Bill Wilson
Analyst · Michael Kupinski with Noble Capital Markets. Please state your question
Thanks Dhruv. As Dhruv noted we are pleased to report strong second quarter results that exceeded the guidance that we had previously issued. Our second quarter net revenue growth of approximately 2% was driven primarily by two key factors. First the continued stability of our broadcast products and second the strong growth of our digital marketing solutions. To provide you with information to better analyze our revenue results we have provided detail in the footnotes to our quarterly report breaking out our revenue composition into the following categories, advertising which is inclusive of broadcast and local digital advertising products. Our marketing solutions business Townsquare Interactive and live events. We encourage you to review this detail to better understand our revenue trends and in particular gain more insight into what is driving the strong performance of our company. As part of the local first initiative that we outlined on previous calls we have been recruiting and attracting strong talent to the local sales force in our markets. And as a result, we are currently at our highest sales staffing levels since September of 2016 nearly two years ago. We believe we are able to correlate strong local talent and a larger sales force with a noticeably increased in new business generation which we have observed over the first six months of this year. Similarly our content investment initiatives are also producing strong results which continue to manifest in our ratings. Midway through our spring ratings season we are continuing our positive momentum. In Albany we have three of the top five stations in the market including the markets number one station WGNA. After investing in audience research and marketing Monmouth Ocean, New Jersey we had our best ratings book in the past few years led by the Hot AC Powerhouse WJLK. In Buffalo our country and urban stations maintain a perennial number one and number two position by a significant margin leading in number three station by more than 50%. Our digital products and solutions continue to be our primary revenue growth drivers particularly Townsquare Interactive and Townsquare Ignite. In Q2 Townsquare Interactive our digital marketing solutions business continued its strong performance increasing revenue to 11.7 million in the second quarter and 22.5 million in year-to-date representing revenue growth of approximately 17% compared to the same periods of 2017. In addition, we saw meaningful acceleration of net subscriber adds in the second quarter adding 850 net subscribers a noticeable increase from the previous four quarters where we averaged 400 net adds per quarter. We drove this acceleration through an increase in the amount of new customer sales as well as a reduction in our monthly churn due to our focus on customer retention. Looking forward we anticipate that quarterly net adds will remain above historical average of 400 net adds per quarter because of our sales and retention initiatives. At the end of the second quarter we had approximately 13,650 Townsquare Interactive subscribers with an average ARPU of approximately 300 per month with new client ARPU meaningfully higher implying a current annual revenue run rate of nearly $50 million. Townsquare Ignite our digital programmatic advertising platform continues to perform exceptionally well and a number of orders running per month has increased to 1,700 in June 2018 from less than 1,000 per month for the comparable period in 2017. Like Townsquare Interactive, Townsquare Ignite has demonstrated consistent revenue growth each and every month so far in 2018, generating strong revenue growth during the first six months of 2018. Consistent with our plan, we have continued to expand our sales force and service teams for both of these fast moving and profitable digital products, in order to support continued growth, and this investment will continue through the year. Finally, as we have shared previously, we continue to operate both of these digital products and margins consistent with our core broadcast business. We are very proud of our digital performance and the digital expertise of our local teams. Gordon Borrell of Borrell Associates, recently completed his 2017 digital benchmarking study, in which he examined digital advertising across the local media landscape. This study concluded that Townsquare captured 2.6x the average addressable digital market share of other radio companies in it's markets. In fact Gordon highlighted Townsquare as one of the top digital performers across the local media landscape which includes more than 3000 local media properties, including radio, television, Yellow Pages, and new paper companies. I'd also like highlight our national digital business, which was restructured at the end of 2017 to have a smaller and more focused direct sales team with an increased emphasis on programmatic sales. This strategy is working very well, as we're experiencing strong profit growth. In addition, our local and national digital content remains very strong across platforms, reaching on average nearly 30 million unique visitors per month in a year-to-date period, and garnering more than 1.2 billion lifetime YouTube views and 2.6 billion lifetime minute views as of the end of the second quarter. I'd also like to highlight our terrific team at XXL. The number one hip-hop and urban brands on the web, who had an incredible quarter. XXL announced the 2018 freshman class in Q2, and three of the freshman videos appeared on YouTube's trending section with one becoming the number one trending video on YouTube the day it was released. For context, the 2018 freshman class videos have already been viewed over 15 million times on YouTube since being release. As Dhruv mentioned earlier, we continue to in innovation related to our local advertising products. In particular, our first party data initiatives which we're seeing drive new sales and customer attention for both digital and broadcast products. And second, our broadcast measurement and attribution service through our partner analytical. For the first time, we now have the ability to back up the assertion that radio works for advertisers, with specific attribution data that can demonstrate to our clients the impact of their radio advertising campaigns, measure and compare creative, and help to optimize their advertising spends. In our view, this is a game changer for radio, and we are pleased to see that many of our colleagues in the industry have also begun to adopt these same practices. In our opinion attribution tools like analytical should become the currency with which we speak to advertisers. In total, our advertising revenue which includes both broadcast and digital advertising, increased 3.5% in the second quarter and 3.4% in the year-to-date period compared to the same periods of 2017. Excluding political, advertising revenue increased 2.6% in the second quarter and 2.8% in the year-to-date period compared to the same periods of 2017. Finally, our live events business also had a great quarter, delivering strong profit growth on intentionally lower revenue as we've discussed previously. Our second quarter live events results were primarily driven by our multi day country music festivals which had a dynamite year, breaking ticket sales and profit records. A significant highlight was this year's addition of the Taste Of Country Music Festival which as Dhruv mentioned earlier, we watched in 2013 at Hunter Mountain, New York, and which this year achieved its first ever sell out audience of approximately 70,000 people over three days. We're also pleased to report that WE Fest, our three day country music festival in Minnesota was recently nominated by the Academy of Country Music as festival of the year. Before turning the call over to Stu, I wanted to share a brief anecdote that demonstrates the power of our local brands. At the end of June, one of the world's biggest artist Drake, released his number one album Scorpion, which included the hit song, "After Dark." After Dark includes a minute long air check from our number one urban radio station in Buffalo, WBLK, highlighting the WBLK brand to millions of music fans. Drake also announced to his more than 40 million Instagram followers that WBLK was the radio station that he grew up listening to. This is just one example of the power and influence of our local radio brands. With that, I will now turn the call over to Stu, who will review our financial results.