All right, great. Let's get started with our next session. Thank you everyone for taking the time to join us today. We are excited to welcome back to the Communacopia Plus Technology Conference this year, Bob Pittman, the Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and Rich Bressler, President, COO, and CFO of iHeartMedia. Bob, Rich, thank you for taking the time to join us today.
Thank you. Glad to be here.
Great. Before we get into the results and some of the operating trends that are playing out in the ad market, I thought we could start off by talking about iHeart's strategy to leverage its assets across content, distribution, and ad tech to drive growth in the business over the long term. Could you maybe just start out at a high level by talking about the strategy and where we are in the arc of that execution?
Sure. Look, I think our strategy has been pretty, pretty simple: build a lot of engaged relationships with consumers, and then do two things with it: Monetize that by renting that relationship to unaffiliated third parties, called advertising, and the other is to use that relationship to build other platforms. We've done, I think, a great job of building out the engaged relationships. Our broadcast radio reaches 90% of America every month. That's more than Google and Facebook. To put that in contrast, I think the biggest TV network reaches about 38% of America. TikTok, for all of its wonderful PR, reaches about 30% of America. Spotify is probably in the 30s. So we are sort of stand alone in terms of the reach. We've used that reach, and we've used that audience to build new platforms.
We are the number one digital, streaming audio service or radio service by a mile. We've built out podcasting. We're bigger than the next two podcast publishers combined. And we are, in terms of social, I think we're seve n times the social of the next largest audio player, and we've built out influencers, we've built out events, et cetera, all off of that platform. In terms of the monetization, I think we've done an extraordinarily good job in terms of monetizing the new platforms, podcasting, streaming, et cetera. I think our big focus has been on broadcast radio, which is really, for us, it's very clear that the ad market wants to buy and sell advertising consistently with the way they buy and sell digital.
So we've spent probably the last four or five years in earnest, building out the tech capabilities, going to your point about ad tech, capabilities, so we can offer programmatic trading, real-time bidding. We can offer data-infused buying. We can do targeting and attribution, and we think that's necessary for that. And I think the best progress report on that is to look at what happened in the last downturn in 2020. When the downturn came, we lost about 50% of our, broadcast radio revenue, Multiplatform Group revenue, immediately. This time, in this downturn, it's only down 7%-8%. So we're making progress in terms of making us more of the mainstream, in advertising.
And again, our expectation is that, you know, as the recovery comes, that the broadcast radio and the, the Multiplatform Group, goes back into being a, a positive contributor in terms of revenue growth. Smaller, much smaller than digital, but still growth, that we're not a business that's going through a transition. We're a business that's adding new pieces to our existing business.
You know, by the way, just maybe one or two quick things I might just build upon what Bob said right onto. If you go back to the last downturn, and Bob talked about the Multiplatform Group, but just also look at and the audio, what we call the audio tech stack and the technology Bob described. But if you just also look at our revenue composition, you know, in addition to the revenue stream that we have coming out of Multiplatform and broadcast radio, we also now have the Digital Audio Group. And back during the last downturn, you know, digital revenues were, let's say, about 10% or a little less than 10% of the overall revenue. We're now over a billion in terms of total revenue.
That's in addition to what we have on the Multiplatform Group. In that digital pie, you know, which is podcasting, streaming, you know, websites, you know, extensions in terms of, social extensions and additional things to meet the needs of our consumer, I'm sorry, our customers. I think the important takeaway from all that is just, you know, we are a company that's evolved to meet the needs of both our listeners and the advertising community. So we are a different company coming out in terms of this recession than we were back in 2019.
That's a great overview. I want to dig into a lot of that, but maybe starting first with what you're seeing on the Multiplatform side of the business and terrestrial radio. At a top-line basis, last quarter, revenue declined 3.6% in the second quarter, which was towards the high end of your guidance. That said, your guidance for the third quarter calls for a bit of a deceleration in revenues, expected to decline in single digits in the third quarter. July, I believe, was pacing down 5%. I know there's some political in there, as well, but perhaps more broadly, could you maybe touch on some of the trends you're seeing in the advertising market that are playing out between the second and third quarter and really any major trends worth calling out?
Well, look, I think the biggest trend is, I mean, we're at Goldman Sachs, so let's talk about Goldman Sachs. You guys, for a while, were kept increasing the odds that we're going into a recession. Now you're decreasing the odds we're going into a recession. I think the same thing's probably happening in the ad marketplace, that people have seen the bottom, and they're getting more optimistic about things. We not only see it in numbers, but we see it in conversations we're having with our advertisers about 2024. We said at the last earnings, you know, that we see the year continuing to improve sequentially. We're looking at absolute dollars. And, you know, there's a lot of noise in the percentages from prior year, et cetera.
But are we making more money, both revenue and bottom line, going quarter to quarter? And again, we've projected that we would again do that. I think Q4 will be the biggest quarter of the year, as it usually is. And so I think from a trend line perspective, we are seeing what I think everyone would call the recovery. And the question is, when is it fully recovered? We've not put a, you know, a pin in that. But I think, and I think if you listen to other people talking about the advertising world, whether it's the agencies or the other media folks, you're hearing the same thing.
Mm-hmm. You mentioned some of the conversations you're having, and I think from the investor standpoint, outside looking in, across the advertising landscape, a lot of companies are saying 4Q is the quarter that ad will recover. It's a little bit hard for us to gauge the probability of that without some visibility into those conversations. Could you maybe elaborate a little bit more on those types of conversations you're having? Maybe through the pipeline, anything you're seeing in the pipeline that really gives you the confidence that 4Q will materialize?
Yeah. Well, look, I, I think no one said Q4 is recovery. I'm not sure what that moment is, but we're saying it's gonna be the biggest quarter of the year, and I think you're gonna begin to see the folks who sat on the sidelines or held back the first three quarters, the one quarter that usually advertisers can't avoid is Q4.
Mm-hmm.
It's their big sales quarter. There is a reason that year after year, Q4 is that monster quarter for the advertising business. And we see every evidence that that's coming in. We also see on the consumer side, that consumers are actually talking about doing their holiday shopping earlier. Many people reported they actually started the holiday shopping in August. So I think that bodes well for not only the economy, but for advertising as well.
Mm-hmm.
And again, I think most of the discussions at this point in the year are also beginning to focus on next year.
Mm-hmm.
What are we doing about next year, and what are the plans for it? And I think it, I'm trying to think, almost every discussion we're having is about a sort of recovered economy.
Yeah
From the standpoint of the advertiser. And so that's positive news for us, obviously.
How does that sentiment differ between different ad verticals? I'm thinking local versus national, smaller markets versus larger markets, end markets in particular. I think auto housing, I think, have been under some pressure this year, but, but it sounds like there's a possibility.
Auto has been big for us. I mean, insurance obviously is, you know, look at the marketplace, is down some. But I think we saw in the beginning of the year that a lot of the big advertisers who could afford to sit on the sidelines and hold their money, and they're doing the same thing we do. What are we gonna do this quarter to hit our number? Quick, cut out advertising.
Mm.
And they cut out any discretionary item they could. I think those folks, we're not hearing so much standing on the sidelines as they were. The small advertiser that really has to have advertising or somebody doesn't come in the door, spent through this, which is why I think you saw the smaller advertisers probably doing better than the, than the super big advertisers. And they weren't gone from the marketplace, but being a lot more selective.
Mm-hmm.
I think we're seeing that, you know, that trend evaporate.
You know, and one thing, by the way, one of the great assets we have as a company, is that we've got, just as a reminder, we have no more than-- no category that's more than 5% of our overall revenues. You know, every once in a while, we'll kind of go above that, you know, 5%, 5.5%. Bob alluded to insurance. You know, pharmaceuticals, in particular, has been very strong for us, and we have no individual advertiser that's more than 2%-
Mm.
of our revenue. So, you know, I think it's an important conversation from a trend standpoint, but the great news is because that diversification, we're not overly dependent on any category or any advertiser.
Let me make one connection to your first question. The reason I think we have such diversity is we have such a large audience. We reach 90% of Americans. Everybody is in our tent.
Mm.
No matter what you're trying to sell people or what audience you're going after, they exist within iHeart. There are very few companies that have that.
Mm.
And therefore, I think there are very few companies to kind of have the kind of diversity we do in terms of ad revenue.
Absolutely. Bob, you mentioned this in your opening remarks on the long-term trajectory of Multiplatform. I think there's a broader debate amongst the investment community on the trajectory of that business over the longer term, really the question of: Can multi-platform, traditional radio advertising get back to being a long-term growth business? Or is it for some reason, secularly impaired as a shift to digital, and you see to some of those ownership trends on linear distribution? I'm curious what your thoughts are on all that. How do you see audio advertising progressing over a multi-year period? What gives you the confidence that it could perhaps return to normalize growth?
Look, I've been doing this a long time, back to cable networks, back to AOL, you know, and a bunch of other businesses. And the one thing I know in looking at it, both as an investor and as an operator, is you follow the consumer. And there has been no degradation in the reach of broadcast radio. The degradation has been in a lot of other media, but not radio.
Mm-hmm.
I think the reason it's not been is because what we do is fundamentally as important or more important than it's ever been. We keep people company. If you look on our website, our mission statement is: To give everybody in America a friend, anytime, anywhere. We're not playing music. We're not in the music business. We haven't been in the music business since, you know, music was in the car with a, with a cassette tape or an 8-track. We're in the keep people company business. The reason 75% of our stations play some music is because if we're hanging out with someone, what we often do is play music together. But we're the people that tell people about the music.
If you look at, you know, the music streaming services, which really replace CDs and downloads, not radio at all, you find that probably the vast majority of any service, say the main way they discover their new music is FM radio.
Mm.
So they listen to our personalities, talk about the songs. They're on for interviews. We're explaining it to them. We play the new music, and then you wind up putting it into playlist or look for it on playlist. And I think that fundamentally hasn't changed, and it's not gonna change. So I don't think there's a risk in this business, that we're not transitioning from something. If you look at TV, they're transitioning from linear TV to on-demand TV.
Mm.
If you go ... I was there in the beginning, when we launched cable networks. They were a poor man's on-demand. If you remember the concept, we called it narrowcasting back then.
Mm.
The idea was that we knew the consumer didn't want someone telling them: You get news at 6:00, you get music Friday nights, you get cartoons Saturday morning. That we put together these 24-hour networks, and the idea was the consumer could pick and choose what they wanted, when they wanted. So if you want your news at 3:00, you go to the all-news station.
Mm.
If you wanted your cartoons at 5:00, you go to the Cartoon Network, and that you were putting something up. When on-demand came, the cable networks were going to unravel. It's just a matter of time, because what we were really doing is giving them poor on-demand. Remember when on-demand on pay-per-view used to be, they'd run the same movie over and over again, and you'd join it in progress because we didn't have the ability to start and stop it for everybody? But once that came about, the world changed. We don't have that dynamic going on in radio. There's nothing close to that, where they're not leaving us for something else. And as a matter of fact, those people they listen to every day on the radio are their friends. They ride to work with Ryan Seacrest. They ride to work with Steve Harvey.
They ride to work with Charlamagne Tha God. They ride to work with Bobby Bones or Ellen K. They're not going to change that habit. As a matter of fact, if you look at radio, it's very hard to displace an established morning personality because people have the habit. "That's who I ride to work with. That's my carpool. I know that person, and I like them, and they're part of my daily routine." We've seen no evidence of that. I think when people are trying to make an argument for transition, their only argument is, it happened in another industry.
Right.
It's a very imperfect analogy, and it's nothing like what went on in other industries. So I think you really have to go back to the consumer, say what's going on. So for us, in broadcast radio, it's just a matter of monetization. Radio got out of sync with the advertising community, that we were still selling them spots, and we were calling a radio buyer. We didn't notice, as an industry, that the world had changed, and there were now these people saying, "I don't—as an ad agency, I don't want a lot of buyers. I want to electronically trade. I want some of that data. I don't want the Nielsen audience. I want to find auto intenders. I want to find moms who had a baby in the last six months.
I want to find these special audiences." We now have 800 cohorts for broadcast radio, 800 audiences you can buy that are pre-populated, and if you want to custom them, we can build it, too. That's a new way. We haven't finished our programmatic, but we're in the process of building out real-time bidding on programmatic, and I think that the focus of this company ought not be on, is radio going away? The focus of this company, rightfully, ought to be on how well are you monetizing it, and how well are you adapting to the new way advertising is bought and sold. And I think that's... Again, I don't think there's a risk there. It's a matter of time, money. We know that's where they're going. We'll be there. We'll be part of it.
Given the pricing differential between radio and TV and digital, by the way, radio and TV used to be the same CPM. Radio is now a quarter of the cost of TV per user. With that kind of pricing power, I think you're finding more and more interest in radio. Again, I think the future is bright, and I think anyone who thinks it's going through a transition has absolutely missed the analysis of this marketplace.
By the way, can I just add, just very quickly, two things. Bob talked about real-time bidding, and we—and just to tie it back to broadcast and our Multiplatform Group, just to be clear, we're going to have the capabilities to do real-time bidding and programmatic on the broadcast side, too. Because I think people hear the word real-time bidding and programmatic, they automatically think digital, but unlocking it on the broadcast side. And, and by the way-
I'm sorry, because I meant all of that on broadcast radio.
Right.
That, I was not talking digital.
I wondered about that.
I was talking broadcast radio.
Yeah. That—and by the way, I think if you look at broadcasters in general, just whether they're video or audio, I don't think anybody else is going to have those capabilities out there. So I think that's really important. And I think your other point, just to come back and really hit it hard, when you talked about the debate, which obviously we're well aware of with all, you know, in your world and the investor industry, it starts with your audience. You know, it starts with the reach we have, it starts with the audience you have. And Bob referred to, just for context, you know, the biggest TV or broadcast networks, sort of. I think Bob said 38%, whether it's 35 or 40, you know, on a sports weekend out there. If you go back a number of years, that was dramatically higher.
You go back a number of years, we were over 90% on reach. You know where we are today? Over 90% across all the categories. So the stability and resilience of broadcast radio, I think somehow people have missed that fact, not speculation out there.
Right. Maybe on one of the opportunities on broadcast. I think in the past, you've mentioned that something like one-third of your advertising inventory goes unsold. I'm not sure if that's still the case, but if it is, it seems like a big opportunity. How do you plan to go about converting that unsold inventory into sold inventory? I would imagine programmatic and sort of the digital smart audio layer that you're building on top of the broadcast inventory plays a part in that.
The reason we have so much is the traditional way radio was bought, somebody way back when decided prime time for radio was 6:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M., and prime time for TV was 7:00 P.M. to 11:00 P.M. Looked great, right? But what happens is, we still have the legacy of that going in terms of 6:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M., Monday through Friday, is the heavy sell-out period. Everybody thinks they want it. All the rules were written for that. The world has changed, by the way. It's crazy, but that's the way it is. And so to fill it in, we really need to begin selling like digital, which is impressions. And we sell impressions. People aren't buying Elvis Duran on Z100 at 7:15 A.M. on Monday morning.
They're buying, "Give me this audience, and give me x number of these impressions." Now, we can go to, if they're listening at 3 A.M. or they're listening at 8 P.M. or they're listening at, you know, 2 P.M., we can use that impression to fill the holes. So what you've got is, you've got people are buying all of our inventory, but they're buying it in pieces, and we've got holes in between. And so everything I just talked about on digital for broadcast radio, like, digital-like buying for broadcast radio, is the, the key to filling in those holes and begin to sell that inventory.
By the way, and I think the context when Bob had made that comment was previously, not even today, was really talking about, Gee, now that we have, again, all this technology, you can sell cost efficiently... sell the rest of that inventory, 'cause for a while there, you had to pay a commission. You commission people, what are they gonna get paid on? What are they gonna sell? But now, because of the, of the audio tech stack and everything Bob was talking about with, impression-based buying, you have the ability to efficiently sell that at, at whatever the cost is.
I wanna make one other point because I think it gets lost sometimes, is almost every company I've been in charge of, if we're gonna grow the company, I've got to grow new businesses and get more users. This is the only business I've been in where we've got all the users we need, we just need to monetize it better. You know, if we can monetize half as well as TV, we can have half the audience and double our revenue. It's just. It is really a clear focus on monetization, and it's a whole lot easier when we don't have to go find new users. We just have to monetize the users we have a lot better.
It seems like the tech stack plays a pretty critical part.
Huge role.
You mentioned you're in the process of rolling out some of these products. Is there a timeline or a roadmap that investors should be?
They, they come out in different pieces with different agencies. As you know, the advertising agencies are all going to sort of unified buying. They wanna put all the buying together. And one of the problems, which you know, is that audio is about 31% or 32% of consumer consumption. It's about 9% of the revenue. But when we go to an algorithm picking it, no one's gonna be—no one's gonna have that historical bias. And we think we'll get much greater share because the algorithm's gonna say, how do I put together the right buy using all of this media? So they're in different stages.
Some have gone from unified, they're digital, they're adding TV, they're adding audio. Some probably will unify their digital audio and their broadcast audio first as one buy. Some are putting it all together. There are advertisers who are not going through the agencies, but doing this themselves, and we're working with them all. There'll be multiple platforms. Some people will have their... You know, there's gonna be unifying DSP. Some of them have 30 DSPs that they're looking at. We've made a commit we're gonna do them all. We'll be there for everybody. And by the way, you know, and then you have to step up. Okay, once the technology's there, then I got to put the advertisers using it.
You know, so it's a step process, but I would say you're probably gonna see over the next 2 years, us getting pretty concentrated in this and probably will have sort of crossed the hump.
Got it. I wanna pivot to podcasting and the digital side of the business for a moment. Podcasting as a category has gained tremendous amount of traction over the last number of years. It kind of powered through every economic cycle I've seen over the last number of years. That said, we've seen podcast revenue decelerate quite significantly over the last couple of quarters, from 40% last year to 12% so far in Q1 and Q2. I'm curious, has podcasting finally hit this point of maturation, or are the recent decelerations more macro-driven, in your opinion?
Well, I think you're also applying a percentage to a business that's growing. So, you know, it's like if I have $5 and I went to $10, that'd be 100%. I'd much rather go from $200 to $300, I get 50%. So I think we have to be careful there. The revenue is continuing to grow, and it's been the fastest growing segment of the digital marketplace. Fastest growing segment of the digital marketplace is podcasting. So I think in terms of relative terms, there is no deceleration. I think it continues to be, in essence, the king of digital. And it has surpassed, in terms of usage, the streaming music services, which everybody spends a lot of time talking about. Podcasting's kept growing right through it. The revenue has not caught up yet.
I think you've probably read many of the studies we've seen and some of the studies we've done on podcasting in terms of its engagement, impact for advertisers, et cetera, that it looks like it's more impactful than digital video, which has been the real star of the digital marketplace. So I think there's nothing that looks, you know, scary there. As a matter of fact, I see a lot of positive trends. You know, two years ago, there were competing theories about how you do podcasting. One was, you pay whatever it takes to get somebody to do your podcast. I don't care if he was like, we'll... I don't know how they were gonna do it. Miraculously, figure out how we're gonna renegotiate that deal somehow, and it would make money. We avoided that temptation.
We've always been, if we can't make money, we're not doing a deal. There is no such thing as a good podcast we don't make money on.
Mm.
And the second point is that you saw people looking at podcasting as, you know, a world in which they could not only spend a lot of money, but also a world in which they, you know, didn't measure it the way that needs to be measured.
Mm.
And so for us, we've got the measurement there now. We've avoided the, you know, the world of scary cost. And the final one is that people thought there was gonna be this whole idea of exclusive podcast. And somehow, if I put an exclusive podcast on my platform, I was gonna drive people to my platform. This podcasting is not the world where you look at where people consume the podcast. If you're in the business, you're looking at who's the publisher of that podcast, because we send out everywhere. A couple of them, there's just a big story the other day about someone that decided they were gonna try and just put it on their platform. It turns out it didn't work. We didn't think it was gonna work. We didn't go down that road.
We said at the time, look, if it works, we're the publisher, we can always change that. But I think that's proven not to be it. So for us, I think it's become pretty clear how the podcast business works now.
Mm.
I think the bets we made and the policies we made and the way we do business turned out to be the right way.
Mm.
That's the reason we probably have, you know, the majority of the profits in the podcasting business in addition to being number one.
Do you think we're fully past that world where some of the podcasting competitors are willing to pay those fees to those select number of artists? And I bring it up thinking about margin structure in the podcasting business. Do you see this as an opportunity now, as the industry pivots, to take more market share of podcasting talent and the strike, perhaps get better deals?
Well, we've done real well with market share of talent. I mean, you know, we're the number one podcast publisher, bigger than number two and three combined. So that, we've done well there, and probably one of the reasons we cannot take podcasts is because we were number one, so we weren't we didn't have that problem. I think the question you're getting at, an implication is, is it easier for us to do a better deal? The answer is yes.
That we are seeing talent come to us now, not with, "And somebody's gonna pay me $100 million," or, "Somebody's gonna pay me 20 times what this podcast is worth." And I think you've seen all the other publishers that were doing that have all issued public statements, publicly said, "We're not gonna do that anymore." That not only helps, you know, it helps investors understand it, but it also the world of talent see those same statements and understand them. So, you know, we've always gotten the deal, even if somebody's offering more money, if somebody wanted to build a hit podcast, like the NFL, NBA, I'm sure people would have paid them more money, but they wanted a hit podcast. That we did lose some, that people were just paying a ridiculous amount of money.
Some we said, "If you can get that money, go." I mean, there's nowhere, any way you're ever gonna make that money, earn it just on a straight-up basis. I think those deals are gone.
Yeah, but could I just add very two quick things? One, just to remind everybody, and we've said this publicly time and time again, you know, remember, podcasting is accretive to our overall margins in the company, just to Bob's point, from a profitability. And I probably would take a little exception to the statement you said Bob talked about in terms of absolute dollars, in terms of what's happening, without commenting on specific growth or anything else. Just as a reminder, the podcasting industry is, whatever analogy you want to use, the top of the first inning, top of the second inning, first quarter of a football game. I'm not the best on sports analogies, but just analogies. Because if you really think about it, large advertisers have just started to come to the podcasting industry.
Remember, it starts, you know, we talked earlier in broadcast about consumer usage. For all of us that have been running media companies for a long period of time, the level of engagement that Bob talked about, 85% or 87%, people always find this shocking, of people that start podcasts, listen to it all the way through.
Mm-hmm.
By the way, you can do every technology. You can fast forward, you can stop, you can rewind. That you can do with online video. There's never been... So when you start with that level of engagement, then big advertisers take notice, and that's really critical because you know what big advertisers have? Big advertising dollars, and they follow it into the media.
I want to add one more thing on podcasting. We do something unique on podcasting. We're able to take the podcast audience that they go very deep on for an advertiser-
Mm-hmm.
Find exactly that same audience on broadcast radio, which has this tremendous reach, and sell them that audience, too. So for us, it is, with an ad tech we put together, we now have an ad tech platform that can unify all of audio. So you can find the same audience, so we can serve to it on streaming audio, we can serve to it on podcasting, we can serve to it on broadcast radio. We think that's a unique advantage of our company and something that allows us to do something no one else can do.
Got it. I want to make sure I pivot to cost efficiency-
Sure.
and margins and free cash flow generation and leverage. Maybe to group some of these together. I think one of the questions we've been getting more frequently from investors is the flexibility of the cost structure. You've done a great job taking costs out over the course of COVID and over the last 12 months as well. If, for some reason, maybe macro related, we didn't enter, you know, a recovery period over the next 12 months, how much flexibility in your existing cost structure is there to take out further incremental costs? And specifically, where, what parts of the business could that come from?
Well-
Go ahead.
I'm just going to do top line, although Rich will get more specific, is there's a lot. Yes, we're a high fixed cost business, but that doesn't mean we can't take fixed costs out. And, you know, we have the ability, if we don't need as many people, we won't have as many people. If we're not worried about the future, but worrying about the next quarter, we can take a lot of those costs out. And we will. We've proven it again and again, and, you know, depending on how much we think there is a need, we can modulate it. You know, I don't want to slow down my future too much if I don't have to. 2020, we had to slow it down a lot.
This time, we didn't have to slow it down as much, but we'll take out whatever costs we need.
Yeah, but, but just, I think very, also just very succinctly, you start out by saying, Gee, people think we've done a good job on cost, which is great, so thank you for that. But just go back to the pandemic, and Bob, we do what we need to do. And I think the evidence of that on the cost is we generated free cash flow during the pandemic. So tell me another media company that during that period... Because we're cash guys, but I'm saying the cost leads to free cash flow.
Mm-hmm.
That we generated that free cash flow during that period.
By the way, the worst downturn I've ever seen in my career.
That's helpful. Maybe on capital allocation. So at the end of the quarter, you had $165 million in cash in the balance sheet. You mentioned free cash flow, the generation coming in the back half of the year as well. How do you intend to allocate this excess capital? You've been aggressive in buying back some of your bonds. Do you intend to keep doing that and maybe longer term at that particular tranche? Is that still the plan with excess free cash flow to attack
... Yeah, I mean, nothing's. We haven't changed. I mean, again, I want to go back just for context philosophy. We're talking about all these things today operationally, we're cash people, we're cash guys. There's no better evidence in terms of generation of free cash flow. And, you know, again, taking advantage of the marketplace out there, we've stated we have a target of leverage of 4-to-1 debt to EBITDA. That hasn't changed. We continue to march towards that target, and we always say, "Gee, how do we improve our overall capital structure, the efficiency?" I'm not going to comment on, you know, exactly what we're going to use the free cash flow for going forward.
If you look historically, which is always a pretty good indication of a management team, we've bought over $400 million of face value of the 8 3/8, so we've reduced it from almost $1.5 billion to about $1 billion. That has saved us close to $40 million of interest expense out there, so I think that's a pretty good cash on cash return. We'll just continue to focus on the generation of free cash flow and use that cash to continue to make the balance sheet the most efficient it can for our shareholders and our equity shareholders. By the way, I think we've also done a nice job balancing that.
Bob talked about, or Bob uses this term, feeding the winners, you know, continuing to invest in our businesses, like podcasting and other areas, and the audio tech stack that are going to fuel our future growth.
Hmm. Do you see any opportunity, you know, CapEx? I think you've done a good job at making that more efficient this year.
Right.
On the M&A side, you're largely through, I think, a lot of the tech stack investments. Do you see any opportunities to maybe play offense in 2024 on either the CapEx or the M&A side?
Well, look, I think we've done—you pointed out, you know, we, we've given guidance for $90 million of CapEx this year, which is down dramatically, you know, just from the last couple of years. I'm going to go back fundamentally. When you reach over 90% of the country, and if you look at our acquisitions since Bob and I have been running iHeart, it's really been assets, whether it's Stuff Works or Triton or any of the assets Bob talked about that add to the value overall, make the rest of the iHeart asset base more valuable so that they're not significant and there's going to... I don't see any change to that.
We don't use M&A to build the business. We use M&A as part of our, we need something. Are we going to buy it? Are we going to build it, or are we going to partner for it? And we partner extraordinarily well. Building is usually the last thing we like to do because it takes a long time, and it's not as efficient.
Mm-hmm.
In some cases, we've bought it.
Got it. Maybe just on, on the debt maturities, it's, it's a question we get a lot from investors as well. Rich, you have $5.3 billion of debt that comes due over the course of 2026, 2027, and 2028. Is there anything you can say about your ability or plan or game plan to, to work towards addressing those, those maturities? I think just given the leverage in the broader macro, people are somewhat concerned about, about, about the setup, but anything you could say on, on that front?
Nothing, nothing that you haven't already heard. But if you kind of think about it as a package, I mean, look, we're very comfortable with the maturity schedule and the refinancing of those maturities. And I think just again, marrying all the pieces, we've been buying back the eight and three-eighths, you know, in terms of the '27, so we've gotten improvement in that part of the capital structure, the generation of free cash flow, you know, during that period of time, and laser focus in terms of the operating performance of the business. And we talked about CapEx. I think we've also done a really nice job managing from a tax standpoint in terms of I think we originally gave guidance this year about $25 million - $35 million or maybe even higher on cash taxes.
We're down to about $15 million this year in terms of cash taxes. And we've got the benefit of time, you know, out there, but we're obviously also conscious of the maturities. And just as a reminder, we haven't touched upon this really. You know, we've said in terms of 2024, that we expect to be back to kind of like historical growth levels. And just to remind us all, 2024, which you know, is a presidential election year, and previously our high in a presidential election year was $170 million of revenue.
Mm-hmm.
Great thing about election year advertising revenue, it's the only category we get the money upfront from a free cash flow basis. And if you just look at the political landscape, we have no reason to believe it won't be another very robust political year going to 2024.
Got it. We have, unfortunately, I have to leave it there. Thank you guys very much-
Thank you.
For taking the time today.
Great. Thanks a lot.
Yeah.