Thomas Lesinski
Analyst · B. Riley Securities. Please go ahead
Thank you, Ted, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our second quarter 2021 earnings call. I hope that you're all continuing to stay safe and are having a happy and healthy summer. During the call today, I'm going to provide a high-level update on our recovering cinema advertising business and the ongoing steps we've continued to take to balance cost containment with the need to quickly restart our business. I will also provide an update on our strategy to diversify and strengthen in our marketing, product offerings by expanding our online presence and consumer databases and analytics and increasing our reach and impression base from other out-of-home venues. Ted will then provide more details about how we are managing our operating costs and our overall liquidity. And then as always, we'll be open for questions. Summer movie-going season is in full swing. And we've been very encouraged by the way advertiser demand has picked up with the box office success of several new releases. The strong openings of a Quiet Place, Fast and Furious 9, Black Widow and Space Jam have all demonstrated that there's a significant pent-up demand through a churn that the communal big screen experience of the movie theater. Even in films like Black Widow that have opened day and date where the streaming service have attracted large cinema audiences. With a very crowded film release schedule for the remainder of the year, the highest percentage of movie theater location to open as the pandemic began on March 22 and our ad commitment book building, we are very optimistic about the rest of '21 and '22. While the various release strategy experience of traditional Hollywood studios and new tech video content produced continues to play out, there are strong signs emerging that lead us to believe that an exclusive theatrical window remains the best approach for content producers. Two of the highest domestic grossing release of the year, A Quiet Place 2 and F9 were released exclusively on the big screen. Positive press and other PR about the success of the cinema openings cost of producers nothing, it has created huge incremental awareness, that's also expected to provide meaningful marketing benefits in the upcoming streaming and other release windows. Combined with consumer awareness benefits and the significant lost revenue due to streaming-related piracy, we believe that it's becoming increasingly clear that students are leaving money on the table with the day-and-date streaming strategy. These realities may underline recent announcements by many studios, including Warner Bros, that they will maintain or reconsider an exclusive cinema release window for all or some of their films in 2022. There's also been a recent experimentation with an exclusive cinema release window by Netflix for certain of their feature linked films. This could be a trend that expands to other companies that have recently entered the streaming business. For the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began in March of 2020, some release schedules have begun to normalize. Nearly all movie theaters have reopened and cinema audiences have begun to return and most importantly, so too have our advertising clients. At the end of Q2, 97% of the theaters within our own network were open in a robust motion picture release schedule was in place, a stark contrast with the bleak conditions at the end of Q2 of 2020. As U.S. movie theaters begin to reopen and capacity restrictions begin to be lifted in all major metropolitan areas during Q2, the number of ad impressions available to sell to our clients began to increase, resulting in a small amount of in-theater revenues versus none in Q2 last year when theaters closed. While our Q2 revenue was still significantly below pre-pandemic levels, the trends are encouraging as future marketing budgets are starting to be allocated to cinema now that clients can see for themselves that our valuable, young, engaged movie audience has been trending towards critical mass once again. This growth momentum reflects all of the hard work of our sales team over the past year is that kept cinema advertising and NCM, in particular, top of mind with advertisers, even though we've had very few high-quality cinema advertisements to sell. Maintaining these client and agency relationships during the pandemic has paid significant dividends during this year's TV network upfront that are in their final stages. We've already completed numerous upfront commitments and are actively engaged in finalizing many other negotiations with major advertisers for marketing campaigns that will cover the broadcast year beginning this October. Approximately half of our top 20 upfront partners in 2019 are back and have closed deals with us for 2021 with another 25% expected to return to our screens by the end of Q3. We also continue to have promising discussions with many other new and existing clients across a wide array of key categories, including QSR, telecom, auto, entertainment, CPG, technology, finance, insurance, retail and others. The upfront market demand that we are seeing may also be related to some changes in consumer TV viewing behavior caused by the pandemic. High-quality video GRPs are becoming harder for marketers to find as TV consumers begin to favor SVOD versus ad-supported television. This reduced ad-supported TV viewership combined the continued aging of the traditional TV audience is forcing ad-supported TV networks to increase pricing to secure the same level of upfront commitment. This creates a real opportunity for us as marketers must find their premium video GRPs elsewhere and our CPMs are in fact, more competitive. There also appears to be less excitement about the new fall TV programming schedule from the media buying community as COVID-related production issues have reduced the number of new shows premiering on linear ad-supported TV and networks have begun to put more of their program investment behind series that will help them grow the subscription base of their emerging streaming networks. This puts cinema in a very strong position with a crowded film slate for the rest of this year and well into 2022. While the recent news of the increase in new COVID cases, including the spread of the Delta variant, recent news regarding vaccine mandates, working on the potential markets, potentially stricter COVID projections in the future may impact box office attendance and advertiser sentiment, but we remain excited for the box office later in the year and box office as much for Q3 and Q4 of '21 continue to be very positive with the major upcoming film set for release, including Shang-Chi and the Legend of the 10 Rings, the next James Bond movie No Time To Die, Halloween Kills, Doom, Ghostbusters, Afterlife, Top Gun Maverick, Spider-Man, No Way Home, Sing 2 and of course, The Matrix 4. In addition to the recovery of our core cinema ad business, we're also making good progress on our strategy to create a more robust consumer analytics data base and unique ways to bundle our highly coveted leader audiences with online impressions from our new and expanding digital platforms and other consumers that visit our other digital out-of-home partner locations. These new integrated marketing offerings will allow advertisers to engage movie fans anytime and anywhere. Throughout the COVID pandemic, our Newbie digital ad offerings continue to attract new advertisers. In addition to our owned and operated digital products and apps, we're continuing to execute on our plan to integrate with world-class consumer tech platforms, including YouTube and TikTok, to exclusive partnerships that allow us to sell advertising alongside the compelling entertainment content that our Gen Z and millennial audience would love. Our advertising on YouTube is an ideal example of a complementary digital expansion, as we are now working with brands like pharma and QSR categories to run their ads alongside premium, brand-safe movie content like trailers and fan favorite movie online across the top social video platforms, which included a 7-figure deal in particular in Q2. We've just also started a new TikTok custom social influencer offering that we've developed in a unique partnership with the digital specialty group for ad intelligence. We anticipate that this new offering will be particularly successful on the local side as it gives our local team an easy and affordable way for small business advertisers to participate in one of the world's biggest social platforms through NCM and to bundle with around screen ad, create powerful marketing bundle to reach young consumers. Our digital offerings also provide valuable consumer data. Our ultimate goal is to become the premier source of movie-related consumer data. As such, we have increased our focus on the aggregation of highly valuable consumer data we collect both from our consumer-facing apps such as movie trivia and movie [indiscernible] and also from movie ticketing data and partnership with the exhibitor. These important movie ticket audience data sources are expected to grow our data sets to 300 million by year-end. It will greatly expand our ability to create more robust targeting solutions for advertisers and to create custom close-loop attribution measurement for brand [indiscernible]. Our growing industry position as the movie audience experts will put us in an ever stronger competitive position in and larger digital advertising platforms and is an important part of our supporting our premium CPM value proposition. We're also continuing to expand our new digital Out-Of-Home group, which was created to allow brands to access a unique combination of theater audiences and consumers in a variety of vendors like supermarkets, convenience stores, restaurants and office buildings. Although this is very much an emerging business for us, we're seeing a growing pipeline of commitments from brands and categories, including CPG, health care, education, professional, financial services, government, travel and tourism and insurance. We also recently expanded our digital Out-Of-Home network to include some exciting new venues, including our new Noovie on-campus network powered by True, which offers brands a unique way to reach young Gen Z movie bands and point of market entry consumers in college and university campus locations where they spend the most time, including high-traffic nonacademic commercial spaces such as campus retail and bookstores, student centers and cafeterias and athletics and recreation areas. We're also exploring new entertainment marketing arenas with an exclusive eSports advertising and content monetization agreement with eSports community aggregator to create new ways for brands to capitalize on that cultural phenomenon. As we mentioned during our Q1 call, our new digital Out-Of-Home and digital social video platform inventory also provides us with two initial entry points into the programmatic buying marketplace, which is an important step in our strategy to make all our NCM markets easier to buy. Our capital investments in our new cinema advertising management system that was launched in Q1 is laying the foundation for programmatic access to our on-screen inventory as well, which we expect will create higher inventory utilization and other monetization opportunities for our in-theater inventory in the future. And while we're still early days of this recovery, as local multiplexes begin to sell out auditoriums showing the new from opening, it's clear that consumer demand for the cinema experience continues to be strong. And as previously described, there are also signs that market or demand for our high-quality video GRPs may be on the rise. While our business recovery is clearly underway and revenue levels and related accounts receivable balances are beginning to build, our monthly cash flow burn rates remain elevated and there will be working capital timing differences associated with the payment of operating and debt service costs and collection of ad sales accounts receivable. Thus, we've implemented initiatives to manage our liquidity, including approval from our Board and founding members of a short-term revolving debt facility between NCM, Inc. and NCM LLC to bridge short-term working capital deficits that Ted will get into more detail shortly. We also continuing to balance the need to continue certain cost reduction measurements with the need to keep our talented NCM team in place and motivated to quickly ramp up our business as advertisers demand increases. Our sales teams are now back to full strength and we brought back some several staff that are needed to support the increased contract volume levels. We've begun to reinstate some of the company - some of our temporary pandemic salary reductions. We also expect to implement our return to office plan for our Denver corporate office and regional offices in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City shortly. I know that these staffing plans may not be happening as quickly as all of us would like, so I remain very grateful to our entire NCM team for their incredible resilience, dedication and support. NCM has not only survived the worst of the pandemic because of everyone's hard work. The company is very well positioned for success in a post-pandemic world. I also would like to acknowledge the support of our Board, our exhibitor partners and our advertising clients and their agents and again sincerely thank them for their continued support as we begin to emerge from this historic time together stronger than ever. While uncertainty related to the COVID-19 pandemic remains, we believe that we're well positioned to reestablish the growth momentum that we had created before the pandemic started. We look forward to a continued recovery through the remainder of the year and to much better times ahead. So with that, I'll now turn the call over to Ted to discuss more details about our financials, cost-saving measures, liquidity position and outlook. Ted?