Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Comscore Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I'd now like to hand the conference over to John Tinker, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Before we begin our prepared remarks, I'd like to remind all of you that the following discussion contains forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include comments about our plans, expectations and prospects and are based on our view as of today, August 6, 2024. Our actual results in future periods may differ materially from those currently expected because of a number of risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties include those outlined in our 10-K, 10-Q and other filings with the SEC, which you can find on our website or at www.sec.gov. We disclaim any duty or obligation to update our forward-looking statements to reflect new information after today's call. We will be discussing non-GAAP measures during this call, for which we have provided reconciliations in today's press release and on our website. Please note that we will be referring to slides on this call, which are also available on our website, www.comscore.com under Investor Relations, Events and Presentations. I'll now turn the call over to Comscore's Chief Executive Officer, Jon Carpenter. Jon?

Thanks, everyone, for joining us this evening. Look, there's no way to get around the fact that 2024 has not played out as we had expected, and certainly fluctuating for our stakeholders, especially our employees who bought their humps every day to deliver and that certainly weighs heavily on me. And as I know it does the rest of the leadership team. Despite that frustration and the financial print here in the quarter, we are making progress with the turnaround of this company. The path we're on is one that will take us from being a company that was heavily reliant on syndicated revenue from products focused on legacy markets, undergoing tremendous disruption to a company that drives growth via transactional model tied to solving the rapidly growing problems that will define the future of media measurement. It's fair to say that the pace of that turnaround isn't what we expected it would be at this point in the year. However, given what we're seeing in the market, we're convinced that we're moving in the right direction as we execute our playbook. The pressure that we've seen on our clients and what I'd refer to as the legacy media segments with our syndicated digital and TV products being down in the first half, certainly helps point to the rough first half we've had, but it also highlights why the turnaround we're executing is the right one. While much of the industry is obsessing over yesterday's problems, Comscore is unapologetically focused on the emerging areas that will enable the future of media and advertising measurement, areas where Comscore has a unique set of assets and capabilities to deliver durable value within a rapidly changing media environment. We're seeing encouraging strength in our cross-platform offerings, specifically our Proximic business, and in terms…

Thank you, Jon. Total revenue for the second quarter was $85.8 million, down 8.4% from $93.7 million the same quarter a year ago. Content and ad measurement revenue of $72.2 million was down 6.7% from 2023, primarily due to lower revenue from our syndicated audience offering. As Jon mentioned earlier, the pressure that our legacy media clients are under has created headwinds for our syndicated offering, and the impacts have been felt most notably in our national TV and syndicated digital products. Our movies business remained solid in the second quarter with revenue growth of 5% over the prior year. Cross-platform revenue did decline in the second quarter, primarily driven by a decline in CCR revenue due to a pause in usage with a large enterprise client, while we work to integrate across their ad platform. The CCR decline was predominantly offset by growth in Proximic revenue, which also came in slightly lower than we expected. Proximic is integrated inside Oracle's ad platform, and we benefit from the campaign flowing through there, which significantly reduced in number during Q2 when Oracle announced they're shutting down their ad business. As Jon will highlight later, we view this as a short-term setback that bigger picture should be another revenue catalyst for Proximic. Research and Insight Solutions revenue of $13.6 million was down 16.5% from 2023, primarily due to lower deliverables of custom digital solutions and less products as a result of the pullback that we've been seeing on discretionary ad spend from certain clients. Adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter was $6.9 million, down 22.8% from the prior year quarter, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 8.1%. Our disciplined cost execution, fueled by the restructuring efforts we've made over the past couple of years, allowed us to maintain a reasonable adjusted…

Thanks, Mary Margaret. Looking ahead, I'm confident in the direction we're taking the company as we target a return to growth in the coming quarters. We're focused on solving the biggest, fastest-growing problems facing the market, and we're already seeing tangible evidence that we're making real progress. The solutions that we're taking to market here require new ways to think about things, both for Comscore and for our clients. And that kind of change does take time. As we look to the second half of 2024, and as Mary Margaret mentioned, we expect that we'll see the rate of decline slow as we move deeper into the second half. And looking specifically at our cross-platform products in the second quarter, we did see a few important things to point out. First, we introduced a comprehensive cross-platform YouTube audience measurement that includes desktop, mobile and connected TV to a major milestone with an important client. Additionally, we've integrated CCR under the Trade Desk, putting our solution for cross-platform advertising measurement into one of the most important channels in the programmatic ecosystem. Finally, our Proximic business has made significant strides with major holding companies with multiple preferred partnerships in the works, and you'll see these announcements on this front in the very near future. We've got great momentum building behind this turnaround. It's possible that if we see this momentum continue and accelerate a bit that we could see a return to growth as early as the fourth quarter of 2024. To give you some more color around that momentum, we currently have 5 of the top 10 auto brands in the US, leaning in to onboard our cross-platform ad measurement product, where our one-of-a-kind market-by-market view of campaign delivery is incredibly impactful for national advertisers whose businesses depend on their campaigns…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Surinder Thind with Jefferies.

Thank you. Just a really big picture question here. Given all of the changes and the challenges in the legacy business, what really is the path forward here given that the newer products that you're focused on are much more part of the business at this point?

Hi Surrender, thanks. I mean big picture, we're focused on areas of where comScore has got significant opportunity, and that's going to continue to be in our cross-platform capability and building out the solutions that our clients are asking us for, and that includes expanding CCR integrations. It includes our cross-platform, content planning product that I mentioned, and it includes continued investment in sales and product development inside Proximic, and that's where we're going to continue to focus the lion's share of our investment, because that's where we see the most significant growth going forward as we look out over the early the remainder of this year and certainly, they're a part 2025.

But I guess from a headwinds perspective, what's the risk that these headwinds remain material for a significant period of time and just asking the other parts of the business. I guess that's kind of what I was trying to get at. And are there maybe strategic alternatives or options that you can think about, for example, the movies business or anything else where it may be able to separate out some of the parts of the business?

Yes. I understand the question. I'm not going to comment on maybe some of the strategic points that you mentioned if we've got an announcement to make. We'll certainly make that available. But I think when we look at the balance of this year, what we put out for our thinking on 2025 as it relates to the traditional businesses, outside of custom, which does get choppy. And in the guide, we've really stripped out any kind of try to account for any unknown in the custom business in the guide. But as it relates to the traditional products, TV, in digital, I think by the time we get to the end of this year, we'll have anniversaried a lot of the, I would say, churn that we've seen in the digital product, we'll have anniversaried some of the big major renewals that we have this year and that we had in parts of last year. So just in terms of the visibility to that side of the business as we exit, certainly the third quarter and the early parts of the fourth quarter, we've got pretty good line of sight into what that -- how that business kind of stabilizes itself.

Got it. And final question, just you kind of gave an example of the ramp in Proximic and then you kind of transition that to c0ommentary around CCR. How should we be thinking about that? Is that -- are we measuring that in quarters or how should we talk about where you want to be at a certain point in the target?

Yes. I mean I think what we've learned here with CCR is that, we're integrating with some very big platforms. And much of the time line that we're talking about here is not always in our control in terms of the pace with which these things start to become visible inside those platforms. If anything, I think we can look back and learn from Proximic, and that was the example that I used, where it took some time. We're now 15 months into that integration. And as I mentioned on the call, we're doing over $1 million a month in one platform. And looking back on it, it took 3 to 6 months to really start to see meaningful momentum build. If you look at where we are with CCR, for example, the Trade Desk, which is one that we've talked about publicly, it really didn't get into the platform until the early part of July, and that was certainly delayed from when we had initially expected it to be. But that gives you a sense for CCR is still in the very early innings inside that platform specifically. And so, I think we're talking about months and quarters as these things start to get scale, we tried to account for that in terms of resetting our expectation for the growth that we can count on from that specifically in the balance of the second half.

Okay. That's appreciated. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] I'm showing no further questions in queue at this time. I'd like to turn the call back to Jon Carpenter for closing remarks.

Okay. Thanks, everybody for joining. I appreciate everyone dialing in to the call, and I'm sure we'll be talking to many of you shortly. Thanks.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.