Thank you. So for the next fireside, excuse me, we've got Bob Pittman and Rich Bressler from iHeartMedia. Gentlemen, good to see you again.
Thank you.
Thank you for coming again. Maybe a good place to start off with is the BMI news that was announced earlier this week. Maybe a little bit of background as to how you ended up in the ownership of that asset, what drove your decision to divest it? It's a significant amount of cash, you know, certainly relative to the equity value now. I'm assuming proceeds, you'll probably look at some debt retirement. Would love to get your view on that to start off with.
Rich?
Well, you know, it is. First of all, thanks, everybody, for being here, listening to the iHeart story. You know, it is one of the more interesting transactions I think any of us have seen. So, our ownership stake in BMI came about really when BMI was first formed, and just as a reminder, many, many years ago. BMI was formed by, you know, the radio broadcasters, the TV broadcasters, and was really set up as a not-for-profit to collect royalties and then to pay them out, you know, to the songwriters and both on for the music industry, for us, for the radio industry and for the TV broadcasters. It existed for many, many years as a not-for-profit.
Then, about a year and a half or two years ago, they converted from a not-for-profit to a for-profit entity, and then shortly thereafter, explored the sale of the entity, which they announced a transaction a week or so ago to New Mountain Capital. So from our ownership standpoint, it's really not, wasn't really for us to decide. I mean, we had a nice stake. We own a little under 10% of BMI. I think we're the third largest shareholder. And the company, the company's being sold. So for us, it really wasn't a choice of selling or not.
Mm-hmm.
But it just provides a great opportunity to receive cash, to get liquidity. I think, probably none of our investors or none of our constituency realized that we had that type of asset. You know, quite frankly, if you go back a couple of years, we didn't think of it from an asset that would bring cash to the company.
Mm-hmm.
But, you know, sometimes, you know, sometimes obviously things like this happen, and we're in the right position. And what we said in the press release is that we're going to use it for general corporate purposes, including the reduction of debt. So you should assume that, we will reduce debt, with it. BMI has stated that they anticipate the closing to be in the Q1 of 2024. We don't have any more information than that. But, you know, whenever the proceeds, whenever they close and we get the proceeds, it's- I think it's terrific, for all the iHeart shareholders. And I think, as you've alluded to, Steve, if you look at the equity market value of the company today, this is, you know, about a third of the equity market value of the company today.
I think it'll really be helpful in terms of improving the capitalization.
And just because, you know, we're talking about debt reduction, maybe you can talk a little bit about where some of the debt is trading at the moment, especially now you have the potential for some of this cash to move on to the balance sheet. Earlier this year, you've reduced a lot of debt-
Right
... at significantly, below par.
Yeah. So the, well, actually, for those of you who have followed the debt since the announcement of BMI, I didn't look at it today, but it ticked up quite a bit over the last few days. Again, no surprise, with the announcement and which Steve was alluding to. And what we've stated is we're using all of our free cash flow to reduce debt. We have a stated goal of four-to-one debt to EBITDA. We haven't given a date specifically where we expect to achieve that, but we do expect to continue to make significant progress.
As part of our overall debt reduction to date, we've used our free cash flow to buy back the 8 3/8, which I think has been a terrific value creation for all the iHeart stakeholders. We've reduced the face value from $1.5 billion to about $900 million on that, and saved close to $50 million of cash interest. You know, as we go forward, because we have the BMI stake that we've just been talking about, we also announced right in the month of October that we sold the remaining radio towers that we had not sold. That generated an additional $45 million of cash.
By the way, both of those numbers I gave are pre-tax, but we do have capital gains carryforward attributes that I think will make that both of those very tax efficient. And as you all know, you know, Q4 is the biggest quarter of the year for this company, and we expect to have strong free cash flow in the Q4 quarter, based on no change, based on the guidance we gave as we had Q3 earnings. So I think we're in terrific shape from a liquidity generation of free cash flow, and also in terrific shape to be able to take advantage of opportunities in the marketplace to improve the capital structure.
Bob, maybe you could talk a little bit about what I think the market perceives as the cyclical risk versus the structural risk. And so we were talking outside that it feels like there's maybe been somewhat of an ad recession this year. Hasn't necessarily been a consumer recession, but in anticipation of it, we've seen a business enacted ad recession. And again, that's kind of probably cast some concern amongst investors about whether what's going on with iHeart and within radio is a cyclical downturn or something that's going to be longer in duration. So could we get your view on that?
Sure. Well, look, a couple of points in there.
Yeah.
So let me hit the first one. I think if you look at this year, you know, advertising tends to be a leading indicator. I think anytime business leaders get nervous about their business at all, the biggest discretionary item usually to go to is advertising, and you usually hold back. You can usually see that trend within the quarter as well. Generally, first month turns out to be the slowest month. The next two are better because they're holding back. Let's see how the quarter develops before we release the advertising. That's a trend we've been seeing for the past year. Now, the good news is, I think once people sort of think recovery is underway or they're out of the woods, then they tend to probably spend ahead of it.
So again, we're, we're looking at the recovery, and as we look even in the advertising business, the digital side of our business and digital in general, seems to have already recovered. So we are probably-- and I, I know people are all over the place, but I'd put us in sort of the optimistic end of the scale, that the recovery is underway in terms of the advertising recovery. I think in terms of the... and that's, you know, external factors. In terms of internal factors, how's the-- I mean, implicit in your question is: what's the health of radio? And, you know, we hear people compare it to TV or newspapers or old media.
We have been around a long time, and if you look at this stuff, nothing dies until the consumer stops using it. And when the consumer stops using it, the advertiser stops using it. Sort of very logical. TV, back in the 1980s, began to fragment their audience with cable, the broadcast networks, but yet there was still a very strong and robust business through the '1980s and '1990s because the reach was still there. I could still reach everybody in America. I might have to buy some more spots, I might have to buy some more networks to get it, but the reach was there within the medium. In radio, we've seen no degradation of reach. Today, NBC, I think, reaches... Last number I saw was 38% or 39% in the month of consumers.
We reach 90% with our radio assets, broadcast radio assets, not including our digital, not including our social, et cetera. And, so again, and when you look at it, there are really only two other companies that have that kind of reach, Google and Facebook. Everybody else, if you go down in the analysis of the players, you know, sort of 50% reach is really good. I don't think there's a cable network that reaches more than 20% of Americans in an entire month. TikTok, for all of its success, its reach is about 30% of America.
Mm-hmm.
Not, you know, one of the tricks I play when I go-
Yeah
... talk to people in the sort of coastal elites, and which I guess I am one, one of the questions is, "Okay, I got a quiz for you here. iHeart's AM/FM radio stations and TikTok, one reaches 90% of America, one reaches 30%. Which is which?" you know, if I go to the Heartland, they'll say, "Of course, it's iHeart, 90%." If I'm in New York or Brooklyn, they'll probably say, "TikTok." If they pass that one, the next question is:
Yeah.
One of them reaches 90% of teens, and the other reaches 50% of teens. Which is which?" So I think when you look at the health of the business, you say, the underlying health of any advertising business, how many consumers you reach and how engaged are they? We do spectacularly well on both of those scores.
Mm-hmm.
Our issue with advertising is not, we're not performing, and we don't reach consumers. The problem we've had in advertising is radio was late to change the way they sold advertising. When I got to the company 10 years ago, we were still treating it like it was 1995, where, you know, agencies call up, they give you avails, you give them a price, they, you negotiate a little bit, and you buy it. Google and Facebook fundamentally changed the way advertising is sold. It's moving to electronic platforms. It's being. It needs to be data infused. They need audiences beyond Nielsen audiences, et cetera. We spent the last seven or eight years really building out our ad tech capabilities, so that we can now sell our broadcast radio that way as well.
So we expect to begin to see the benefits of that. But I would say, when you sort of say, is there a fundamental that's a problem here? The fundamental is how we were sold, not is the product a viable advertising product. As a matter of fact, as TV's reach has gone down and down, radio winds up being sort of the last man standing in terms of reach.
Maybe two points in there I'd love to go a bit deeper on. The first is, so you talked about reach. You said that you also do well on engagement metrics, so maybe you can provide that side as well. Again, I think that's another skepticism in the market, that reach is like, I turned the radio on once, but engagement is kind of the master metric.
Sure.
And then, the second would be just on the data infused. I know you've worked a long time to be able to sell terrestrial radio through a digital format. I think that's starting to take on some real scale. So can you help us understand maybe what percentage of your inventory you can start to move into a digitally native sales process?
Well, let's start with the first question, and the first question was?
Engagement.
Engagement.
Engagement.
Dentsu did a study about an attention metric. How much are people paying attention to a commercial? Radio and podcasting came on absolutely the high end of that. When you look at how much time people spend in a day with radio versus social, I think it's about 1.5x more with radio. When you think about how many times a day people come to the radio, I think that latest number is seven or eight times a day, they come to the radio. They come to it off and on all through the day, which makes it, you know, very much a part of people's lives. If you think about it, what is radio? Radio is not your music collection, has almost nothing to do with Spotify and Pandora. It's sort of the mirror image.
It is, we're keeping people company. Those personalities on the stations are really important. They wanna hang out with people, and indeed, we coach our talent that, "Listen, you're not a star putting together a show. You're hanging out with people. You're riding in that empty seat in their car with them to work every day. You're sitting on the counter talking to them while they're cooking. You're standing behind them while they're brushing their teeth, and what would you be talking to them about? That's what you need," and, and the great personalities do that, and people feel like that's their friend. We know that if somebody leaves a station, people go through sort of grief and mourning over the loss of that person that they rode to work with every day. So those metrics are almost all through the roof.
You know, another way to look at it is look at the social impressions we do. When we do the iHeartRadio Music Awards show, we get twice as many, twice as many social impressions as the Super Bowl or the Grammys or the Academy Awards, the other awards show. When we do the iHeartRadio Music Festival, we eclipse Lollapalooza and Coachella in terms of social impressions. We are... People wanna have a conversation with us constantly, and, you know, 20 years ago, they called the request line to talk to you. Today, they talk to you on social, and they sort of include everybody in the conversation.
Then, the follow-up, just on how you're taking your terrestrial ad sale-
Yeah, data
... and turning that into both data-driven, but also just digitally driven, where it's maybe not necessarily programmatic, but bought in the same way that your digital ad revenue is bought.
Well, look, we're about 30% of our revenue now is digital.
Mm-hmm.
You know, the beginning of 2020, I think it was 10%. Our podcasting alone is about 10% of our revenue overall today, so we're making great progress on sort of that side of the business. But the real win for us is to take the broadcast audiences, turn them into cohorts, turn them into, you know, car buyers, telco switchers, first-time homeowners, new baby in the house, things that are important that audiences are, that people are looking for. And by the way, or they come to us and say, "Look, I want you to match my audience and go find this profile." We can do that for them now, and again, we can price it, sell it, deliver it, and actually measure, in reasonable attribution, that as well.
The big key, of course, will also to be to get that plugged into the programmatic platforms. And obviously, the purchase of Triton and Voxnest and Unified and Jelli were all pieces of the puzzle to build our own ad tech so that we can plug that into these very important platforms. And if you look at the ad agencies, they're all moving toward that kind of buying and selling electronically using algorithms. I think ultimately that is a big positive for us, big positive for broadcast radio, especially, because instead of having a human being with all the biases we come to stuff with, historical bias as well as personal bias, deciding how much should be spent in radio, an algorithm will look at variables and decide.
When you look at reach, engagement, time spent, et cetera, those are all the ones which would say, "That's where I want to put my money.
Mm-hmm.
So we think radio will be a net beneficiary. Also, if you look at cost per thousand, we think there'll be sort of a migration to the mean for everybody. TV is above the mean, radio and outdoor below the mean. You would reasonably expect them to be the ones that would come up.
You know, and Steve, can I just add one thing to what Bob said, though? Because I just wanna make sure, and I know sometimes in discussions with other investors, just make sure we draw that contrast. So today, and we're very much a part of it, for digital, including podcasting, there is tapping into the digital budgets on a programmatic basis, right? As you talked about, you know, it could be automated buying and selling, you know, absent... You know, some people refer to as, you know, the agencies are going to unified buying and selling, but that's great, but what it really says is that it's all going to be based on ROI, return on investment.
And we know from our standpoint with radio, you know, like a quarter of the price of TV and the big social, you know, alternatives out there, that this is the ability to open that pool of dollars in digital to a broadcast platform with the efficiency of a broadcast platform-
Mm-hmm
... is a huge win. And nobody's ever done, to be clear, we talk about programmatic digital to digital. That exists, and we're a part of it. Nobody's ever done broadcast in a programmatic way, where you can take it, make it look like digital, and tap into, like, the DSPs, so you have access to those big digital budgets.
Yeah.
That's the direction we're heading to in 2024. By the way, not just radio, as Bob said, nobody in TV has that either.
Yeah, right. Actually, one of your peers, AMC, I think, is just trying to do the same thing, but-
Right
... sell linear digitally. I mean, in 2024, do you think this is something that could be a material percentage of the multi-platform sales, or what kind of scale?
I wouldn't build anything material for 2024.
Mm-hmm.
I just think realistic. I don't want to get ahead of ourselves.
Yeah, yeah.
Realistic expectations. I think what we're talking about is, you know, we will have a product-
Mm-hmm
... you know, out there in 2024.
Yeah.
We're clear on our path to it.
Yeah.
I don't think anybody should change their models for 2024.
I think the migration has already started.
Yeah
... on some of the platforms, we're on. There's some of the other platforms we need to be included in. We think 2024 is probably the year to get on those other platforms. Then we also obviously have to train our sales staff to begin to sell the programmatic, because they still need to push people to our products, even if they're trading on the programmatic platform.
Mm-hmm. And, so I think you said you've guided conservatively for Q4. You've got no real project budget flush in there. You know, Bob, you were talking earlier that as we've gone through the year, you tend to see sequential opening of wallets as the outlook is better understood, probably vis-a-vis each spender's budget. So now that we're nearing the final month, do you have any improved visibility as to that project?
Can I just supplement? I'm not sure we've said the word conservative. We got—we gave guidance that we think-
Mm-hmm.
is realistic, just to be
Okay. I might have used the word.
Yeah, you might have, because you said we did. I just wanted to-
I think what we said was we didn't include in it-
Right.
Yeah
... any hope that there would be this-
Right
end-of-year spending.
Okay. Yeah.
Unfortunately, we're in December, so I won't know until we get near the end of the month. But this is the month that it usually breaks free. As I think we've mentioned, the last two years, there was a surprising amount that broke free at the end of the month. You know, we'll knock on wood, but we'll wait and see.
And then, you know, you talked about already seeing some of the recovery in digital. It looks to us like it's going to outperform multi-platform pretty strongly this year, I think by about 12 percentage points and up around five percentage points this year over last year. That's, that's our estimates. I know that's not your guidance, but could you just take through some of the trends that you've seen in podcast and non-podcast, especially because it has disconnected so much, probably more than we've ever seen for multi-platform. I mean, it almost feels like these are two separate budgets for, you know, clients or separate sets of clients. So maybe-
It's interesting. I actually would take the opposite analysis. If you go back to 2020, the difference between the Multiplatform Group and the Digital Group was about 40 points. Now it's about, what do you say? seven or eight points.
Yeah. Yeah.
So actually, that has narrowed dramatically.
Mm-hmm.
I think that's again, an indication that we are making that broadcast radio much more data-focused, much more-
Yeah
... targetable, much more measurable. So I actually think it's closing, not going the other direction. And our expectation is over time, that that will close, and the more we can... You know, look, the buyer, at the end of the day, they've got a certain way of buying. If we're on the system-
Yeah
there's not going to be a lot of difference. So the key is, in everything we're doing, is sort of drive to get in that process. We know that the agencies and most of the major clients are sort of moving everything to sort of digital-
Yeah
-type transactions, even if it's not digital product. They like the way that transact. It's very cost-efficient. They can move quickly. They can sit at home in the middle of the night and say, "Eh, I want to buy some stuff,"-
Yeah
and push a button and buy it. They don't have to call anybody. They don't have to get affidavits.
Mm-hmm.
It's not a big process, and I think that's where it's going, and we have to be in the middle of it.
By the way, I do think that bodes incredibly well for our previous question—
Mm-hmm
... and conversation-
Yeah
in terms of what we think the opportunity is on broadcasting-
Mm-hmm
Just due to size and scale. And the other thing I might just add to what Bob picked on saying is, and just going back to a previous question and bringing them together, is we said, you know, probably a leading indicator in terms of advertising spending coming back would be more on the digital side out there.
Yeah.
We saw that, you know, as you articulate in Q3, and by the way, I think we were up about 5% on the Digital Audio Group in Q3, and we guided up to high single digits in terms of revenue growth in Q4. So we continue to see that strengthening, and we were up, I think, 13% in Q3 in terms of-
Yeah
podcasting. And podcasting, you know, continues to be, I think, probably the hottest medium, period, in the United States, not just within audio, but clearly is the hottest medium. And, and, you know, we've talked about this, I think, briefly before, and we've articulated, you know, we feel very strongly. I mean, we were in the early days of podcasting and the podcasting growth-
Mm-hmm
As you look out, which just... You know, if you go back three, four years ago, podcasting was primarily a DR, a direct response medium. And really, when we got deeper into podcasting for all the reasons, 'cause of following our listeners and following our-
Yeah
Consumers out there, we started to bring the big advertisers into the medium, and that's so critical, 'cause what, what do big advertisers have? Big dollars.
Yeah.
That are following.
Yeah.
So it's always interesting to me. I had a question earlier. Gee, you know, they said, "Gee," and they started out the conversation on podcasting, a mature medium. And I was like: Well, let's just stop right there.
Yeah.
It is the farthest thing away.
Right
from a mature medium
Right
out there right now. So just, you know, so-
The good, good news is, though, on podcasting, it's getting absolutely embedded in people's lives. If you look at how much time they're spending per day, how many episodes they're listening to. We did a study with with Malcolm Gladwell on sort of Real America, contrasting it to the marketers'-
Yeah
perception. And it's interesting, we sort of compared marketers to Real Americans, and they both agreed two things they couldn't live without. But the one thing they agreed on, they couldn't live without snacks. And the other thing they-
Yeah.
But what's interesting-
Right
... the marketers said the one thing they couldn't live with is online shopping. Real consumers said they couldn't live without podcast. So podcasting is real America, embedded in the heartland. It's not, you know, it's something real cool in New York. It's something real cool in St. Louis and Memphis and Jackson, Mississippi, too.
I want to come back to podcasting in a moment, but before we do that, I mean, so I think you both mentioned just digital as a leading indicator. And I think what I was kind of trying to ask before, maybe I can ask it a better way, is: we haven't necessarily. So we've seen digital improve for a few quarters. It looks like it's getting very strong. Multi-platform hasn't shown that same potential trend. So, what's your confidence that this leading indicator correlation is there? Can you talk us through some other signals there? Because I think the other worry would be digital is just a great business, and it's performing really well, and so the two could disconnect over time.
Well, look, I go back to. I've lived through the birth of the invention of cable advertising. I was there at the birth of internet advertising. When I was at AOL, we had about 50% of all the digital advertising was AOL-
Mm-hmm.
It always follows the consumer.
Mm-hmm.
So when you say, what's the best leading indicator?
Yeah.
Are people listening to the radio or not? If they're listening to radio, we'll figure out how to make money.
Yeah.
Uh-
Yeah.
If they're not listening to it, it's a fool's game. It's gonna go away. Even if we're holding the revenue up, we must be propping it up. Remember, newspaper held up their ad revenue on print well past when their audience declined, but you knew the revenue was going away 'cause the audience-
Yeah
had gone away.
Yeah.
There's just no way you're gonna, you know, beat that one.
Mm-hmm.
And so I think the opposite is also true, that if you've got an audience, you'll make money. The early days of cable advertising, people thought we would have... There was no way we'd ever make money. That was a fool's errand. When we started the internet advertising, people thought that was an idiotic idea.
Mm-hmm.
And so it's, you know, you sort of forget how things begin.
Mm-hmm.
But the reason we felt confident, both in cable and in the internet, is 'cause we had an audience.
Yeah.
And again, if we saw our audience eroding and we had 45% reach of America, I'd say: Yeah, you know, we're really in trouble here, and we're gonna have to redo cost and-
Yeah
just sort of take it down.
Yeah
harvest the business. We're not seeing that. If anything, we're seeing just the opposite, that there's an incredible-
Mm-hmm
… sense of belonging and loyalty to radio, and it's generation after generation. I'm gonna go take you one step further: why is radio so resilient? 'Cause it's the only medium where the parents teach the kids how to listen. Every kid you start out in a car seat with watching two adults talk about the radio and push buttons.
Yeah.
There's no other medium like that. And by the way, I think television suffered mightily when the family TV went away. It was no longer there a generation talking to the other generation about it. And I think that's, you know, somewhat at the heart of the resilience of radio, it's just something you've grown up with. You didn't remember how you learned to walk; you don't remember how you learned to listen to the radio.
Mm-hmm.
It's just always been there.
Mm-hmm.
If you drive to school, ever drive kids to school, you know, the heart of-
Yeah
The thing is to fight over the... which station? And somebody in the process always will say, "Let's put on my playlist." And it plays about one song, and they go, "I hate your playlist. Let's go back to the radio." So it's, it's, it sort of plays out again and again and again.
You said that podcasting is hotter than ever. Can you talk about what you see as the best opportunities to continue to grow your podcasting business? Are there genres where you think you can put incremental capital behind? Or are there, you know, additional creators that, like you've done with Pushkin, you could bring in over time? So how do you... There's obviously a strong underlying organic growth-
Right
to that business, but I'm wondering how you look to-
Well, you know, it's interesting.
We've got-
How to build it. Jay Shetty, who is already big, came over to iHeart, you know, generally runs the top 10 podcast. But then we also have David Eagleman, who's the neuroscientist, wrote my favorite book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. I think it's the best marketing book ever written. He does not think it's a marketing book, but he does something called Inner Cosmos. It's also a top 10. And we're able to find these rewind shows from TV Rewatch are doing extraordinarily well. True Crime continues to do well. We're the only company that has ranked content in all 19 categories, measured by Podtrac. The number of shows we have, shows we have that have over a million downloads in a month, has gone up dramatically. Time spent with podcasts per day has gone up.
So sort of every metric is going up. The good news about being number one, and we're bigger than the second and third largest podcast publisher combined, is if somebody decides they wanna do a podcast, they generally start with the biggest and work their way down. And so we usually get first look at something. So if we pass on it, it's probably because we didn't think the economics were good. And indeed, you've seen, you know, the ones we passed on that got a lot of attention, you know, that everybody's had to go back and redo the economics at a certain point. So I think reality is setting in on economics, which is good for us, because we'll not lose some because, yes, we'd like it, but not at that price.
Mm-hmm.
I think that things are becoming much more affordable and much more in line with reality.
Yeah
... and again, we've seen, and some come out of the blue, some are, you know, expected. NFL, big podcast, you would expect it to be a big podcast. Some of the big people on the radio, Charlamagne tha God, The Breakfast Club, Colin Cowherd, Dan Patrick, you would expect to be big, they are big. But then there are people you've never heard of, and I've never heard of, that suddenly come out with a great idea, and suddenly it's like the hot new podcast.
And the only thing I might add to that, 'cause just getting back to when you talked about on the business, on the business side, just, you know, from... If you look at what all the estimates are today in the U.S., it's about, you know, this year it's gonna be about $1 billion-$2 billion of advertising revenue in the U.S. for the total podcast industry. And, and, you know, we're always about 20%-25% of the industry revenue. You know, you can, you know, speculate, estimate, we're probably 90+% , quite frankly, of the industry profits. And then you look at projections going forward, and whether it's eMarketer or Pricewaterhouse or any of these firms that make projections, they all have a little different number.
But, you know, they're all $4 billion, $5 billion, $6 billion over the next three or four years-
Mm-hmm
out there. And again, back to the point we made earlier about big advertisers coming in, back to Bob's point, in terms of it becoming, you know, a way of Americans, it's part of their lives. And also from an advertiser standpoint, it's the most engaged, you know, you used the word "engagement" earlier. It's the most engaged medium out there.
Mm-hmm.
85% of people that start a podcast listen all the way through-
Mm-hmm
the podcast. And you can do everything with a podcast. You can stop, rewind, fast-forward, skip. All those capabilities are available. So no wonder why advertisers are flocking to it, and no wonder why you see those kind of growth projections for revenue. And from our standpoint, because of all the points Bob just made, we're both going to continue to take market share and participate in the rise of the podcast pool of money.
Rich, could you just unpack the multi-platform segment margin a little bit? I know there's a lot of operating leverage in that business, so the revenue trajectory has an outsized impact on it. You've also done a lot on cost-
Right
I think that's heavily weighted to that business. So, both based on where you are now and then where you expect revenue to go, over the next twelve months or so.
Well, look, it's... I'm not gonna give any—you know, we haven't given any projections.
Yeah.
Quite frankly, based on revenue, the only thing we've said about 2024 as a company, to remind everybody, is we expect it to be back to a growth year. And just as a reminder, we haven't really talked about it today, but 2025, obviously, is a presidential election year. And for all the things we read, and many of us, you know, have a lot of consternation about what's happening in this country right now, that's gonna benefit iHeart. But Multi-Platform Group, it is a, just a phenomenal free cash flow business. Bottom line, phenomenal business to create value for our shareholders. We have, you know, 75%-85% incremental margin dollars out there. And yes, you know, when the revenues are down, and we've- I call it speed bumps.
You hit some speed bumps because of the uncertainty of the economy or because of what's happening in the Middle East, where-
Yeah
-that might create some uncertainty. You get negative flow through-
Mm-hmm
... because of the fixed cost nature of that business. But on the other side, when you get incremental revenue, you just get tremendous flow through there also. And I think we've also set it up, you alluded to, cost. We have taken out a lot of cost. You know, in total, we've taken out, Bob and I, over $300 million of cost out of this company over the last couple of years. And as you know, we go forward, finding efficiencies in our company... By the way, whether now we call it AI, but we were- I would say we were doing it-
Mm-hmm
before anybody had the buzz terms of AI. How you take advantage of-
Yeah
-you know, technology, both on the sales, both on the programming side. You know, you're going to continue to see us improve the margins-
Mm-hmm
for the whole company, but particularly, multi-platform. But I do think it starts back with what Bob said earlier: It's the audience.
By the way, I also-
It's there.
I also think if you look at Multi-Platform Group, especially, we've got a lot of just people doing stuff. AI does a lot of that, so everybody's going to have an assistant. And I think we're going to be able to do a lot of tasks very efficiently using AI. I think we'll be a company that will benefit greatly from it in an operational means.
And then just lastly, at the beginning, we talked a little bit about leverage ratio and capital structure.
Mm-hmm.
Just want to come back to that to finish up. When you look at just the maturity walls for the next few years, is there anything in particular that you want to communicate around those?
No, I mean, look, I for- you know, we're obviously very conscious of, you know, our 2026 and, and to a lesser extent, the 2027, maturity walls. And, and just to say, you know, from Bob and myself and the rest of the management team, we have great advisors working with. Clearly, the most important thing, which we continue to do is, and we've talked about that extensively today, is execute on the performance of the business, continue to generate a significant amount, significant amount of free cash flow. You know, and we just... You know, we have time. We have, you know, until, 2026, but obviously, you know, it's top of mind. And I think for us, I know it's important to investors.
You know, investors are looking at both the maturity wall, I think, when it's going to be extended to out there, and what the incremental—you know, if there's any incremental cash interest expense, going forward. And for us, you know, we're very clear on the path run. We feel very good about the path run, and quite frankly, right now it's just tactics in terms of when we go to the market and execute.
Yeah. Yeah. Great. Thank you, all.
Great.
Thank you. Appreciate it.