Walter F. Ulloa
Analyst · Noble Financial
Thank you, Laura. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Entravision's third quarter 2013 earnings conference call. Joining me today is Chris Young, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I must inform you that this conference call will contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ. Please refer to our SEC filings for a list of risks and uncertainties that could impact actual results. This call is the property of Entravision Communications Corporation. Any redistribution, retransmission or rebroadcast of this call in any form without the express written consent of Entravision Communications Corporation is strictly prohibited. Also, this call will include certain non-GAAP financial measures. The company has provided a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparable GAAP measures in today's press release. The press release is available on the company's website and was filed with the SEC on a Form 8-K. During the third quarter, we generated strong core advertising growth at our television and radio stations, reflecting the health of our brands in the nation's most densely populated Latino markets. We also made further progress in extending our online presence, building our research capabilities and providing cross-platform opportunities to our advertising clients. Advertiser interest in reaching the Latino population continues to expand. We are making good progress in leveraging our sales force and developing opportunities that integrate our online, mobile and social media assets into our broadcast media offerings. Consolidated third quarter revenue was $57.8 million, down 1% compared to the third quarter of last year, which included $4.9 million of political revenue. Year-over-year, the decline in political revenues was partially offset by strong local advertising performance at our local -- at our core television and radio properties. Now moving on to our operating highlights for the third quarter. Our television revenue increased 3% during the third quarter due to the absence of political revenue this year compared to the third quarter of 2012. Excluding retransmission fees, TV revenues increased 4% compared to the third quarter of last year. Local television revenues increased 16% in the quarter, while national TV revenues declined 21%. The decrease in national revenues was driven primarily by the impact of higher political television advertising sales of approximately $4.4 million in the third quarter of 2012. Excluding retransmission and the impact of political advertising sales, core TV revenues increased 8% compared to the third quarter of last year. Core local television revenue grew 16%, while core national revenue decreased 1% during the quarter. Overall, our television revenue performance continues to outperform the broader television industry. The Television Advertising Bureau currently estimates that the core television industry fell 5% in the third quarter compared to core growth of 8% at our television stations. We have now significantly exceeded the industry's core growth projections for 8 consecutive quarters. A key contributor to our core television performance was the automotive category, which finished the quarter up 19% compared to last year. Automotive spending growth at our TV stations has now posted double-digit increases in 14 consecutive quarters. Importantly, the growth in automotive continues to be broad-based. We saw growth in 6 of our top 8 auto brands during the third quarter. 97.5% of our automotive television revenue is generated from our top 8 automotive brands, and Ford and Chrysler Group were the only 2 automotive brands where ad spending with Entravision television was down year to year. On a tier basis, we saw strong growth at all 3 levels, with Tier 1 up 25%, Tier 2 up 8% and Tier 3 up 42% in the third quarter. And we continue to be optimistic about the automotive sector going forward. Automotive sales on a national basis were up 11% in October despite the disruption of the government shutdown debt ceiling crisis. Looking now at other television advertising categories. We experienced growth in 7 of our top 10 categories in the third quarter, including strong performance from automotive, health care up 28%, retail up 14% and grocery convenience stores up 14%, services up 6%, travel and leisure plus 5% and telecom up slightly. Our declining categories in the third quarter were product name brands, media and fast food restaurants. During the third quarter, we added 28 new television advertisers who invested $10,000 or more with our television properties. New television clients included Franklin D. Azar and Associates, WellPoint, Nevada Health Link, Aetna and Dick's Sporting Goods. Turning to our television ratings performance. Our Univision affiliates extended their ratings leadership position in July 2013 sweeps. Among all adults 18 to 49, regardless of language, 11 of our Univision television affiliates ranked #1 or #2 sign on to sign off. Additionally, 9 of our Univision affiliates are either #1 or #2 among all adults 18 to 34. 5 of our UniMás television affiliates are the #2 ranked Spanish-language television stations in their markets in adults 18 to 49. 5 also ranked #2 among adults 18 to 34. During our primetime novela block, Entravision Univision affiliates delivered higher ratings among adults 18 to 49 in 14 markets than at least 1 of the big 4 English networks. In 12 markets, our Univision affiliates beat ABC and CBS. In early network news, 14 of our Univision affiliates are #1 or #2 regardless of language, adults 18 to 49. 14 of our Univision affiliates are #1 or #2 in early local news and 9 are #1 or #2 in late local news, adults 18 to 49, again, regardless of language. Moving over to our radio division. Revenues increased 3% in the third quarter compared to last year. Our station group once again outperformed the broader radio industry, which Miller Kaplan estimates grew 2% during the third quarter in the 12 markets in which we subscribe. Local revenue, which represents 69% of our total radio revenue, increased 10% during the quarter, while national revenue, which represents 31%, declined 10% due to reduced political advertising compared to the prior year quarter. Net political revenue in the third quarter was $39,000 compared to $540,000 in the third quarter of last year. On a core basis, excluding political advertising, total revenue finished up 6%. Revenues at our Entravision Solutions Audio Network increased 34% during the quarter and are up 18% year-to-date. This revenue growth is attributable to the strong interest we are securing from major advertisers as they seek effective ways to target Latinos across our markets. This increase is supported by the robust year-over-year growth in network advertising. During the third quarter, we had a total of 32 Entravision Solutions Network advertisers compared to just 19 during the same period last year. Our top 3 advertisers were Mars, JCPenney, Walmart and Sears. Our radio division continues to generate balanced growth across key advertising categories. We recorded revenue growth in 7 of our top 10 categories in the third quarter. The auto category, which is our second largest category in the quarter, ended with revenue up 8%. Tier 1 decreased 2%. This decrease was the result of a reduction of spending by doctor -- by Dodge, partially offset by increased spending from Ford. We saw a 5% reduction in Tier 2 spending, and Tier 3 local car dealerships saw an increase of 21% in the quarter due to Mike Shaw Automotive, Nissan of Duarte and Charlie Clark Nissan. In addition to automotive, our strong growth categories in the third quarter were services, which is our top category for the quarter. It increased 6%. This increase was a result of Farmer Insurance increasing their spending by 155%. Travel and leisure increased 5%. Retail saw a 27% increase. We saw increased revenue in the telecom category of 12%, and the health care category was up 14% in the third quarter. Fast food, restaurants, media and product brand names were down in the quarter. We added 34 new radio advertisers who spent more than $10,000 during the third quarter, which resulted in approximately $800,000 in revenue. In the third quarter of 2013, our Los Angeles radio cluster generated a 4% increase in total revenue. Entravision's Los Angeles radio cluster continues to perform in line with its peers. According to revenue data from Miller Kaplan, our Los Angeles radio market total revenue for the third quarter increased 5%. Our Los Angeles revenue growth continues to be propelled by solid growth in both local and national revenue from our 3 Spanish-language formats in the #1 radio market in the nation. Our cluster increased local revenue by 5% for the quarter by focusing on local direct business. In addition, we are continuing to focus on intensive cold-call strategies and the training of our account executives to take advantage of exciting, new commission incentives to help grow new business. These initiatives seem to be working as we're seeing a steady improvement in billing for our Los Angeles cluster locally. National revenue decreased by 1% in the quarter over the same period last year. Over the past few quarters, we have implemented strategies with Entravision Solutions to further target differences in our cluster formats and providing integrated marketing solutions and leading with idea-driven strategies. On July 20, we continued our tradition of producing 1 of the largest Latino concerts in the United States with our 15th Annual Reventon Super Estrella. Once again, this event exceeded all of our expectations. This year's Reventon featured an all-Spanish rock lineup. More than 15,000 fans enjoyed their favorite artists at Staples Center for a 6-hour concert. We also had a number of sponsors for this year's event including Bud Light, AT&T, McDonald's, MundoFox, Vallarta Supermarkets, Toyota, E&J Brandy, Los Defensores and La Opinion. As in the years past, we used both Facebook and our mobile platform to conduct our presales of concert tickets. We asked our listeners to either like us on Facebook or text in Reventon to our shortcode for the exclusive sale code. We sold over 60% of our tickets in the presale and we sold out the event within a week of going on sale. For the summer 2013 radio ratings, our stations continue to be ranked among the leaders in adults 18 to 49 against all competitors, regardless of language. Among the 10 Entravision markets released by Arbitron in the summer survey, 6 of our markets are in the top 10 in their markets. Let me now turn to our digital business. We continue to leverage our strong brands and revenue teams to deliver attractive Integrated Marketing Solutions. Now our clients can connect with our audiences across TV, radio, online, mobile and social for greater aggregated impact with new, attractive multiplatform advertising campaigns. Third quarter was a new all-time revenue record for our digital ventures. Our interactive revenues have grown year-over-year for 21 straight quarters, including strong growth of 44% during the third quarter over the same period last year. We launched our digital ventures in 2009. We have experienced solid revenue growth with a compounded annual growth rate of 49% since 2009. We continue the ramp-up of our digital video operations. During the third quarter, we published more than 10,000 local news stories online across our markets. We are investing in our former radio production facility in Los Angeles. We plan to leverage all the great talent and celebrities that visit our new media center in Los Angeles to produce video for evergreen content categories like entertainment, sports, wellness and others. Our audio live streaming operations showed solid performance during the third quarter as we streamed 5.2 million hours of audio content, a growth of 45% over the same period last year. We now have, every month, an average of 700,000 unique audio streamers with an average session length of 1 hour. Our mobile operations continue to grow at a fast pace as well. In the third quarter, our mobile revenues increased 24% over the same period last year as usage trends remained at record levels. During the third quarter, we sent over 6 million text messages to our mobile audiences on behalf of advertisers like Toyota, Ford, AT&T, Coors, Comcast, McDonald's, Bud Light, State Farm Insurance and many others. We also see search as an important driver of growth for Entravision because search represents 48% of all online advertising. ENTRALEADS is an online Latino search platform that delivers customer calls and other high-quality lead forms to our national and local advertising clients. 10% of all search queries are Spanish-language keywords and ENTRALEADS was created to connect potential Latino customers with clear purchasing intent and advertisers. This digital product identifies key details of customer interactions, measures the outcomes and optimizes yield. This unique automated platform continues to produce positive results for our clients. We have 200 clients advertising with this digital product, and it is becoming an important digital revenue driver for our company. We are driving increased engagement across social media as our radio and television websites continue growing their Facebook and Twitter audiences. We finished third quarter with 550,000 followers on our social media channels, which is up 74% over the third quarter of last year. We also deployed a new enterprise social marketing platform that allows us to integrate our social media campaigns into our traditional advertising offerings to drive social media engagement and revenue. We are diversifying beyond traditional media into areas of high growth to bring new opportunities to our current and future client roster. We are also focused on capturing nontraditional broadcasting clients with new complementary digital products and services. We are actively looking to diversify by forming new partnerships and acquiring new digital assets targeting the Latino consumer. A good example of our digital initiative is our big data unit. In August 2012, we launched Luminar as the first big data analytics business intelligence and modeling provider to focus on the Latino consumer. Luminar's big data platform and analytics provide actionable Latino consumer growth strategies for Fortune 1000 companies. Luminar continues to make significant progress with marketers and national advertising agencies. In a little over a year since its launch, Luminar has been retained to perform Latino consumer insight analysis for national brands including Carnival Cruise, Valvoline, Nestle, Publishers Clearing House, Target and the California Milk Advisory Board and is working diligently with other potential national brand clients. Luminar now collects and analyzes data for 15 million U.S. Latino adults, which represents 70% of the U.S. Latino population -- adult population. As a logical extension of our big data unit, we are pleased to announce the launch of the Luminar Audience Platform or LAP. LAP is a technology platform that organizes display, mobile video and social ad inventory using data from numerous sources, including Luminar's transactional data. That enables advertisers to set customized specifications about the type of customers they want to attract. LAP delivers immediate buying platform at big data scale. It is designed to use the power of analytics to improve the return on investment of marketeers targeting the Latino consumer for growth. Luminar is not only allowing us to deliver strategies of growth for our clients, but increasingly is transforming our whole operation into a more data-driven organization. This transformation is leading us to better cost efficiencies and revenue growth by dynamically managing our yield and management practices. We are transforming Entravision. We used to be a broadcast group. Now we see ourselves as an integrated media and information technology company serving the Latino market. We will continue to invest in our digital platform and our goal is to drive our digital and information technology businesses to produce at least 20% of our total revenues by 2016. Turning to our pacings. While we do not provide specific guidance, in October, we continue to see positive trends across our television, radio and digital businesses. Entravision's total core revenue through October is plus 12%, with television core pacing at plus 17% and radio core at plus 3%. That said, we are seeing anticipated health care spending in the quarter slow down due to the difficulties surrounding the Affordable Care Act rollout. In summary, we are pleased with our third quarter results, which demonstrated continued strength in core advertising, as well as notable progress building our digital platform. Interest in reaching the nation's Latino population remains high and we are attracting new clients through our multiplatform opportunities and strong audience shares. Core advertising pacings in October are demonstrating continued growth, and we are focused on further executing our strategy and delivering increasing returns to shareholders. I will now turn the call over to Chris Young, our Chief Financial Officer, for a review of our financial information.