Outfront Media at JPMorgan Conference: Strategic Shift and Growth Focus

Published 14/05/2025, 20:04
Outfront Media at JPMorgan Conference: Strategic Shift and Growth Focus

On Wednesday, 14 May 2025, Outfront Media (NYSE:OUT) presented at the 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference. Interim CEO Nick Bryan and CFO Matt Siegel discussed the company’s strategic transformation, highlighting efforts to modernize sales strategies and improve operational efficiency. While the tone was optimistic, challenges such as exiting low-margin contracts were acknowledged.

Key Takeaways

  • Outfront Media is focusing on modernizing its sales strategy and enhancing operational efficiency.
  • The company is targeting non-traditional advertisers and key sectors like automotive, CPG, and QSR retail.
  • Strategic exits from low-margin contracts aim to improve profitability and EBITDA.
  • New York transit sector shows strength, while other regions face challenges.
  • M&A opportunities are being explored to enhance technology and brand partnerships.

Financial Results

  • Q1 saw a 4% increase in national sales but a 3% decline in local sales.
  • Temporary campaign delays occurred, but there were no significant cancellations.
  • Q2 is 90% booked, with 70-75% of the year already secured.
  • Contract exits in Los Angeles and New York will impact revenue growth but are expected to improve margins.

Operational Updates

  • The company is investing in technology and automation for process improvements.
  • Exiting low-margin contracts in major cities is part of a strategy to focus on profitability.
  • Digital conversions are targeted at 100-150 new digitals annually, with significant revenue lift expected.

Future Outlook

  • Outfront Media is optimistic about its transformation and growth strategy.
  • The company is exploring M&A opportunities to enhance technology and brand experiential partnerships.
  • The focus is on increasing its share of media spend by improving measurement and simplifying the buying process.

Q&A Highlights

  • The company is confident in its ability to mitigate recession impacts through commission-based sales and revenue-sharing contracts.
  • Efforts are being made to diversify and focus on mid-market and local opportunities in challenging regions like Los Angeles.
  • Outfront Media aims to be a significant part of brands’ strategies, emphasizing real-life brand building.

For the full transcript of the conference call, please refer to the document below.

Full transcript - 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference:

Chris: Right. Thank you. Should we start? Okay. Cool.

All right. So we are happy to have back at the conference, Outfront Media. I’m joined up here by Interim CEO, Nick Bryan EVP and CFO Matt Siegel. Guys, thanks for being here. Thanks, Chris.

Nick, maybe I’ll start with you. You’ve been in the executive seat for a few months, but part of the board at Outfront for over a decade. Maybe you could just give us a refresh on your background.

Nick Bryan, Interim CEO, Outfront Media: Sure. I hello everybody. I’m I’m historically an agency leader for thirty five years. I’ve won many of the large multi multinational networks globally both on the credit and the advertising side. So, in a way it’s an interesting challenge now being on the sell side, not the buy side.

I’ve also spent some time in the ad tech side of the business when I was hired by Singtel to get control of Amobee and to run that process. So this is an interesting time because I’m, I would say, I’m not of the out of home industry, but I’m of the industry, the brand building and the media industry. Got it. Alright, so

Chris: as you noted, you bring extensive experience on the advertising agency side, the buying side, both in creative and media buying. You know, curious how that informs your view of outdoor and its place in the ecosystem.

Nick Bryan, Interim CEO, Outfront Media: That, yeah, that’s a very good question. It reinforces what I’ve always felt for the medium that it has tremendous value. It has tremendous strategic contribution to both building brands and fueling growth. I have a strong point of view that it’s undervalued. I think it’s not as well marketed as it needs to be, and I think as reflective in its share of total media spend, out of home has fallen from grace somewhat, and I think the strength of the digital channels have demonstrated themselves in the ability to go straight to business outcomes as well as some of the more traditional media including out of home have really felt to keep pace with that.

Chris: Got it. All right, a lot to unpack there. We’ll come back to some of that. But on last Thursday’s earnings call you highlighted for Outfront a number of strategic imperatives. Maybe you could touch upon some of those and where you have the exec team focused.

Nick Bryan, Interim CEO, Outfront Media: Well, the exec team is focused on all four. We’ve been very focused that this is a year, and again this is a company I know well. I’ve been on the board for ten years, so it’s an industry I know well and it’s a company I know well. So this is a leadership team that I’ve worked with quite intimately. It’s now getting everyone aligned around the things that matter most, and I think number one is really on changing the focus on the sales strategy, the culture, the ways of working.

The second was making sure that we’re very diligent on the approaches we’re taking through all things system and technology to ensure that we’re underpinning our organization with the right kind of focus on automation and process improvement. Third was about ensuring that we’re more attractive to the non out of home advertisers as many of the largest multinational brands who care about brand, but they want to fuel growth and they’re not spending enough money or in some ways some and not at all with the out of home medium. And the fourth was making sure that we are operationally highly efficient and the most effective we can be in everything that we do. And that’s divided itself into a number of key initiatives against each one of our strategic imperatives, And the leadership team is very focused on executing now with real focus.

Chris: Okay, you said a second ago in kind of your opening remarks that outdoor is not marketed well. And maybe that relates to sales strategies. Where do you think out front, or maybe this is a critique on just the outdoor industry generally, has room to increase its sophistication and raise its value add for marketer clients?

Nick Bryan, Interim CEO, Outfront Media: I I think there’s three distinct areas to ensure that we are more significantly considered as part of the modern omni channel media mix. One is making sure that we can be very straightforward when it comes to measurement and there’s no ambiguity about the measurement. And I’m talking here base level reach and frequency of our medium. So what is traffic count? How consistent is it?

That is very much an industry challenge with GeoPath. I think it’s also recognising that most sophisticated marketers really want to focus on ROAS and incrementality. So how are we making sure that we are offering that at scale? And thirdly, it’s about making sure that we’re more straightforward to buy. We’ve got to ease the complexity.

You said yesterday, you know, if you had Clear Channel and Maart as well as many of the independent players, It is a fragmented medium, and yet most of the bigger media, whether it be on Amazon or even on the Trade Desk or Facebook or Google, they can be bought in a relatively straightforward way at scale, and certainly agencies prefer that, and a lot of the marketeers can do a lot with that. So this is as much for us and a responsibility and an opportunity as the industry leader, but these are a lot of industry issues as The

Chris: challenge being on that last point, if a marketer wants to do a buy in certain regions, they have to call you, they have to call your competitor. Now,

Nick Bryan, Interim CEO, Outfront Media: the platforms, there’s increasing places like we think about place exchange, and we think there’s a number of increasing open market platforms, and I think some of the SSPs have done it in digital like Vistar, but there’s still, it’s not as easy as it needs to be. It can still be a number of different phone calls, a number of manual aggregations, which is what has given rise to the out of home specialists within the big agencies, but they aren’t necessarily representing. That’s about trading negotiation and campaign management, not marketing the power and the efficacy of the medium. And one of the things I talked about the OAAA conference that was here in Boston last week is that we really need to be talking much more about building brands in real life. That still 90% of all commerce happens outside in stores, and our opportunity to be much more significantly part of brands and the way that consumers are living their lives and undertaking commerce and having parts of community, we need to be part of that.

And we haven’t been really talking about that. We spend a lot of time as an industry talking about our products whether it be billboard or transit, not necessarily how we’re part of the marketing solution. Got it.

Chris: You also mentioned measurement. You mentioned raws at scale, which I assume goes partly to attribution. So maybe as a follow on, and this is not necessarily an out front issue, right? What needs to happen at an industry level on these two topics? And then maybe you can touch on initiatives from Geopath, what role you see for Vistar under T Mobile.

Nick Bryan, Interim CEO, Outfront Media: Well, if we start with the last part, I think the Vistar acquisition by T Mobile was very smart. I think it is the industry SSP. They’re looking to make sure on top of all those buys and transactions they can overlay data sets. I think T Mobile had the vision of what they could aggregate with digital out of home with their in store, with obviously their T Mobile stores as well as handset data. There’s definitely an aggregation and I think a lot of that is about proving efficacy to drive transactions.

So that leads to the second question, which is how does the industry focus on attribution? We need to get BaaS based level one quickly, which is basic audience reach frequency measurement metrics, media metrics, and start to be much more thoughtful about some of the all the big agency groups and all the big marketers are using mini mix modeling, and they’re using attribution. Attribution. They want to really understand incrementality. How are we part of that conversation?

There are specialist research companies, specialist modeling organizations who we need to start working with. We are. We’re having those conversations, but it helps us all when we do it at the industry level.

Chris: It’s the idea being that once you’ve kind of established that outdoor becomes part of the media mix model as opposed to say something It’s

Nick Bryan, Interim CEO, Outfront Media: part of the campaign planning. We have too many large sophisticated marketers who have told me I use out of home. No, you use it for a day. You might use it for a week. You might use it for the ball drop in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

It is not using it as a mainstream integrated part of campaign, and yet our biggest advertiser, our biggest client is Apple. They love the medium. They have used it in a highly sophisticated way for thirty five years all over the world. They use it extensively, and it is part of their media mix whether it be for their handsets, streaming. They use it extensively.

Why isn’t it used across more in the electronics category? Our other significant advertiser is the biggest of a sector is Morgan and Morgan. The lawyers use it. The legal profession loves a medium. It is nearly approaching 20% of the money they spent in paid media.

So why is it it’s 20% of their category, and yet their category is very, very small? If we look at CPG, we look at automotive, we look at pharma, we look at QSR, we’re looking at major industry categories, and we’ve done the analysis to identify the biggest marketeers who are spending over $100,000,000 a year on paid media, and we’re looking at the average. The highest level of spend is 1.5%. So if I say paid media, we’re 2.5% of paid media today, obviously our strength is we are local. We’re hyper local, local, regional, all the way up to national brands, but how are we really representing the very significant part of the advertising ecosystem which is brand marketers who care about brand.

They’re spending $200,000,000,000 a year in The U. S. On paid media. We’re not a significant consideration for how they are building brands and fueling growth, and a lot of that is relevance, why we’re contemporary, we’re not a legacy media, and how we prove the efficacy of what contribution we make as part of the various, whatever the success metrics they are. And by the way, I think that’s also the change in the industry.

I’m starting to get a sense of talking to the ANA, talking to some of the biggest marketeers that the pendulum for the last five years has been so heavily focused on performance, on short term immediate measurable metrics, and yet we know if that were the case, then Google would get the check and they’d sell the invoice and be the one to claim the sale for everything. But we know that your consideration to buy a Mercedes Benz has been built over a twenty year period. So we are part of brand building. We just need to make sure we’re part of the fueling growth conversation as well.

Chris: And would most of, I mean there’s a lot to unpack, but like would most of what you’ve said here apply as a strategy mainly on the national side, sorry, the local side as well or are there a different kind of set of priorities? Well,

Nick Bryan, Interim CEO, Outfront Media: I think is we’re trying to change the vernacular and we’re talking much more about enterprise mid market and SMB because when we’re confusing national and local and regional, it can become, especially between regional and local, all quite mushy. And I think we’re seeing very significantly that there are very big regional businesses, whether it be in Texas or Florida or Illinois, where there are significant opportunities for us to engage big insurance groups and big banks and universities. The local affair is very much about SMB, and we know that’s a significant advertising. That’s 80% of Facebook and Google’s revenue. So the SMB, we want to take that much more.

We want to bring automation system and process management to that in a way that isn’t really leveraged today because a lot of that revenue is also consistently re upped. So you could call it subscription revenue. What does that look like? And then how are we gonna be much more significantly focused on the regional mid market clients? But it’s really the biggest advertisers are medium, especially for out front.

We have high concentration of very good quality inventory. When I think about our sites and our transit, we’re in the major DMAs. We’re in 36 of the 50 states. We are in the most significant cultural centers in The U. S.

So we want to be attracting the national brands.

Chris: Okay. You noted before also a goal to drive new demand from non out of home and high spending categories. I mean you gave some examples of that like electronics, but are there other kind of big buckets you’ve identified that sit outside the outdoor ecosystem? Maybe where is the room to kind of pull something in?

Nick Bryan, Interim CEO, Outfront Media: I think the three that we’re focused on initially are very much is the automotive sector, because we’ve talked and engaged and I’ve worked very extensively with three of the biggest automotive players in The US. So I’ve had conversations at the tier one level why they haven’t been considered spenders. The other one is in CPG. Or CPG is such a large category from food to beauty across the board. And, the third is really developing where we are with QSR retail.

We believe there’s a significant opportunity in the retail sector because our medium can play a significant contribution to the strength of retail media networks because when so many of the retail media networks are starting to imagine what they do in store, we are near store, so much of our inventory can be organized around partnership whether it be with Kroger or Albertsons or Walmart, CVS. I mean all of the big retailers are imagining how they can become media owners. Every media owner wants to become a retailer. Every retailer wants to become a media owner. How is our medium an integral part of what they’re selling or what they’re buying?

So we see retail in general, and I’m talking about the retailers as well as the 90% of retail that’s conducted still in real life, how are we representing our assets in those conversations. What we’re going to do, you’ll see us as we announce it soon, having a dedicated focus that is going to be client direct. So we’re going to have five. We’re going to start with five. We’re going to escalate it as quickly as we can.

Five significant industry verticals and we’re going be very pronounced about what we are the conversations we’re having with those CMOs about how we engage the medium. We’re also going to see an evolution in our sales organization to make sure that when we’re looking to drive demand, we’re recognizing it’s a different kind of talent and sophistication we need at the enterprise level than it is at mid market and the SMB.

Chris: Okay. And then just taking your retail media example, which is really interesting. The idea is a supermarket as a website. People are putting advertising on that website. But you’re going to get better recall on that advertising if you’re also buying the billboard right on the way to that supermarket.

Nick Bryan, Interim CEO, Outfront Media: Especially even more so if it’s programmatic and we can change it and we can kind of geo fence and geo locate that. We can change copy. We can dynamically alter the content that’s appearing. But why wouldn’t we when we know that so much of a consideration set might be choice, how to influence choice? I mean that’s always been the role of advertising.

It’s not to make a sale immediately. It is to affect the human behavior. Pick up the phone, visit the dealership, go online. How are we using our medium to influence? And that’s the other thing.

We’re starting to really make sure we integrate in our marketing that we’re not just in the business of reach and frequency. We’re about reach and influence, and the influence comes from the proximity and it also comes from the trust of the medium. I shared at the OAAA conference last week studies we had done about the decline level of trust in online platforms and the increasing level of trust of in real life media. And I’m talking here about, yes, the billboards, the sites, the transit, and how can we leverage that. And I think retail is an exciting opportunity for Maybe

Chris: we could shift to actually before we shift over to current trends, just want to ask one more strategic imperative. I know you had highlighted modernizing workflows, operational excellence. Question we got after the print was should investors interpret this as there is room for a structural margin improvement in Outfront?

Nick Bryan, Interim CEO, Outfront Media: I think investors should identify there is going to be structural improvement as part of a reorganization that is going to see us invest in key technology and resource and automation capabilities, especially around ad tech, while also looking to ensure that we’re as profitable as we can be and focused on EBITDA. And that performance and how that manifests itself, we’re in the thick of that right now, but investors can be reassured we will not be spending ahead and over in any way to compromise the guidance we’ve given forward on the investments we’re going to be making. So we’re very confident that the structural changes for our organization will give us cost efficiencies, which you gave a nod to on our last earnings call, and as importantly create a stronger, more streamlined, more agile organization to pursue the targets we’ve outlined.

Chris: Maybe we could shift over to current trends. So, Alphrona Q1 reported a 4% increase in national, 3% decline for local. Maybe you can unpack a bit what you’re observing in the market currently. How are advertisers absorbing some of the macro volatility? We’re

Nick Bryan, Interim CEO, Outfront Media: pleased to see that it’s definitely calmed down now. There was, I think, three, four weeks ago we had a number of campaigns that were delayed, notably a significant car launch. Cars weren’t coming in. It was pushed back, an electronics launch. Some government spending at the local level, some retail but not much.

And it was more pause for concern rather than any cancellations. It was delay. Now I wouldn’t say we’re looking at anything in what’s happening at the moment that’s giving us any rise for concern that either money’s not being committed that was being talked about or campaigns have been cancelled.

Chris: And I think your outlook for Q2 is better organic trends, right? Even inclusive of another low margin contract exit. But can you just remind us when you give guidance how much is kind of booked for the quarter and visible for the year?

Nick Bryan, Interim CEO, Outfront Media: Yeah, I think we’re our quarter two is now 90%.

Matt Siegel, EVP and CFO, Outfront Media: Yes, we give guidance mid quarter. So it’s really not much left to go, but still on the margin, the guidance is uncertain.

Chris: And for the year at this point roughly?

Matt Siegel, EVP and CFO, Outfront Media: For the year we’re probably 70%, seventy five on books.

Chris: Okay. Any I mean, look, you could debate the economic recession or economic state, whether it be a downturn or not. But any kind of lessons to draw from prior periods, like leaving aside pandemic, which is fairly

Matt Siegel, EVP and CFO, Outfront Media: That’s obviously not every recession is world ending and soul crushing like the last few. For us, we have a commission based sales force, so that is a mitigant on the cost side. All of our transit contracts, except for the minimum guarantee or revenue share, so that’s also a mitigant. We keep our eye because we have the potential recession which never happened in ’twenty two and ’twenty three. So we keep our eye on, Nick was talking about cancellations.

It’s got a bit of a canary in the coal mine. 2020, we never even tracked it. We watch, we know if there’s a pickup or even a couple of lines on the report. Cause for concern we haven’t seen anything. And then I watch daily collections.

That’s an even earlier indication of some of the agencies aren’t getting paid or not paying us. Again, we’re still running the same 49%, fifty % of beginning of month collection every month. So we think we’re in good shape. Doesn’t seem to be recession. We’re certainly aware of what’s out there in the macro environment.

And there’s a lot of uncertainty, but not a classic recession like you’ve seen in other decades.

Chris: Okay. I think you had noted on the call maybe the West is a challenging region. I assume that’s a common inclusive of Southern And Northern California. Is there room for optimism here? We’ve seen the box office started to recover.

Tech spending potentially picking up is something we’re hearing from ad agencies. Anything to note there?

Nick Bryan, Interim CEO, Outfront Media: I think we’ve heard and we’ve got a very sophisticated team who look after all the entertainment. They explained to me when I asked about the second half is looking really pretty strong. A lot of that was down to what is going to be on the release slate. And they explained to me that quarter two, while strong in movies, a lot of them were the horror genre which they don’t support as much. So I think we’ve seen that.

That really has given some strength. I think also without doubt, the terrible fires that happened obviously at the North End of the Santa Monica Bay and around the Palisades and Altadena caused a concern and a sort of pause on a number of issues that’s picked up now. So I think the when we’re thinking about the West Region, a lot of it is focused on what we’re doing in LA, and the pressure is on because we’ve been very clear that so much has been reliant on the entertainment sector and a lot of that region was based on what happened in L. A. But we’ve got to continue to diversify and make sure the strength is, and again this is a new focus of the organization, what is there at the mid market and what is it at the local level that isn’t directly linked to categories like entertainment.

Chris: Maybe staying on LA, you disclosed last week the decision to walk away from a low margin billboard contract in the region that follows an exit of the MTA contract in New York last fall. Can you speak a little bit to the strategic rationale of what’s going on?

Matt Siegel, EVP and CFO, Outfront Media: I think it’s an evolution. So we’ve started really focusing more on especially on our inventory, focusing on EBITDA or profit margin of the inventory, not just revenue. So recall we exited the MTA billboard contract in the fall in October specifically. That was a single digit margin contract. We knew if we had our salespeople sell something else in the New York market or elsewhere, we can make up the EBITDA.

And I think we’ve told people about the revenue impact and that we can absorb the EBITDA hit. Similar in this portfolio in Los Angeles, we’ve had it for a number of years, almost ten years. We’ve doubled the revenue. And the rent to revenue metric was leaving us again with a single digit margin. We didn’t want to pay any more than anyone was looking for a little higher payment to them.

And we wish them well. And again, we think there’s a revenue headwind, but really no impact on EBITDA going forward.

Chris: And Matt, can you just refresh on the combined impact of those two contracts to your billboard growth rate in 2025 and maybe also kind of like the margin?

Matt Siegel, EVP and CFO, Outfront Media: Each one is probably a 200 basis point revenue headwind for billboard. Each one individually, each about 150 basis point impact overall. But on billboard revenue about 200 basis points. So the MTA started in October, so we felt it in the first quarter. We’re seeing it now, so you’ll see it again in the third quarter.

The one in Los Angeles, we’re winding down now, so I’m not sure it’s a material impact in the second quarter. We’ll see it third, fourth and first quarter of next year.

Chris: Anything on margins

Matt Siegel, EVP and CFO, Outfront Media: Margin, percentage margin will be better. And then EBITDA will be about the same. As an example, if we didn’t sell $25,000,000 of revenue on the Los Angeles portfolio and we put 5,000,000 on a bus contract or $10,000,000 on other billboards, we’d be neutral. We feel very confident about that.

Chris: Let’s touch upon transit. So the New York MTA had another solid quarter, up 10%. As you look over the recovery in the past year, I’m curious how much would you attribute that to factors in your control such as really refocusing your sales efforts there to kind of a rebound we’ve seen in key categories like media or maybe just a broader shift of New York marketers going from billboard to underground?

Nick Bryan, Interim CEO, Outfront Media: I think it’s a combination of both. We’re seeing a this is bearing fruit of a dedicated task force that is being responsible not just for the marketing, but more concentrated dedicated focus on sales and measurement because we’ve had to do more because existing geopath hasn’t really satisfied in that regard, as well as more returning to work. Obviously, the government workers back to work. I think healthy ridership, and I think increasingly the benefit of us not having had the billboards is to say, okay, how are you really engaging within the culture in New York and what are we going to be doing for that? And that dedicated team has done a very good job and we continue to see it.

And I think this is also us providing more systems process measurement. Just really getting behind it in a really significant way with a new leadership team involved. So I think that’s just bearing fruit, and we’ve got to see it continue. Mean we’ve got that. It’s a significant contract with a significant MAG, but it’s also one of a kind for New York City.

Chris: Congestion pricing mean anything even if it highlights for marketers that subway ridership could increase? It’s probably

Matt Siegel, EVP and CFO, Outfront Media: accretive. I think it brings a few more people underground, but so does five days a week in the office. Even though you bankers may not like it, we like it.

Nick Bryan, Interim CEO, Outfront Media: So

Chris: Matt, I think on the last call, you recently talked to activating automated buying within some of the stationary MTA assets. Maybe it would be great to hear on demand so far what that’s been like and any timeline to getting that rolled out on the moving assets?

Matt Siegel, EVP and CFO, Outfront Media: So we turned on programmatic and all of our automated selling on stations and platforms across our digital transit properties in March or April of last year. So it’s still early days, growing quickly, growing even quicker than our billboard business at this point because it’s ramping up. The trains, remind people that they’re moving. It’s hard working on it. I think we should have it connected by the end of the year.

There’s tens of thousands of screens on those trains. I think the original investment thesis was designed for automated selling. So we’re pretty excited once they get connected.

Chris: Okay, got it. The transit outside of the New York MTA, I think we estimate was down in Q1. Maybe talk about what you’re seeing more broadly across the portfolio. Any kind of expirations and contracts, anything to be aware

Matt Siegel, EVP and CFO, Outfront Media: Nothing specific. Nothing material explorations or maturities start in 2030s. We’ve with this portfolio for a while, except for the little ones.

Chris: Yeah, got it. Anything to comment just broadly on performance outside New York?

Matt Siegel, EVP and CFO, Outfront Media: You’re right. New York over performance is great for us and we’re excited. A lot of the little ones are underperforming. LA bus still is a struggle for us. With that going forward with Super Bowl and FIFA and some other events, we think there’s good opportunity in the future.

But the bus product has been a little bit tired as the world goes digital around it.

Chris: Okay. Maybe a few on costs and CapEx. Matt, maybe just how should investors consider any possible risks around tariffs whether it relates to the OpEx or the CapEx side? Tariffs, we feel that

Matt Siegel, EVP and CFO, Outfront Media: really only impact our CapEx. We buy digital screens and steel. In total, we spend about $50,000,000 mostly on the screens and 40 and 10 on steel. Obviously the tariff situation is uncertain. We get our digital screens from Asia and our steel from various places.

So not a huge spend for us. And if there is a tariff, it will be a little higher. I don’t think it’s going throw off any of our numbers.

Chris: Okay. Can you just refresh us on where you stand on digital conversions, what you’re targeting in terms of units for the year?

Matt Siegel, EVP and CFO, Outfront Media: We still target about 100 to 150 new digitals a year. About 100 of that, plus or minus, is conversions. The conversions have a longer gestation period than some other things. So we keep a pretty big pipeline. But we do some management agreements, we do some new development building organically among ourselves.

And we still do very small opportunistic tuck ins, which I think is the bread and butter of the industry. And that kind of offsets some of the development that leads to some condemnations around the country.

Chris: And as you kind of convert more, I mean, are returns on the digital conversions very consistent? No change?

Matt Siegel, EVP and CFO, Outfront Media: I’ve been here seven years. We’ve been targeting a 20% IRR for approval. And we’re probably averaging as a portfolio somewhere in the 25, 20 seven range. So very consistent. Back in the day when it started, we were probably getting a 12x revenue lift because the first Shiny Digital was fantastic and everyone wanted to be on it.

Now we’re getting still about a 4x revenue lift. We’re adding inventory, we’re adding flips. Price points a little lower. But still it’s great return and just takes us a couple of months to build up demand on each new digital.

Nick Bryan, Interim CEO, Outfront Media: Got it.

Chris: Less than five, does anyone in the room want to ask anything? Okay. Nick, before we close, it would be great to get your view on M and A, how it folds kind of into the out front growth strategy from your point of view. I know you talked to more kind of modest opportunity set for 2025. But assuming you execute on your strategy and naturally delever, how would M and A play into your view?

Nick Bryan, Interim CEO, Outfront Media: I think we’re clear that this year the focus is on executing a clear focus on transformation and the excellence of what we have. As we said, small amount of money allocated on a relative basis to tuck ins should they occur. We are going to be looking at when we think about M and A for the future, it’s not just sort of digital inventory. It’s also what may be the opportunities around all things technology, systems, measurement, other partnerships, maybe in the brand experiential space. I mean we’re not discounting any of that.

What I’ve agreed with the board, and Matt and I have talked about it, is to ensure that if the focus for 2025 is on the transformation to ensure that we are as healthy as we can be on the top line and we’re improving our situation on the bottom line, how is 2026 expansion both in terms of top line revenue growth as well as the diversification of our kind of portfolio of opportunities, not just is it billboard or is it transit, is it static or is it digital. That’s quite one dimensional. We’re looking to be more progressive around that. Does M and A fit within that? It possibly could.

Do we have any targets in mind? No. Have we really established what that looks like in 2026 going forward?

Chris: No. All right. Nick, Matt, thanks so much for being here.

Nick Bryan, Interim CEO, Outfront Media: Thank you for your time. Thank you everybody.

Matt Siegel, EVP and CFO, Outfront Media: Thank you.

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Before deciding to trade in financial instrument or cryptocurrencies you should be fully informed of the risks and costs associated with trading the financial markets, carefully consider your investment objectives, level of experience, and risk appetite, and seek professional advice where needed.
Fusion Media would like to remind you that the data contained in this website is not necessarily real-time nor accurate. The data and prices on the website are not necessarily provided by any market or exchange, but may be provided by market makers, and so prices may not be accurate and may differ from the actual price at any given market, meaning prices are indicative and not appropriate for trading purposes. Fusion Media and any provider of the data contained in this website will not accept liability for any loss or damage as a result of your trading, or your reliance on the information contained within this website.
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