Serge Matta
Analyst · SunTrust. Your line is open
Thank you, Mel, and good morning, everyone. We ended 2015 with record results and strong momentum to carry us into what we hope will be a historic 2016 for comScore. Less than three weeks ago, we completed our merger with Rentrak, creating a new cross-platform Measurement Company, built on a precise innovation lead understanding of audience and consumer behavior at massive scale. We're extremely excited and bullish about the new comScore, and on today's call, we will spend a significant amount of time on details regarding the new vision. That said, Rentrak's results will be included in our financials beginning January 30th of 2016, and not included in the financials we are reporting for comScore during the fourth quarter of 2015. As you can expect - as you can imagine, we expect today's call to run a little longer than usual. As Bill and I take some time to walk through our post-merger business plans for 2016 and detail the momentum, we've already been building in the marketplace. But first, let's move now to a brief overview of the comScore legacy quarter, before we close the Rentrak merger. Turning to slide four, comScore delivered another quarter and year of record revenues and strong profitability. We closed our 2015 with positive momentum across our business, setting us up well for game-changing 2016. Fourth quarter 2015 pro forma revenue was $97.7 million, up 10% over fourth quarter last year. We have strong revenue growth, despite the continued negative effects of foreign currency adjustments. On a constant currency basis, our pro forma revenue grew 13% over last year, and we achieved record pro forma constant currency revenue of $100.9 million. Adjusted EBITDA was $27 million, a 30% year-over-year increase and a 28% adjusted EBITDA margin, reflecting the significant operating leverage we have in the business. This adjusted EBITDA margin increased more than 400 basis points from the same quarter last year. I'm especially pleased that our pretax income for the quarter was $6.5 million. This amount includes expenses for 1.3 million of Rentrak-related transaction fees. Excluding these transaction fees, our pretax income for the quarter would have been even stronger. Turning to the next slide, during the fourth quarter, we added 42 net new customers for our overall business for a total of 2,770 customers. Our contract renewal rate for the entire business with existing customers again remained above 90% on a constant dollar basis. Our flagship digital audience measurement service, Media Metrix Multi-Platform also known as MMXMP continue to do great adding 61 net adds for the quarter; also almost 60% of our Media Metrix client base have now upgraded to Media Metrix MP in the markets, where we offer the product. And similar to previous quarters, about two-thirds of these Media Metrix MP clients also purchased our Mobile Metrix and or our Video Metrix Multi-Platform products. So, there is an upsell component to this momentum. We would expect a similar upsell momentum as we bring the services that Rentrak has to offer to the customers in our digital business. Finally, to continue our momentum, we expect to rollout an additional eight countries in 2016, ranging from Brazil to India. I am also pleased to report that the Media Ratings Council, known widely the MRC accredited our flagship Media Metrix service. This is the first time, the MRC has ever issued accreditation for digital audience measurement service, and it demonstrates our commitment to transparency and to working with the industry to deliver services, which are unmatched. We are committed to pursuing MRC accreditation for all of our flagship syndicated products including cross-platform. Lastly, we are thrilled that our free cash flow position for 2015 was up 32% year-over-year to $55 million. In the past 16 years, comScore has built a great business, focused on providing shareholder value. Given that commitment, our Board believes that right now, our stock represents a great value. With that in mind, our Board has authorized a new $125 million stock buyback program that will begin a few days from now. We expect this buyback program to be completed by the end of this calendar year. Turning to vCE, as many of you know, we have seen tremendous growth over the past 18 months here, and we continue to do so. Year-over-year vCE grew by 56%, reaching $46 million. In the past year, the number of clients leveraging vCE analytics has increased by 64% and the number of users accessing our platform has increased by 98%. A key win during the fourth quarter was Kraft Heinz, which made a strategic decision to start using vCE in the United States. In addition, we signed an important agreement with Twitter, whereby they will be the first tag less vCE integration with data directly available through Twitter’s advertiser user interface. We expect the Twitter integration to go live in early Q2 of this year. Finally, our Google DoubleClick relationship has never been stronger, and we expect a few major initiatives to be announced in the first half of 2016. As you can tell, there is a lot of momentum over here and we are confident in our previous guidance that vCE will be at a $100 million in annual revenue in 2017. Turning to slide seven, let’s now talk about the new comScore. We announced in September, our agreement to merge with Rentrak, and our merger creating the new comScore was completed on January 29th. When Bill and I first began discussing the possibilities of joining our companies, we knew that there was a tremendous opportunity ahead of us and that our assets, talents and focus on execution would create a great company for our shareholders and our customers. We also know that we could have significant synergies selling the products that each company has created and will create. In those initial meetings, neither of us fully appreciated the common corporate culture and how quickly would be able to build remarkable synergies between our teams, sales and our products. We've only been a unified company for three weeks and we are incredibly proud of the focus and intensity, we see on display across our technology, product and sales teams. Everyone is truly fired up, focused on execution and delivering on the promises we are making to customers. More importantly, our customers and future customers are even more excited and the need for speed in delivering scalable and quality insights has never been greater. As such, we want to take some time this morning to outline how we're moving forward as a new comScore and share with you the market momentum that is building in our favor. Turning to slide eight, one outcome of the merger has been the dramatic expansion of the market opportunity that comScore is positioned to address and profit from. As many of you know, pre-merger, comScore’s total addressable market also known as TAM was primarily focused on the digital advertising ecosystem. The new comScore incorporates a myriad of new platforms, including traditional TV, video on demand, movies, mobile video and over-the-top. Undoubtedly, this'll have significant impact on the overall TAM, and we expect that for the U.S. alone, the opportunity can be north of $2 billion. The Rentrak merger allows us to enter new markets and deliver new powerful insights that we simply couldn’t do in the past. We're aggressively going after this expanded opportunity with the new approach for our market need that has yet to be fulfilled, cross-platform measurement. Now contrary to what many of you may have heard, this is a new market category where no one truly has market share. comScore is focused on being number one in this new category. As you know, the new comScore is creating the new model for a dynamic cross-platform world. It’s a dynamic world that’s characterized by tremendously fragmented audiences who are watching and engaging with more choices of programs and content than ever before. And consumers are doing this across screens in the movie theaters, on the wall in your home, on their desk, and in their hands, yes everywhere. We are breaking new ground, delivering new currencies, and insights for our clients across the whole media and advertising ecosystem. These are currencies the market has asked for and desperately need, because they have not been provided in the past. In part, because building them is hard and complex, without our massive, passive and in many cases, census [ph] like information that only comScore has the unique ability to combine into our products. So, let us make it simple to understand. Moving to slide 10, our new model combines massive scale and smarter methodologies to deliver better information and more precise results. Now better information and more precise result is what the market is hungry for. Better information means the ability to use advanced demographics to plan and execute media bytes [ph]. The ability to link detailed consumer demographics that go far beyond age and gender with the exact TV shows, websites, or mobile experiences that the target consumer is watching. Yes, the advanced demographics of the cars consumers drive, how they vote, the products they purchase and consume in their home and much, much more, all linked with how they use the media that we measure at scale. Better information means new currencies that allow media companies to properly value their complete cross-screen audience. Better information also means that the media companies no longer sell themselves short, because of lack of measurement on all the screens their audiences use. This measurement has to be complete and include viewing over linear TV, VOD, over-the-top, mobile or the desktop; and it must measure all of the programs that are available, not just a sampling of them, and they have to be in all markets. New currencies that enable transactions based on trusted and independent metrics that reflect a media and consumer landscape that's fundamentally changed. Better information means the ability to know equally, who's viewing TV on major networks and highly targeted networks, cable networks, local stations, on new video platforms and on mobile. And not just knowing something about the aggregate audience, but know in detail characteristics of these audiences with the depth to create powerfully targeted advertising campaigns and can improve that those campaigns worked. Now, the only way to achieve this is to deliver the advanced demography, new currencies and granular, but stable insights is through the new model that comScore is pioneering. In many ways, it comes down simply to math, not simple math, you can't just total up the audiences starting with the TV base. You need two things. One, massive and diverse information assets. And two, smart and sophisticated methods to unify these assets to create precise metrics and industry-changing product. We have both at comScore. Now, let's talk about scale, about data scale. In the United States on slide 12, comScore is now measuring behavior on more than 260 million desktop screens, a 160 million mobile phone screens, 95 million tablet screens, 40 million television screens, a 120 million video on demand television screens. Adding in our movie box office business, we have information of more than 100 million movie goers, viewing 40,000 movie theater screens. Our footprint is unsurpassed and includes 500 national television networks, 2000 local TV stations, nearly 9 billion VOD transactions more than 10 billion desktop and mobile websites and more than 10,000 mobile apps from every movie and program title. Now let's be clear, it's not enough to have lots and lots of input. You need smart and sophisticated methods and our power house technology platform to turn this information into insight and currencies. comScore and Rentrak both have been inventing and patenting proprietary methods for handling massive measurement datasets for years. Our unified digital measurement methodology was a step change in how the digital world of desktops and mobile usage have been measured and understood in the digital world. And both comScore and Rentrak have been developing methods to unify TV and digital for a long time. The industry is finally in a position, where they are ready to purchase and certify new currencies. Slide 14, we're moving swiftly and decisively. We have begun briefing clients and we're making several concrete promises, which I will share shortly. First, we will have products in client’s review in early April, in time for the TV upfront and new prompt [ph] season. Second, we'll bring to the market a new syndicated Cross Media service time for the fall TV season. That service will have person level reporting across linear TV, time-shifted TV, VOD, over-the-top and digital video with advanced demographics and a broad range of measures for national and local markets. We're able to move so quickly because of how closely aligned our philosophies and approaches were as Rentrak and comScore operated and because we've all been preparing for the moment to make this happen. Slide 15, now I know a lot of our investors have been asking on exact specifics on what and when we will be delivering this year. And as such, for giving an advance, but for the sake of being sorrow, we felt it was necessary in this call to provide everyone what we are going to develop. As mentioned earlier, we are going to provide a ton of new insights fast. Starting in early April, we will provide the industry Cross Media series reports that includes person level ladies. And these reports will be segmented by linear TV, VOD and digital, and by age and gender demographics. We will immediately provide 15 months of historical data as part of our service. This is a huge milestone centered to leverage the massive datasets of the new comScore. In Q2, we will evolve from series reporting to the telecast level and provide the incremental reach for each audience by platform. We are hearing our clients’ needs and we are providing them the metrics, they are begging for. In Q3 of this year, we plan on delivering most of our new capabilities in a new syndicated user interface. We will also be moving to daily reporting cross-platforms. Finally, in Q3, we will add the advance demographics that is auto intenders, consumer package goods, buyers et cetera, and incorporate them into the overall products. On the activation side, one of the benefits of having a mature technology platform with massive datasets is our ability to integrate into major data management platforms. Excuse me, also known as DMPs and provide cross-platform insights. An example of major DMP is Oracle's BlueKai. Our strategy of integrating across DMPs is rooted in our focus on being a trusted independent provider of information and currencies. We don't want to be in the business of owning a DMP. We want to help power the sector and as such remain agnostic. This approach also allows comScore information and insight to be used at scale on a myriad of clients versus going to each client one-by-one. In Q1, we expect to activate TV-based segments digitally, and in Q2 of this year, we intend to move to cross-platforms. In addition, we expect all of our DMP relationships to leverage our advanced demographics. This will help our clients to identify likely customers and their viewing habits. Finally, since I know curious minds will ask, we are absolutely moving towards delivering vCE results in a cross-platform manner in the U.S. This is critical and we will have that starting in Q2 of this year. We will also be leveraging our vCE platform and incorporating a very scalable approach to measure online and offline sales, a key need for advertisers. We will make sure to provide you a much more detailed overview of this initiative during our Analyst Day in mid-March. I hope by now you've heard the passion and enthusiasm in my voice, while I was describing the new model we're building. Our clients have the same enthusiasm. Moving to slide 18, on our last call, we introduced the newest measurement platform we've invented and are investing in; the comScore Total Home Panel. With the Total Home Panel, we are able to measure the full range of connected devices, including TVs, smartphones, tablets, game consoles, over-the-top devices and other connected devices. One of the most exciting developments to report is our ability to support the measurement of content consumption on TV. The technology that we are rolling up to the panel will enable the measurement of over-the-top services like Netflix and Amazon Prime with title level information. The rollout of this technology is expected to be complete in Q3 of this year and will then be incorporated in our Cross Media insights. As mentioned in our last call, the Total Home Panel is real and we are in the recruitment phase. We are measuring today approximately 4000 active devices and we expect 60,000 active devices by the summer and over 300,000 devices by the end of 2016. We are extremely excited about this development and the initial data has all the operators in the United States and is representative of the entire U.S. population. Now, since it's on everyone's mind, the investment in 2016 to achieve the Total Home recruiting goals is approximately $10 million to $15 million and is included in our annual guidance. Continued innovation is a hallmark at comScore and the Total Home Panel is a comScore first. We will be leveraging this to inform our census data across all screens. Now, I'd like Bill to talk in detail about our TV sector.