Outfront Media at Citi’s Conference: Strategic Shift in OOH Advertising

On Thursday, 04 September 2025, Outfront Media (NYSE:OUT) participated in Citi’s 2025 Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference. CEO Nick Brien outlined a strategic transformation for the company, focusing on digital integration and operational excellence. While the shift promises growth, concerns about the profitability of transit advertising remain.

Key Takeaways

• Outfront Media is shifting its focus from traditional out-of-home (OOH) advertising to digital integration and enterprise advertisers.
• The company aims to enhance profitability by exiting unprofitable leases and improving real estate management.
• A new team is set to revitalize the transit advertising segment with innovative brand experiences.
• Outfront Media is leveraging major sporting events and retail media partnerships to expand its reach.
• The company emphasizes trust in OOH advertising compared to online media, aiming to bridge brand-building and performance metrics.

Strategic Transformation

• Focus Areas:

- Restructuring sales to target enterprise and commercial clients.

- Centralizing real estate and supply functions.

- Emphasizing digital integration with ad tech and data sets.

- Driving operational excellence through workflow automation and AI.

• Expansion Plans:

- Developing experiential brand experiences at events like the Super Bowl and FIFA World Cup.

- Forming retail media partnerships for near-store advertising.

- Engaging with the creator economy through influencer partnerships.

Out-of-Home Advertising Market

• Perceived Limitations:

- Historically seen as weak in brand-building and performance, leading to lower CPMs.

- Enterprise marketers have been hesitant to invest due to existing brand exposure.

• Shifting Value Proposition:

- Targeting enterprise marketers seeking both brand presence and performance metrics.

- Highlighting digital OOH’s improved performance metrics.

- Positioning OOH as a trusted, real-world medium.

Financial and Growth Strategies

• Historical Growth Drivers:

- Previously driven by M&A, digital conversions, and same-store increases.

• Focus for 2025:

- Prioritizing organic growth through enterprise clients and new business.

- Enhancing digital inventory quality and quantity.

- Building a dynamic, creative, and talent-intensive culture.

• Yield and Profitability:

- Emphasizing profitability over revenue growth at any cost.

- Exiting unprofitable leases, such as MTA above-ground and Los Angeles.

Transit Advertising

• Investor Perception:

- Seen as risky due to complex contracts and potential ridership declines.

• OUTFRONT’s Strategy:

- A new team focused on proactive sales and innovative brand experiences.

- Viewing transit as an opportunity for cultural brand moments.

- Investing in CMS and ad tech to support transit advertising.

Future Outlook

• North Star Metrics:

- Organic revenue growth from enterprise clients and new business.

- Improved quality of advertising supply through digital conversions.

- Cultivating a dynamic, creative, and talent-intensive company culture.

• Strategic Imperatives:

- Driving new demand.

- Focusing on enterprise advertisers.

- Achieving operational excellence.

For more detailed insights, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Citi’s 2025 Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference:

Unidentified speaker: To have Nick Brien of OUTFRONT Media with us here today.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Thank you.

Unidentified speaker: Thank you for joining us.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Thank you for inviting me.

Unidentified speaker: This has been the first time you’ve come to this conference.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: It has.

Unidentified speaker: Great.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Yeah, thank you.

Unidentified speaker: I wanted to start with just a super easy one because your background is a little bit unique and I think might inform the discussion. Just give us two sentences on what you did prior to becoming CEO of OUTFRONT Media.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Okay, I’ve been always in the media marketing industry, but always on the agency side. Some would say I’m now the poacher turned gamekeeper. It’s the first time, let’s say, on the supply side, on the sell side. I’ve always been a big fan of the out-of-home medium. I always felt that there was a lot of potential that strategically wasn’t optimized, maybe because of the marketing and the positioning, but also because of the sales approach. I’ve been on the board of OUTFRONT Media for 10 years. I took over as interim CEO on February 7th. After a six or seven-month period, both parties, the board and myself, decided to make this a permanent role.

Unidentified speaker: Did you recuse yourself from the board? No, I’m just kidding. Okay, so what is that, nine months, something like that, that you’ve been in the seat?

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Yeah, it’s 7.

Unidentified speaker: Okay, seven. Maybe I’m bad at math. What are your key priorities at OUTFRONT?

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Drive revenue, improve profitability, and create a winning culture. If I break that down, this has been the year I’ve agreed with the board, the year one, this year has been the year of transformation. Year two, when we talk about 2026, is the year of expansion. I focused and agreed with the board, there were four strategic imperatives for this year. Those were very much concentrated in changing the ways of working. Those kind of significant approaches reflected in recently the restructuring of the company on a sales side of the business. It was about driving new demand and focusing much more significantly on the enterprise side of the business, enterprise advertisers, who I feel have been largely neglected by the out-of-home industry.

It was to ensure that all things digital, and not just on digital demand and digital sales, but our ad tech stack, our data sets, and really ensuring that all things and the approaches to the way we even work with the agencies, not just the big multinational global agencies that I ran, but the growth of the independent digital agencies in the U.S. The fourth was operational excellence everywhere, which was obviously workflow, automation, AI leverage, and just making sure that the underpinnings for every aspect of the business have been world-class. That has been very much the focus. We saw the, not only people have been asking me about the change in the sales organization for now two CROs. There’s one CRO that’s focused on the enterprise side of the business, so the biggest multi-brand brand marketeers.

We have what we’re calling the commercial side of the business, which is mid-market and SMB.

Unidentified speaker: Yep.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: It has also enabled us to say that all key functions, especially real estate and the supply side of the business, are now centralized. No more disbursement and no more distraction, the intensity of focus either on the demand side or the supply side of the business.

Unidentified speaker: Okay, and that’s everything that you just listed is under the transformation part?

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: All under the transformation part.

Unidentified speaker: The second chapter is expansion. What do you mean by expansion?

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Two aspects. Yes, get more, more demand, higher pricing out of what we have today, which you would say more conventionally has been out-of-home brand exposure. The second dimension is very much about the brand experience opportunity. More significant big brands, they have all the exposure they need. They need to be in real life. They need to be where the conversations are. There are three significant areas we’re looking at for next year. One is in all areas of experiential brand experience. We had tremendous success at this year’s Super Bowl with New Orleans, having our real estate or someone very specialized in our real estate approach and work with the local authorities to get unique screening and canvas opportunities on the side of walls, where we can think about doing that. We are now with FIFA World Cup, with Formula One.

How do we create the opportunities for a more experiential opportunity for big brands? The second is retail media. The retail media and the retail media networks are a huge part of the media ecosystem. They are essentially either all online or in-store. We have near-store. They are near-store with their in-store and that value proposition. The early conversations with some of the most significant retail media companies is that they’re very excited about that. Either they become a channel partner for us or we do JV. We’ve got to work that out. The third area is a creator economy. We live in an influencer economy. The creators have increasingly, they have the scale and the influence. We have huge scale. We have a huge influence. We haven’t been working with them. We haven’t been productizing with them.

We’re having those conversations now because we’re convinced that the opportunity to make that shift from out-of-home to IRL is about the conversation and the opportunity to build trusted brands in real life. We believe that AI and the fundamental changes in the web search, internet usage is going to be a fundamental opportunity for ourselves.

Unidentified speaker: Okay, I want to start with a hypothesis just to frame how I think outdoor has been used or viewed by big agencies. I want to confirm that with you.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Okay.

Unidentified speaker: I want to see, I want to probe on some of these changes, particularly the creator economy. I’ve always thought if I was going to spend some money on advertising, I’d either go brand and the canonical brand spend would be Super Bowl, or I’m going to go performance-based, maybe that’s search or social media. The reason outdoor CPMs have been low is you’re not perceived as either brand or performance-based, right? It’s not brand because, you know, you put a billboard up and everyone drives by and the reach is sort of small and you’re going to get the same person over and over again. Do you think that’s the proper framing in terms of the hurdles that you have to overcome or the wrong framing for why outdoor has gotten low CPMs historically?

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: I don’t think it’s the right or wrong. It’s a framing.

Unidentified speaker: Okay.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: I don’t believe it’s the most accurate one for the significant absence of the enterprise marketeers, because the reason why the out-of-home share of media spend has collapsed from 6% to 2.5% in seven years is because the biggest marketeers in the world, let’s say the top 250, that dominate TV spending, they barely use the out-of-home media.

Why? Because they have all the exposure they need. They don’t need more brand exposure. They want to be in a more contemporary, dynamic way to build their brand, but they also want performance. We’re clearly not a hardcore performance play. There are too many options. A lot of those big performance marketeers don’t care about brand. We want to work with the brand marketeers who do care about brand, but they also want performance, which is why the digital side of the equation is so important. It’s why out-of-home and digital out-of-home in combination is a wonderfully powerful thing. The reason why I don’t agree with your summation of you’re neither a brand builder. Apple is our biggest marketeer. They are the most sophisticated marketeer in the world. They are the most powerful brand. They use the imagery and the simplicity. They don’t change their copy all the time.

Any of you who’ve been into an Apple store, you go down. The visual impact of the way they use the medium is the way they cherry-pick the very best of our medium, not just for myself, but also with our competitors. They love the medium. Now, isn’t it ironic? Why do Apple love it? Yet, look at the rest of the tech category. Where are you? Where’s your... That’s another reason why we’ve established our six industry verticals and created the Brand Solutions Group. The Brand Solutions Group is exactly that. They are not selling products and audiences. They’re selling solutions with outcomes. That’s run by Brad Alpern, who joined from Dentsu. It’s another point here that’s very important. I’m not hiring any more out-of-home people. We are hiring industry people who can put the power of our great medium in context.

For all these big marketeers over the last 20 years, especially the last 10, the strength of the technology giants have been so sophisticated. They’re compelling. They’re powerful. Out-of-home’s been forgotten.

Unidentified speaker: Right.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Not in the conversation. We have to reestablish. We have to reassert. We have to create a more contemporary, relevant positioning of this great medium. It’s coming our way. A lot of people are asking me in the one-on-ones we’re having about mega trends, the economy, tariffs. The biggest mega trend is our biggest opportunity, which is AI creating Web4. Web4 versus Web3 is going to be a very different situation. Already, we’re seeing trust levels on the internet and web usage starting to come down. We are going to demonstrate our medium is the most trusted medium. If you trust a medium, you’re more likely to trust a message.

Unidentified speaker: Trust the medium because it can’t be old.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Because it’s real. It’s real. That bus is real. That billboard is real. That transit experience while I’m sitting there on the MTA, it’s real. It’s real and in real life. That was our pitch for a lot of the virtual. We’re having conversations with a lot of the big AI companies. Don’t just build your brand in the virtual world. Join the real world. This is our opportunity. We have to change the vernacular. We have to change the value proposition. We have to support it. At the same time, let me reassure everyone, we are not not committed to the mid-market and the SMB. This is a bedrock of our business. It is 60% of our revenue. What we’ve done is made sure we separated the two sales organizations, but everything underpinning it, research, creative, ad ops, rev ops, runs across on a horizontal.

Those two CROs, Jim Norton, who is experienced at negotiating and navigating and catching big fish, joins us from Google, AOL. He’s a very significant player. Mark Bernani, we’re promoted to run the commercial side of the business. He is deep into the operational weeds of working with smaller to regional size clients. It’s going to be an exciting partnership.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. I want to circle back on those three things that you talked about where you’re focused. You said it’s Super Bowl, FIFA World Cup, retail media, and creator economy. Can I circle back on those real quickly? I never remember a time, and maybe I was just asleep at the switch, where the outdoor companies called out a sporting event like Super Bowl until last year. That felt new to me. I don’t know if I’m just misremembering or if something has happened where these big sporting events are actually able to move the needle in a meaningful way. If it is new, it feels like, given the World Cup is in the U.S., that this could be needle moving for your industry.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: The Olympics in Los Angeles.

Unidentified speaker: Right.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: I think it’s interesting. You haven’t noticed the out-of-home medium.

Unidentified speaker: That’s true.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Capitalizing on it. The money those big marketers and those big sponsors are spending on it is massive.

Once they’ve spent that money, they need to activate. We are wing fence. We can’t be chasing non-sponsors. The city of Los Angeles is very sophisticated in the way they manage that. The opportunity to have conversations with the cities is important. In fact, who did we just partner with, Stephan? The San Francisco Sports Authority. We need to get ahead of this in advance and lay pipe. Is it Formula One? Is it NASCAR? Is it FIFA World Cup? Is it the Olympics? The issue is, how do we create more brand experience? What opportunities do we have to engage in an experiential conversation? Bank of America doesn’t need more brand awareness. It doesn’t need more brand exposure. We need to be in both businesses and demonstrate that we can do it differently. Our medium can do that.

If we think about transit, a lot of people have approached transit. When I arrived at this company, transit didn’t have what I regarded as the superpower opportunity that I believe it has. We can do the most creative things, the most incredible takeovers in New York, in the MTA, the very fabric of the most dynamic city in the world. We’re able to do incredibly creative things. Now, talking with the MTA, we can now do that with alcohol as a category. Now you can start to imagine you’re selling a different product, not waiting for the phone to ring for someone to say, can I buy an ad campaign? We’re not in the business of selling ad campaigns. We’ll take those calls, but we need to be on the front foot much more creatively and much more strategically representing our assets.

Unidentified speaker: That’s interesting. Retail media was the second one you talked about. I think in a Wall Street parlance, when they think of retail media, they just think of ad dollars going from a shelf space, you know, individual cap displays, and just going to Walmart.com or Amazon.com.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Right.

Unidentified speaker: The way I thought you described it was sort of interesting. Is that the way you’re defining retail media? You said there was something interesting. They said there’s on-store, in-store, and you said you’re near-store.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Yeah.

Unidentified speaker: Okay, I like that framing. What is packaged goods as a % of your business now, if you had to guess?

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Almost.

Unidentified speaker: Almost zero, right?

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Right.

Unidentified speaker: Okay, that’s sort of interesting. Do you have to get some data that you don’t have?

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: In conjunction, we’re having the conversations. I can’t name the different players we’re talking to. We’re talking to three significantly because we have the opportunity to help them. All the retail media, no one has taken more money more quickly out of the media ecosystem than retail media over the last five years. It’s now 24% of all paid media spend. A lot of them, starting with Amazon and then Walmart and cascading all the way down, it wasn’t just in-store and end aisles and caps. A lot of that was your shopper marketing. This is their online networks and their ability to basically white label the trade desk and say, you are going to advertise on our network or you’re not going to get stopped. That’s running out of road. They now want the credit cards. They want the banks. They want the airlines.

They want the non-endemic brands to engage with them. All I’m saying is going to them thinking like an agency leader, not an out-of-home billboard seller, which is, okay, why wouldn’t you go to L’Oreal for their next shampoo launch and do an exclusive if you’re Duane Reade or CVS or Albertsons, and your proposition is not just what happens in-store, but the near-store, because we’ll aggregate all our inventory, we’ll map it, we’ll link it, we’ll have ID, mobile ID, we can see traffic patterns, we can adapt our content and our creativity. Your value proposition is going to be much more compelling to L’Oreal or Unilever than had you done it just on your own.

Unidentified speaker: Okay.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Now, I’m mixed. Just to be clear, this is expansion, growth, development for 2026.

Unidentified speaker: Understood.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: At the moment, these are preparatory conversations, but the leaning we’re having is significant.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. Creator economy.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Yes.

Unidentified speaker: I’m 100% on board with you, and I’ll tell you my sort of, you know, stupid lens that I look through everything. I’m watching YouTube now beat Netflix in terms of U.S. viewership. I’m watching Substack grow subs more than The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. I’m watching Roblox grow faster than Take-Two or EA. Every rock I turn over, it’s creator economy, right? I’m with you. I’m not smart enough to understand how, like I wouldn’t have even thought about what is outdoor, what is an outdoor company like OUTFRONT Media going to do in the creator economy. Just put some meat on the bone. I’m with you on that is the direction of travel. Help paint the picture of it.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: I’ll paint the picture. I’ll paint the picture with Apple, who won the, they were the marketer of the year, second time in 15 years at the Cannes Lion Advertising Festival. Where they won the Grand Prix was for the activation. Did anyone see it? At Grand Central for Severance. They did a week. They had the entire cast of Severance. They didn’t own a billboard. They didn’t, they rented a space, but they amplified it. It just caught fire. It was amazing. It was an experiential event, and it was combined. We’ve done massive takeovers of, we went down underground. I’m walking around the MTA, I’m walking around the subway system, I’m walking around Grand Central, and I’m looking at this Stranger Things activation, and I’m asking my team, did you recruit all the top creators who love Stranger Things?

Did they all come here with an amplification, with massive audiences, and the top influencers? They look at me blankly. Why not? We need to track down every one of these brands. If you say we’re now operating in the creator economy, and these creators and these influencers have more influence than the corporations themselves, and by the way, they’re increasingly not interested in just sponsoring corporate brands. Mr. Beast’s chocolate brand has taken 6% market share off Hershey’s. Whatever that was, it was Logan Paul’s, I mean, his energy drink is collapsed now, but it really hurt Gatorade for a while. You’ve got this situation where they have huge online influence. We have huge IRL influence. If we partner together, and by the way, this isn’t my idea, I was just shared that there’s a business called Raising Cane’s who’s taking significant share out of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Their entire model is out-of-home and influencers. That’s exactly what they do. They run out-of-home campaign, and they make sure all the influencers are there, and they activate it, and they light it up. How do we productize it? How do we think about that? Now we’ve met a number of the significant influencer companies, as well as a number of individual influencers who have massive audience. They have what we have. We have huge scale and significant influence. They have huge scale and reach, and they have huge influence. Why don’t we package that together?

Unidentified speaker: Okay, so all of these initiatives that you described, it’s very interesting, feel like this is most applicable to pretty urban environments. Is that fair?

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Directionally, yes.

Unidentified speaker: Okay.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: We’re a premium brand. We’re in the most premium cities in America.

Unidentified speaker: Yep.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: We have focused on New York, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco. You focus on those significant cities. It’s not exclusively that way, but the density, especially when we have a lot of commitment to transit, we believe there’s a lot of opportunity to apply this. I wouldn’t say it’s exclusive.

Unidentified speaker: Understood.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Yeah.

Unidentified speaker: Just tilts that way.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: It tilts that way. By the way, I just want to clarify one thing. I think it’s important to stress that this is as well as, not instead of, our focus on looking to generate campaign brand building activities across the core base of advertisers. There are still a lot of new advertisers. When I look here and I see Citi, and I look at now the activation, and any one of you living in New York, you see how much money Citi is spending on credit card on their, and now we’ve got Amex, JP Morgan, JP Morgan Chase, and we’ve got others. We’ve got GLP battles now breaking out. We’ve got so many categories that we have the opportunity to talk about advertising impact. That doesn’t go away.

Unidentified speaker: Understood. I’m going to give you my humble framing of the sources of growth in the outdoor industry, not for your company.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Yep.

Unidentified speaker: I look back over 10 years, it’s about mid-single-digit growth on average. A third comes from tuck-in M&A, a third comes from converting a static board to digital, and a third is the rest of it, which is same store, you know, static price increases, whatever. A third, a third, a third, roughly. It may be different for your company, but that’s sort of my framing. To me, what that tells me is in order for a, if your initiatives fail, right, and if the future looks like the past, you need to do more M&A to keep top-line growth in the mid-single digit, and you need to keep converting static boards to digital.

My question is, do you think that the cadence of, do you think the cadence of M&A that your firm does will look like that, i.e., small tuck-ins make up a 30% growth and digital conversions make up a 30% growth, or do you think these initiatives that you rattled off will either make your growth faster or the composition of your growth look different than the past?

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: We’ve talked about this a lot as a team, and we agreed that for 2025, this was going to be the year of transformational focus on the existing core business, and the M&A was not going to distract any of us.

Unidentified speaker: Okay.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: If you go to 2026, I would think the general direction, certainly from the industry point of view, is fair. I think it’s accurate. I do believe, however, we have the opportunity to focus on increasing digital conversions.

Unidentified speaker: Okay.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Increasing demand and being much more focused on how we both programmatically as well as directly develop the most professional sales capabilities in the digital arena, which will pull more demand, which will give us more opportunity to accelerate. The M&A side of it, we are always open and interested to especially tuck-in opportunities. It is fair to say we’re not having any ambitions on any big M&A at the moment.

Unidentified speaker: If your initiatives are successful, then we’re going to see you talk about better yields. That’s going to be the sort of the North Star.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Exactly right.

Unidentified speaker: In the next couple of years.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: If you look at our CPMs, relative to other media CPMs.

Unidentified speaker: A lot of headroom. Right. Okay.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Yeah.

Unidentified speaker: Yield is the North Star.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Yield, but yield and the profit, the other dynamic of that is a focus on profitability. You’ve seen us exit from two significant leases this year that were basically break-even at best. We’re not going to do, we’re not doing that anymore. We’re going to be very focused, especially now we’ve consolidated and centralized all things real estate to ensure that those landlords we’re working with are very excited that they’re working with the smartest sales partners that they can. We really improve our profitability by making sure every lease is great.

Unidentified speaker: Okay.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Yeah.

Unidentified speaker: Remind me, you exited the above-ground MTA, and then what was the other one?

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: A significant player in Los Angeles.

Unidentified speaker: Okay, got it. Can I ask a few transit questions?

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Sure.

Unidentified speaker: Okay.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: I love transit.

Unidentified speaker: Okay, investors hate transit.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: I know, I know.

Unidentified speaker: They hate transit.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Yeah.

Unidentified speaker: They hated it in the London Underground many years ago. They hated it pre, you know.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Do they hate it, or do they hate the contract?

Unidentified speaker: They hate the contract.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: There you go.

Unidentified speaker: Exactly. It just feels like a heads I win, tails you lose sort of setup where if everything goes swimmingly well, it’s a generous rev share, and if things go upside down, you’re stuck with a mag, right?

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Yeah.

Unidentified speaker: I feel like for a company like yours, yeah, it’s urban, it’s dynamic as you talked about being right there in the MTA. I think it hurts your multiple because people are like, oh, I don’t know when this thing is going to go upside down again when we go into another recession. I’d love to just get your take on how does transit as the new CEO fit into your sort of thinking. Is it integral? Is it?

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: It fits because it’s in the family and I’ve inherited it and it’s part of my plan. What I’m going to do is not look at it through a lens of weakness and frustration. I’m going to look at it through the lens of opportunity and success.

Unidentified speaker: Okay.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: To do that, first and foremost, I’ve had to change the team.

The entire team from marketing, product marketing, research, and sales is entirely new.

Unidentified speaker: Wow.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: They are now focused. That was clear to me early on when I had a number of conversations because if people’s mindsets and their mentality is already, this is a problem child and no one wants it, then they’re not going to be very convinced to sell it. Now we have a very significant, and that transit task force reports to me and they meet with me on a bi-weekly basis.

Unidentified speaker: Okay.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: We have a growth velocity team meeting every Monday. We have a bi-weekly transfer, and that transit task force is about building on those great case studies specifically to the point. It isn’t just the MTA. It’s not just in New York. It’s in Boston. It’s in Washington. It’s in a more limited way in Miami. Obviously, we have the biggest opportunity in New York.

Unidentified speaker: Yep.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: It is the opportunity to create the brand experiences that are truly going to engage, create conversation, and be in culture. You have to sell it that way. You have to market it that way. You have to demonstrate results and research that way. It’s a different mindset than saying, I’ve got some static boards that move at speed. Also, lighting it up programmatically. Now increasingly see the money that we’re spending on the CMS and the ad tech stack to support it.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Is that going to convert? Are you going to see the revenue? No, but you’ll see it on our numbers. You’ll see it on our results. You’ll see that force is starting to open. It has been relatively closed because it has not been sold with the vision, the energy, the enthusiasm, and the belief necessary. We are doing that. The other part of this is the success you have with some, it’s about the conversation. We’ve just taken a new campaign for Weight Watchers, which has just come out of bankruptcy. It’s on transit. It’s not on billboards. It’s in the transit system. We have to be much more proactive, and we are being much more proactive because when we flip the economics of these transit contracts, they will start to contribute in a much more meaningful way.

Unidentified speaker: Okay, I’m going to summarize. I’m going to just give you my on-the-fly distillation of what you’ve just said. It sounds like you think the biggest challenge for OUTFRONT Media has been the positioning of the outdoor medium in the minds of the decision makers. You think that there’s a lot of incremental opportunities to sell what you have more effectively to the right customer in a more creative way. Is that fair?

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: No. Yes, you play with the hand you’ve been dealt, but you need to keep playing it and strengthening it every turn.

Unidentified speaker: Okay.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: The contract has certain dynamics in it that we all know so well that I cannot change. What I can change is the revenue levels. What I can change is the context that everyone can’t see looking at me and saying, this is what happened pre-COVID. It’s all about the ridership and give me well-explained excuses as to why we’re not turning the corner.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. Okay. Very good. Are there any questions? If there are any questions, happy to take them for Nick. Okay, I’m going to ask one last question.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Sure.

Unidentified speaker: Let’s say you come back here a year from now and I ask you about the last 12 months and it’s a good news story. What do you think you’ll be telling me? Should it be all about top-line growth? Should it be about CPMs, yield, margins? What’s the North Star you want investors to focus on if your initiatives begin to bear fruit over the next 12 months?

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: I will sit here and proudly talk to you about the success of three things that matter most to me.

Unidentified speaker: Okay.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: The demand levels, the organic growth, not let’s talk about truly driving the organic growth levels to a more respectable growth level born of growth at the enterprise client level and a more consistent success of driving new business growth through new logos and not just current clients.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Second is going to be on the supply side, that we’re going to have a tighter grip on all things of our supply. You’re going to be talking to me about it isn’t just about 100 to 150 board conversions, maybe it’s higher than that, but more importantly, the quality of our inventory, the quality of our supply. Third, it’s going to be the culture, that this is a culture that is really talent intensive, continues to attract highly talented people, that is a winning culture, that is a dynamic culture, and is a creative culture, and is changing out-of-home in the minds of the biggest marketeers from being something that wasn’t very relevant to now being about building their trusted brands in real life.

Unidentified speaker: Perfect. I look forward to a year from now.

Nick Brien, CEO, OUTFRONT Media: Thank you, Nick. Thank you very much.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, absolutely.

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