to find moms who had a baby in the last 6 months. I want to find these special audiences. We now have 800 cohorts for broadcast radio, 800 audiences, you can buy, they are pre-populated. And if you want a custom them, we can build it, too. That's a new way. We haven't finished our programmatic, but we're in the process of building out real-time bidding and programmatic. And I think that -- the focus of this company ought not be on is radio going away. The focus of this company rightfully ought to be on how well are you monetizing it, and how well are you adapting to the new way advertising is bought and sold, and I think that's -- again, I don't think there's a risk there. It's a matter of time, money. We know that's where they're going. We'll be there, we'll be part of it. And given the pricing differential, between radio and TV and digital. By the way, radio and TV used to be the same CPM. Radio is now 1/4 of the cost of TV per user. With that kind of pricing power, I think you're finding more and more interest in radio. And again, I think the future is bright. And I think anyone who thinks it's going through a transition has absolutely missed the analysis of this marketplace.

Just very quickly, two things. Bob talked about real-time bidding, and we -- just to tie it back to broadcast and our multi-platform group, just to be clear, we're going to have the capabilities to do real-time bidding and programmatic on the broadcast side, two, because I think people hear the word real-time bidding and programmatic, they automatically think digital, but unlocking that on the broadcast side. And by the way...

I'm sorry, because I meant all of that on broadcast radio. I was not talking digital, I was talking about broadcast radio.

Yes, that and by the way, I think if you look at broadcasters in general, just whether they're video or audio, I don't think anybody else is going to have those capabilities out there. So I think that's really important. And I think your other point, just to come back and really hit it hard, when you talked about the debate, which obviously, we're well aware of with all -- in your world and the investor industry, it starts with the audience. It starts with the reach we have, it starts with the audience we have and Bob referred to just for context, the biggest TV broadcast networks, where I think Bob said 38%, whether it's 35% or 40% on a sports weekend out there, if you go back a number of years, that was dramatically higher. You go back in a number years, we were over 90% on reach. You know where we are today? Over 90% across all the categories. So this stability and resilience of broadcast radio, I think somehow people have missed that fact, not speculation out there.

Right. Maybe on one of the opportunities on broadcast. I think in the past, you've mentioned that something like 1/3 of your advertising inventory goes unsold. I'm not sure if that's still the case, but if it is, it seems like a big opportunity. How do you plan to go about converting that unsold inventory into sold inventory? I would imagine programmatic and sort of the digital smart audio, layer that you're building on top of the broadcast inventory you place part in that?

The reason we have so much is the traditional way radio was bought somebody way back when decided prime time for radio was 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. and prime time for TV was 7:00 p.m. to 11 p.m. Look great, right? But what happens is we still have the legacy of that going in terms of 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., Monday through Friday is the heavy sell-out period. Everybody thinks they want it, all the rules were written for that. The world has changed. By the way, it's crazy that that's the way it is. And so to fill it in, we really need to begin selling like digital, which is impressions. And we sell impressions, people aren't buying. Elvis Duran on Z100, at 7:15 on Monday morning. They're buying give me this audience and give me X number of these impressions. Now we can go to, if they're listening at 3:00 a.m. or they're listening at 8:00 p.m. or they're listening at 2:00 p.m., we can use that impression to fill the holes. So what you've got is you've got, people are buying all of our inventory, but they're buying it in pieces, and we've got holes in between. And so everything I just talked about on digital for broadcast -- like digital like buying for broadcast radio is a key to filling in those holes and begin to sell that inventory.

By the way, I think the context when Bob had made that comment was previously not even today, was really talking about, gee, now that we have, again, all this technology, you can sell cost efficiently sell the rest of that inventory because for a while, you had to pay a commission, you commission people, what are they getting paid on, what are they going to sell. But now because of the audio tech stack and everything Bob was talking about with impression-based buying you have the ability to efficiently sell that at whatever the cost is.

I want to make one other point because I think it gets lost sometimes is almost every company I've been in charge of, if we're going to grow the company, I've got to grow new businesses and get more users. This is the only business I've been in, where we've got all the users we need. We just need to monetize it better. If we can monetize half as well as TV, we can have half the audience and double our revenue. It's just -- it is really a clear focus on monetization, and it's a whole lot easier when we don't have to go find new users. We just have to monetize the users we have a lot better.

It seems like the tech stack plays a pretty critical part, you mentioned you're in the process of rolling out some of these products. Is there a time line or a road map that investors should be...

They come out in different pieces with different agencies. As you know, the advertising agencies are all going to sort of unified buying. They want to put all the buying together. I mean one of the problems which you know is that audio is about 31% or 32% of consumer consumption, it's about 9% of the revenue. There's no human being that one day is going to say, it was 9%, last year, we're going to give them 20% this year. But when we go to an algorithm picking it, no one's going to have that historical bias, and we think we'll get much greater share because the algorithm is going to say, how do I put together the right buy using all of this media. So they're in different stages. Some have gone sort of unified their digital, they're adding TV, they're adding audio, some probably will unify their digital audio and their broadcast audio first as one buy. Some are putting it all together, there are advertisers who are not going through the agencies, but doing this themselves. And we're working with them all. There will be multiple platforms. Some people will have their -- there's going to be unifying DSP. Some of them have 30 DSPs that they're looking at. We've made a -- we're going to do them all, we'll be there for everybody. And by the way and then you got to step up, okay, once the technology is there, then I got to put the advertisers using it. So it's a step process. But I would say you're probably going to see over the next 2 years us getting pretty concentrated in this and probably we'll have sort of cross the hump.

Got it. I want to pivot to podcasting and the digital side of the business for a moment. Podcasting as a category has gained tremendous amount of traction over the last number of years. It's kind of powered through every economic cycle that we've seen over the last number of years. And that said, we've seen podcast revenue decelerate quite significantly over the last couple of quarters from 40% last year to 12% so far in Q1 and Q2. I'm curious, has podcasting finally hit this point of maturation? Or are the recent decelerations more macro driven in your opinion?

Well, I think you're also applying a percentage to a business that's growing. So it's like I have $5 and I went to $10, that would be 100%. I'd much rather go $200 to $300, I get 50%. So I think we have to be careful there. The revenue is continuing to grow, and it's been the fastest-growing segment of the digital marketplace. The fastest-growing segment of the digital marketplace is podcasting. So I think in terms of relative terms, there is no deceleration. I think it continues to be, in essence, the king of digital, and it has surpassed in terms of usage the streaming music services, which everybody spends a lot of time talking about, podcasting kept growing right through it. The revenue has not caught up yet. I think you've probably read many of the studies we've seen and some of the studies we've done on podcasting in terms of its engagement impact for advertisers, et cetera, that it looks like it's more impactful than digital video, which has been the real star of the digital marketplace. So I think there's nothing that looks scary there. As a matter of fact, I see a lot of positive trends. Two years ago, they were competing theories about how you do podcasting. One was you pay whatever it takes to get somebody to do your podcast. I don't care if you lose, but we'll -- I don't know how they were going to do it, miraculously figure out how we're going to renegotiate that deal somehow, and it would make money. We avoided that temptation. We've always been -- if we can't make money, we're not doing it. There is no such thing as a good podcast we don't make money on. And the second point is that you saw people looking at podcasting as a world in which they could not only spend a lot of money, but also a world in which they didn't measure it the way that needs to be measured. And so for us, we've got the measurement there now. We've got the -- we've avoided the world of scary cost. And the final one is that people thought there was going to be this whole idea of exclusive podcast and somehow if I put an exclusive podcast on my platform, I was going to drive people to my platform. This podcasting is not the world where you look at where people consume the podcast. If you're in the business, you're looking at who's the publisher of that podcast because we send them out everywhere. A couple of them, there's just a big story the other day about someone that decided they were going to try and just put it -- adjust on their platform, it turns out it didn't work. We didn't think it was going to work. We didn't go down that road. We said at the time, look, it works. We're the publisher. We can always change that, but I think that's proven not to be it. So for us, I think it's become pretty clear how the podcast business works now. I think the bets we made and the policies we've made and the way we do business, turned out to be the right way. And that's the reason we probably have the majority of the profits in the podcasting business in addition to being number one.

Do you think we're fully past that world where some of the podcast competitors are willing to pay those fees to the select number of artists. And I bring it up, if you think about margin structure in the podcasting business, do you see this as an opportunity now as the industry pivots to take more market share of podcasting talent and the strike perhaps...

We've done real well with market share of talent. I mean we're the number one podcast publisher bigger than number two and three combined. So that -- we've done well there. And probably one of the reasons we cannot take podcast because we were number one. So we didn't have that problem. I think the question sort of you're getting an implication is -- is it easier for us to do a better deal? The answer is yes. That we are seeing talent come to us now not with -- and somebody is going to pay me $100 million or somebody is going to pay me 20x what this podcast is worth. And I think you've seen all the other publishers that were doing that have all issued public statements, publicly said we're not going to do that anymore. That only helps -- it helps investors understand it, but it also the world of talent see those same statements and understand it. So we've always gotten the deal even if somebody is offering more money, if somebody wanted to build a hit podcast, like the NFL, NBA, I'm sure people would have paid them more money, but they wanted to hit podcast. We did lose some that people were just paying ridiculous amount of money, some we say, if you can't get that money go. I mean there's nowhere, any way you're ever going to make that money, earn it just on a straight-up basis. I think those deals are gone.

Yes. And look, I just had very two quick things. one, is just to remind everybody, and we've said this publicly time and time again, remember, podcasting is accretive to our overall margins in the company just to Bob's point from a profitability. And I probably would take a little exception to the statement you said Bob talked about in terms of absolute dollars, in terms of what's happening without commenting on specific growth or anything else. Just as a reminder, the podcasting industry is whatever analogy you want to use at the top of the first inning, top of the second inning, first quarter of football game. I'm not the best on sports analogies, but just analogies because if you really think about it, large advertisers have just started to come to the podcasting industry. Remember, it starts -- we talked earlier in broadcast about consumer usage for all of us who have been running media companies for a long period of time, the level of engagement that Bob talked about, 85% or 87%, people always find this shocking, people like start podcast listen to it all the way through. And by the way, you can do every technology, you can fast forward, you could stop, you can rewind that you can do with online video. There's never been -- so when you start with that level of engagement, then big advertisers take notice, and that's really critical because you know what big advertisers have, big advertising dollars, and they follow it into the media.

I want to add one more thing on pipe. We do something unique on podcasting. We're able to take the podcast audience that they go very deep on for an advertiser to find exactly that same audience on broadcast radio, which has this tremendous reach and sell them that audience, too. So for us, it is with the ad tech we put together, we now have an ad tech platform that can unify all of audio, so you can find the same audience that we can serve to it on streaming audio, we can serve to it on podcasting, we can serve to it on broadcast radio. We think that's a unique advantage of our company, and something that allows us to do something no one else can do.

Got it. I want to make sure I pivot to cost efficiencies and margins and free cash flow generation and leverage. Maybe group some of these together, I think one of the questions we've been getting more frequently from investors is the flexibility of the cost structure. You've done a great job taking costs out over the course of COVID and over the last 12 months as well. If, for some reason, maybe macro related, we didn't enter a recovery period over the next 12 months, how much flexibility in your existing cost structure is there to take out further incremental costs? And specifically, where -- what parts of the business could that come from?

I'm just going to do a top line, I'll let Rich get more specific, is there's a lot. Yes, we're a high fixed cost business, but that doesn't mean we can't take fixed costs out. And we have the ability, if we don't need as many people, we won't have as many people. If we're not worried about the future, but worrying about the next quarter, we can take a lot of those costs out, and we will. We've proven it again and again. And depending on how much we think there is a need, we can modulate it, I don't want to slow down my future too much if I don't have to. 2020, we had to slow it down a lot. This time, we didn't have slow it down as much, but we'll take out whatever cost we need.

Yes. But I just -- I think there's also just very succinctly you start out by saying, gee, people think we've done a good job on cost, which is great, so thank you for that. But just go back to the pandemic and Bob, we do what we need to do. And I think the evidence of that on the course is we generated free cash flow during the pandemic. Tell me another media company that during that because we're cash guys, but I'm talking the cost leads to free cash flow that we generated that free cash flow during that period of time.

And by the way, the worst downturn I've ever seen in my career.

That's helpful. Maybe on capital allocation. So at the end of the quarter, you had $165 million in cash in the balance sheet. You mentioned free cash flow, the generation coming in the back half of the year as well. How do you intent to allocate this excess capital, you've been aggressive in buying back some of your bonds, you intend to keep doing that and maybe longer term at that particular tranche. Is that still the plan with excess free cash flow to attack boundary purchase?

Yes. I mean nothing is -- we haven't share -- I mean, again, I want to go back just for context, last week, we're talking about all these things today operationally. We're cash people. We're a cash guys. There's no better evidence in terms of generation of free cash flow. And again, taking advantage of the marketplace out there, we've stated we have a target of leverage of 4:1 debt-to-EBITDA. That hasn't changed. We continue to march towards that target. . And we always say, gee, how do we improve our overall capital structure, the efficiency. I'm not going to comment on exactly what we're going to use the free cash flow for going forward. But if you look historically, which is always a pretty good indication of the management team, we bought over $400 million of face value [indiscernible], so we've reduced it from almost $1.5 billion to about $1 billion. That has saved us close to $40 million of interest expected out there. So I think that's a pretty good cash-on-cash return. And we'll just continue to focus on the generation of free cash flow and use that cash to continue to make the balance sheet the most efficient it can for our shareholders and our equity shareholders. And by the way, I think we've also done nice job balancing that. Bob talked about -- Bob always used this term, feeding the winners, continuing to invest in our businesses like podcasting and other areas and the audio tech stack, they're going to fuel our future growth.

Do you see any opportunity CapEx, I think you've done a good job of making that more efficient this year on the M&A side, you're largely through, I think, a lot of the stock investments. Do you see any opportunities to maybe play offense in 2024 on either the CapEx or the M&A side?

Well, look, I think we've done -- you point out, we've given guidance for $90 million of CapEx this year, which is down dramatically just from the last couple of years. And I'm going to go back fundamentally. When you reach over 90% of the country, and if you look at our acquisition since Bob and I have been running iHeart, it's really been assets, whether it's StuffWorks or Triton or any of the assets Bob talked about that add to the value overall, make the rest of the iHeart asset base more valuable. So they're not significant, and there's going to -- I don't see any change.

We don't use M&A to build the business. We use M&A as part of our -- we need something. Are we going to buy it? Are we going to build it? Are we going to partner for it? And we partner extraordinarily well. Building is usually the last thing we like to do because it takes a long time and it's not as efficient. And in some cases, we bought it. .

Got it. Maybe just on the debt maturities, it's a question we get a lot from investors as well. Rich, you have $5.3 billion of debt that comes due over the course of '26, '27 and '28. Is there anything you can say about your ability or plan or game plan to work towards addressing those maturities? I think just given the leverage in the broader macro, people are somewhat concerned about the setup, but anything you could say on that front?

Nothing that you haven't already heard, but if you kind of think about it as a package, I mean, we're very comfortable with the maturity schedule and the refinancing of those maturities. And I think just again, narrowing all the pieces, we've been buying back [indiscernible] in terms of the '27. So we've got an improvement in that part of the capital structure. The generation of free cash flow, during that period of time and laser focused in terms of the operating performance of the business, and we talked about CapEx. I think we've also done a really nice job managing from a tax standpoint in terms of -- I think we originally gave guidance this year about $25 million to $35 million or maybe even higher on cash taxes. We're down about $15 million this year in terms of cash taxes. And we've got the benefit of time out there, but we're obviously also conscious of maturities. And just as a reminder, we haven't touched upon this really, we've said in terms of 2024 that we expect to be back to kind of like historical growth levels. And just to remind this all 2024, which you know is a presidential election year. And previously, our high in a presidential election year was $170 million of revenue. Great thing about election year advertising revenue, it's the only category we get the money upfront from a free cash flow basis. And if you just look at the political landscape, we have no reason to believe it won't be another very robust political year going to '24.

Got it. We unfortunately have to leave it there. Thank you guys very much for taking the time today.

Great. Thanks a lot.