Scott Kauffman
Analyst · Midtown Partners. Please go ahead with your question
Thanks, Matt, and good afternoon, everyone. 2017 was a year of significant progress for MDC Partners. We executed on what we said we were going to do, firmly reestablished our place as the industry’s disruptive growth story, invested in our future and strengthened our financial position. All of these factors helped us achieve our financial guidance, and in many cases, with industry-leading metrics. Reported GAAP revenue increased over 9% to $1.51 billion, our best year ever. We delivered best-in-class organic revenue growth of 7.0%, spot on with our approximately 7% guidance and 6 times the industry average for the big legacy agency holding companies. Organic revenue increased nearly 7% in the United States and 15% outside of North America. Canada declined 1%. We saw double-digit gains in client verticals, led by communications, financials and consumer packaged goods and double-digit growth in our media businesses. We generated adjusted EBITDA of $203.5 million, an increase of over 15%, with margins expanding by 60 basis points, also spot on with our guidance. Our improved profitability was driven by the growth of our business; payoffs from investments in growth areas, such as international and data analytics; and the leveraging of our cost structure. This year, we also significantly strengthened our financial position. We began the year with a $95 million equity investment from Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking and finished in a strong cash position and out of the revolver, as expected. We passed a significant milestone in terms of reducing our deferred acquisition consideration and non-controlling interests. After funding $129 million of acquisition-related payments in 2017, we’ve now reduced these items to a new 6.5-year low. At the same time, we brought our reported net-to-debt EBITDA ratio down to 4.2 times, a full turn lower than year-end 2016 and consistent with our commitment to deleverage. The key ingredient to our ongoing success continues to be our ability to gain market share, and 2017 was no exception. Net new business was approximately $87 million, nearly in line with 2016. We gained particular traction with consumer packaged goods companies, becoming a key beneficiary of clients seeking agencies who are able to disrupt traditional segments. This year, we expanded relationships with Hershey’s, Diageo, General Mills, MillerCoors, Coca-Cola and Bacardi, and with additional recent wins from Del Monte and Dean Foods. Just as importantly, we’re increasingly the go-to partner for many of the major tech players and cutting-edge disruptors and innovators of their respective industries. And as an example, this year, we grew revenue by 30% with the FANG group of companies, which collectively now accounts for over 5% of MDC revenue. And in the fourth quarter, 72andSunny won the global creative account for one of the most disruptive brands, Uber. We continue to gain share outside of North America where we expanded our capabilities in recent years and where we’re increasingly playing at the highest levels of strategy, creativity and innovation. In addition to Uber, this year, we added international or global assignments for Huawei, Electrolux, IKEA and eBay, helping to lift our international revenue to 14% of MDC total revenue from 11% a year ago. And the industry is increasingly honoring our agency partners for their ability to deliver all of this and more. We’re especially proud that just this week, Advertising Age named of one of our own partners, Assembly, as Media Agency of the Year. Additionally, Anomaly and 72andSunny earned two of the 10 spots in the publication’s annual A-list, and Crispin Porter + Bogusky was recognized as an agency standout. Also this week, Forsman & Bodenfors was named by Fast Company as among the most innovative companies in the advertising and marketing sector. That our partners are gaining market share and consistently punching far above their weight in terms of industry recognition is a great validation of the competitiveness and differentiation of the MDC portfolio. Our success in 2017 and beyond comes down to core pillars around which we formed the company: Talent, culture and creativity. These pillars form the foundation that enables MDC agencies to consistently produce impactful work, driving business results for clients, growth for MDC and value for our stakeholders. Empowering entrepreneurial management teams, we represent a progressive alternative to traditional holding companies. With a focused effort on recruiting, growing and promoting a diverse workforce, we believe that diversity of thought and opinion puts our teams in the best position to understand consumer behavior and technology and yields more impactful results for our clients. We are The Place Where Great Talent Lives. Our strategic bet has been that in a rapidly changing market services landscape, the winners will be the most talented, innovative and creative agencies. New technologies will continue to emerge and data will move front and center, but leveraging these capabilities to win will always be fueled by strong creativity at the core. And we believe very strongly in the expanding definition of creativity, so we’ve worked diligently to ensure that our portfolio continues to meet the evolving needs of Chief Marketing Officers. Our approach is to look at big growth areas in our space where there is a client need and where we think we have the opportunity to take a leading position. We’ve done this successfully many times by scaling integrated advertising agencies and increasingly by combining data-driven consumer insights, strategy and digital products into our offering. As examples, we organically launched Gale, a world-class data-driven marketing firm which brings together the expertise of a top management consultancy with the ability to extract strategic insights from customer data in order to solve complex business problems. Gale has scaled to over 200 people in just over three years. We’ve incubated Zero & One, a data-at-the-center platform and consultancy that we launched this past year. This captive agency, available only to the MDC portfolio, empowers our partners to better harness customer data, understand customer journey and activate business and communication strategies on behalf of their clients. Zero & One is live and in the market with a number of projects underway. And we’ve invested in mobile and interaction strategy and development and launched practices that leverage AI-driven insights. Looking ahead, MDC’s modern marketing model uniquely positions us to gain incremental market share in an environment of great change. Many of the challenges that ail the big legacy agency holding companies represent opportunity for us. Our firms were born in a world where Internet already existed. This has shaped our cultures and the talent it attracts. Digital hasn’t changed us, it defines us. While we’re constantly refining our model, we don’t need an organizational overhaul, tearing down walls and breaking fiefdoms to be positioned to compete. The disruption that many industries are undergoing means more brands under pressure looking for change agents with fresh, progressive solutions. That favors MDC’s specialist agencies at the expense of incumbent firms previously entrenched in long-term relationships. The active pitch environment only means more at-bat opportunities for us, and we welcome the reviews. The complexity of omni-channel communications also increasingly requires diverse teams delivering integrated solutions. MDC is born out of like-minded entrepreneurs who are accustomed to partnering with other specialists. It’s in our DNA. So we already collaborate well with one another in our current form. There’s no need for a buzzword to be client-centric, that’s why our top 10 largest clients are currently served by an average of four or more separate MDC agencies, even better than the three-plus agencies where we stood a year ago. New competitors may be angling for their own share of the expanding budget under the purview of the Chief Marketing Officer, but our excellence in creativity means our services are difficult to automate or disintermediate. This is even more the case as we increasingly power our creativity with data-driven consumer insights and great strategy. The drive for efficiency means more clients are reevaluating their marketing programs to ensure that their dollars are driving measurable returns. We’ve always focused on performance, never invested in many of the legacy marketing capabilities that have been disrupted and don’t sit on expensive global infrastructure that just isn’t needed anymore. We’re looking at how we grow agencies from 5 offices to 10 offices, not how they reduce from 200 offices to 100. This allows us to be thoughtful and strategic about building, not emotional and reactive about breaking things down. The swell of client demand for transparency and accountability plays right to the strength of Assembly and MDC Media Partners, which was launched just four years ago in the digital age powered by data and with a fully transparent model. We’ve made no secret that we don’t think that our competitors have gone far enough. For all these reasons, we’re highly confident that our world-class agencies are ideally positioned to continue to thrive in an industry defined by constant change. And so we absolutely expect to continue our long-term track record of market share gains. To fortify our place as a leader in the industry, in 2018, we’re fueling a number of strategic initiatives to capture key growth opportunities to complement our existing strength in creatively led agencies. We’re continuing to scale our data-at-the-center platform, Zero & One, as a resource to our partners as they address the CMO’s most toughest business challenges which increasingly revolve around better understanding and communicating with their customers. We’re adding to our digital product and design expertise to capture greater share of client wallet as CMO budgets are increasingly allocated towards connected experiences across digital channels. We’re scaling and expanding the geographic footprint of our production capabilities to meet the client needs of more cost-efficient content and the rising importance of earned media. And we’re continuing to support a number of our firms through office expansion as they seek to expand into new geographies, with recent openings in Berlin, Singapore and Sydney. We’re making additional investments to scale our health care marketing capabilities to better capture share in this area of significant disruption. And before I turn the call over to David, I’d like to take just a moment to thank the 6,000-plus dedicated members of the MDC family for making MDC Partners the group with the most exciting prospects in the industry. I believe in our business, the people and the work we do, and I’m excited for the year ahead. And with that, I’d like to turn the call over to David.