Okay, we'll get started. My name is David Karnovsky. I cover media, entertainment, and advertising at JP Morgan. Happy to have back at the conference from Lamar Advertising, Sean Reilly, President and CEO. Sean, thanks for being here.
Thanks for having me, David.
Great.
Appreciate it.
Maybe just start high level. You know, how are you and the team thinking about setting key priorities for the balance of 2024 and the long term?
Great question. You know, to your goal of give or take $2.2 billion in revenues, we're about 75% of the way there, so we're in good shape on the bookings, feeling good about that. As you know, we set out a goal to pay down some debt this year. We've got a piece of paper, a Term A Loan, that's maturing in February, and so we're taking a lot of free cash flow, and we're putting it down on that. And that's going well. And then, of course, we have this big ERP conversion that we're in the middle of. Phase one went extremely well and basically touched all the back-office functions: accounting, control, all that stuff.
Phase two is more important, a heavier lift, but gonna be transformational. It really is taking the entire sales process from proposal and quote to cash and truncating it, really making it much more efficient, much more effective, and allowing us, by the time we finish it, to layer in some AI tools and really crank up our sales process. So we're excited about that. That's definitely one of our big goals for the remainder of 2024 and moving into 2025.
Great. Great overview. So you're coming off a Q1 where results exceeded internal expectations. I think you said April was steady. How are you seeing overall demand currently? You know, what should the organic cadence look like from here?
Sure. We're feeling good about the year, exceeding our internal expectations. You know, we came out of Q1, you know, ±5 pro forma growth. You know, Q2, let's call it ±4, and then back half back up to ±5. So, you know, relatively steady as she goes kinda year in terms of pro forma growth and cadence.
When we're talking about pro forma for Q1, just to clarify, is that sort of adjusted for the leap year benefit? Is that-
We got a little bit of-
Small-
Yeah.
... but it, you know, for the analysts in the room-
Yeah
- that track it very closely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, obviously, that'll wash itself out as you go through the year, but it was a little bit of a mini in Q1, and it was. It's funny, I never thought to really budget for leap year, but I guess I gotta learn how to do it.
Yeah. In terms of local, really good performance in Q1 at close to 7%. Maybe we can talk to the shape of that. Is that broad-based in terms of verticals, markets?
It's really across the board. And that's, you know, that's really important and healthy. You know, we touch our, give or take, 40,000 local customers with 1,000 account executives, right? And you know, I've been doing this a long time, and over the course of time, you really don't see a big delta between national and local. It's just that local tends to be very, very steady and do this, and national tends to have a higher beta and do that. And right now, as regards national, we're down in one of those, right? But it's gonna come back up.
And again, if you look at it over a couple of decades, there's not a dime's worth of difference between the two, really, in terms of overall growth rates, at least in our book.
You know, as it relates to the economy, macro risk, have local marketers, like, have they largely become inured to the higher rate environment and the risk of recession, right? That was a factor last year. Seems like they put that past them.
Look, Main Street is healthy. That's, you know, that's just the, the take-home message. It really is, and remains that way. And, you know, again, last year at this time, I was only getting questions about how Lamar does in a recession, and all those questions have gone away. Which is good 'cause, you know, we almost talked ourselves into it, didn't we?
Yeah. Anything to note on regional? It feels like picking nits. I think Midwest was flattish. Was that national, was that local?
It was really a weakness in the Pacific Northwest. You know, you know, I'd say last year you could argue there was a sort of geographical rolling recession almost.
Mm-hmm.
And you might could have said Seattle and Portland were kinda sorta in one, but, you know, the rest really wasn't. But the good news is, you know, Seattle is now coming on strong. That particular region is now hitting budget and feeling pretty, pretty good about their world.
Got it. Lot of nuances, but, you know, local growth overall for outdoor looks better in recent trend, certainly relative to local television, if you leave aside political. Do you see share shifts in your market?
Yeah, I am beginning to feel really good about our ability to take share from linear television. In my view, it's taken too long, really. I mean, it's been happening for a while, that they're struggling with their audience, and we should have had more dollars coming our way, but we're beginning to sense it now, that you can feel it.
Anywhere you see that traction? Services, you said, was very strong.
Services are strong, but, I mean, the real category that was, you know, we're keeping our eye on is automotive. You know, the local car dealers is—for us, automotive is local.
Yeah.
It's local car dealers. It's not national. And, you know, they still buy local network affiliate news adjacencies, which, you know, who's watching that, right? and now we're beginning to see that come our way. Auto, is trending up higher than our overall book, which kinda tells you that, right?
Yeah. And how do you, I mean, how does that play out long term, right? I mean, you look, there's still, you know, huge pools of local dollars. You said local TV, and then also radio and print are still fairly substantial, right? And what do you do to kinda make sure that you capture that, as opposed to, you know, that auto dealer saying, "Oh, I'll put it into digital or connected TVs out there?
We, we used to, you know, 20 years ago, we would walk into a sophisticated local client, and we would try to augment their spend, right? We wouldn't sell against, we would sell with local TV, local radio. We've changed our tone a little bit. We're now selling against, right? So when we walk into a customer, we show them the CPMs that they're paying on TV. We show them the erosion of the eyeballs, right? And then we show them our CPM and the fact that our eyeballs are growing. And so we now sell against our traditional local competitors, and we sell to augment whatever our customers are doing in social and mobile.
Right.
Right. So there's a subtle tone shift in the way we're pitching.
The idea being, you know, a lot of times these local dealers might be utilizing social mobile, and then outdoor just becomes an effective kind of reach extender on a very cost-
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Got it. For political, I know for Lamar, that's been tends to come much more at the local level, hyper-local level, you could even say-
Yeah
... as opposed to kinda national. Maybe just refresh us on the typical uplift you might see on a direct basis. How does the crowd-out effect work there?
Yeah, so two things happen in a political year. We do get some customers who don't want to be part of the nastiness that goes on in elections, so they'll actually pull a little out of TV, which is where all that tit for tat tends to happen.
Yep.
They'll send a little bit our way. So that's the crowd-out effect. The other thing that happens for us is just pure, you know, political buy, right? So this year is trending, slightly ahead of 2022, the last cycle, slightly behind 2020, and that's primarily because in that presidential, we actually had a primary season. And this year, we were-
Rubin is there where-
Right
...-
We didn't have a presidential-
Yeah
... primary season, and so it's trending more like, your typical every other year congressional type of thing. So we'll do... We're trending, like I said, slightly ahead of 2022. It'll be, you know, a little north of $20 million. To that goal, we're about 50% booked as we sit today. You know, so it breaks a little bit later than the rest of our book. Like I said, we're about 75% booked when you take our goals for the year and our whole book. So that's kinda how it's playing out through the year.
Any prospect for market share gain there? I mean, local TV CPMs for political can go through the roof.
You know, it's-
... during season, or is that still the-
The whole social media thing has gotten so intense with politics these days. I think the dollars in political that are coming out of television are probably going into that social milieu that is just a vast wasteland, in my opinion. But that's probably where a lot of it's going.
Got it. As you noted, national going through a little bit of a softer period. I think at earnings, you had said some caution at larger accounts. Any update you could provide here?
No, it's, it's pretty much the same. You know, to put it in perspective, you know, like take the insurance vertical. You're talking about two or three big accounts, right? And, you know, we're filling the hole they created with, smaller but national accounts. So there's a lot of activity, but the dollars aren't as big, and it's still a slog, right? So, you know, what was down five-ish, a little north of five in, the first quarter, slightly incrementally better sequentially as we go through the second and as we look into the back half, but still a slog.
To be clear, you're filling the hole on national insurance with kind of smaller, you know, insurance.
Well, just smaller accounts-
Okay
... on the national side.
Yeah.
The really good news is we're also filling that hole with good, strong local business, right?
Yeah.
I will tell you this: there are a couple of accounts who trimmed back boards they had been buying for a long, long time at really good pricing, right? As we replace that with good local customers, we're actually getting bumps in pricing. So we're selling some of those boards that we used to sell to the insurance guys, for higher rates, just to local customers. So that's a good thing. That's one of the reasons for the lift overall.
On the auto insurance, is that a regulatory issue? Is that an agency-
No
... allocation issue?
I think what that is, if you've been reading all the stories of late about auto insurance and rates and where they're going and the actuarial uncertainty that the GEICO and State Farm in all states of the world experienced last year, I think it just caused them to just... They lost their footing a little bit, and they just pulled back. Not just out of home, right? They've kind of pulled back all of their advertising.
Right. Yeah.
I think they're regaining their footing, so, you know, hopefully, as we turn the corner into next year, they'll, you know, they'll be back with us.
Any other prominent national verticals besides auto insurance?
No, I mean, you know, we had a little pullback on the online gaming, you know, the DraftKings of the world-
Yeah
... which was to be expected. You know, they came in, real, real heavy as it was becoming legalized in different states, and they were trying to be the first to get on your phone, and so they were really spending heavy. And now it's, it's less a market share game and more of a branding game, and so they're spending, I believe they're spending more responsibly, and I think that's what Wall Street thinks, too, in terms of how their stocks are performing.
Before you were noting you were at an outdoor conference. You had met with some of the national agency buyers. Kind of curious the tone of the conversations there, how you see kind of outdoor position with the big agency groups.
They feel good. I mean, you know, they're if as long as you weren't handling the insurance guys -
Right
... then-
Of course
... you're feeling pretty good, and they're tending to grow their book by again sort of growing different customer verticals that are coming into the space. You know, we got, for example, for the first time ever, we got a pharmaceutical. That was just great to see. And so there's excitement in the industry around that one. You've probably heard Clear Channel talk about, you know-
Yeah
... the success they had there. You know, that is a game changer if they are not just dipping their toe in the water and they really jump into the medium, then that's huge.
Was that a regulatory thing?
That was a regulatory issue, you know, that you have to have the disclaimers, right?
Yeah.
You can't write that many disclaimers on a billboard, right?
You can put it really small, right?
Yeah. So, what they're able to do now is just say the name of the brand. They can't say what ailment it cures, and then they say, "Call your doctor." So that's perfect for billboards, right?
I don't know, those national TV drug commercials-
Yeah
... seem pretty vague, too.
Yeah.
Any other verticals like that, that are outside the ecosystem, CPG, anything like that?
The only other one that we don't know if they're all in or not yet is packaged goods. We got a buy from Cascade, P&G.
Yeah.
And, again, we don't see a lot of that. So, that's another one where we're staying in front of them.
That was sort of a dip the toe in the water and-
That one came in programmatically.
Okay.
It was a surprise. I mean, you know, as you know, we don't contract for that. It just kind of happens, right?
Yeah. All right, that's a good segue. Programmatic, in contrast to national, was really strong.
Yeah.
Drove digital same store up. I know programmatic can be volatile. It's coming off a low base, but, you know, can you kind of talk to the divergence of national versus programmatic?
Sure. I think a couple of things are happening. Number one, it is being accessed by some customers we don't usually see, like P&G. By the way, it's gonna be up, you know, 35-ish%, Q2, programmatic is, so it's still really performing well. The thing that happened to us last year, we got caught up a little bit in the sort of digital pullback because of the privacy issues. Again, what happens on your phone, right? The other thing that happened was some competitive screens came online that were not online before. And so while the programmatic pie was growing, the share to large-format digital wasn't.
That script has flipped, and the buying community is now appreciating that all screens aren't created equally, and the large-format digital screens are now rapidly gaining share in the programmatic space.
You're saying that we're... Where was the sort of competition coming on the supply side of it?
Have you ever seen, like, a gas station TV? You know, you're filling up your car-
Sure
... you see the little screen, right?
Yeah.
That, for example.
Interesting. Okay. With programmatic, you talked to Cascade before, but that sounds like it was more of a one-off. I mean, where are you seeing more of the kind of vertical interest on the programmatic buys?
Again, across the board.
Okay.
Some of it is around the entertainment space, which, you know, you're seeing movie releases come back. You know, again, for us, it's not as important as it is for OUTFRONT and Clear.
Yeah.
But that is a space through which we do get some of those dollars.
What do you think the partners appreciate here? Is it just the flexibility to do what they buy? Is that that's sort of the key piece of it?
No, not really. So you have two pools of dollars, right?
Right.
You've got the traditional pot, right? And then you've got the digital pot, and most of that goes to the, to your phone. And, those digital buyers don't pick up the phone and call an account executive, right? They don't wanna go out to lunch or play golf.
Yeah.
They wanna buy through an algorithm. You know, they drop a digital dollar in to the algorithm. We load our CPM, the geography of the board, the demographic they're gonna hit. They load what they're willing to pay, who they wanna talk to, and where they wanna talk to them, and at what time. And if we have the avails and all of those match up, the buy just happens.
Yeah.
Right? It's convenient, it's easy. They also get a higher level of data to back up and prove out their buying. And this is provided by the digital enabling shops, the DSPs, the SSPs. In our case, it's mostly Vistar, which we own a minority stake in. And again, Vistar provides a richer data set to the customer, so-
In terms of targeting, attribution?
In terms of targeting, attribution. Again, they also have a very precise buy.... When you add all that up, we get a higher CPM, right? Our traditional digital CPM runs, you know, let's call it six, seven-ish cost per thousand impressions. We're getting 8eight, nine, ten, right, through the programmatic platform.
Your programmatic at this point is still all national?
It's all national today. One day, we'll open it up to our sophisticated local customers.
I was gonna say, right, a lot of your customers, I assume-
Yeah
... are pretty inured to buying on Facebook and Google-
Yeah
-right?
I mean, look, there's a reason we don't do it, and that's because a programmatic dollar, the cost of sale runs about 10%, right? That's what we pay the SSP world. And our overall cost of sales through all the other channels runs about 6%, right? So I'm not gonna unleash this thing on our buying community until volume is such that the cost of a dig-- of a programmatic sale drops down to around 6%, which it will. I mean, right now, you know, it's in its infancy.
Yeah.
There's not as many dollars flowing through the channel, but when that happens, you know, we open it up to everybody.
Got it. You've targeted digital conversions this year, 200-250, down slightly, from the recent run rate. Part of that's due to capital allocation. We can touch on that later. But how do you see the long-term opportunity in terms of digital conversions? What are the, kind of gating factors to consider in terms of, regulation, bringing supply to the market?
Sure.
You talked about supply being a risk sometimes.
Yeah. You know, on the demand side, I feel great about it. I mean, if you look at places like the U.K., for example, well over 50% of out-of-home is digital, right? And in, in this country, it's about 30%.
...
It's about, it's about 30%, right? So the demand is there, right? And it's really a supply constraint-
Yeah
... issue. You know, we've got 160,000 billboard faces, and only about 4,500 of them are digital.
Right.
Those 4,500 boards do 30% of our billing, right? So we're moving as fast as we can.
Yeah.
You know, again, sort of with the slight exception of this year, but that's... Those digital conversion opportunities are still there. We'll crank it up again next year.
Do you see any change in the ROIs you go through this, right? Someone might make a case that you converted the best possible locations initially, and you could see a decay over time.
You know, it-
You're shaking your head, so I assume no.
No, I mean, you know, it's, it's, remarkably consistent. It's really surprised me, 'cause I would've thought the same thing, right? But we're getting the same ROIs on a digital deployment that we do today that we did, that we got a decade ago. And, so again, it's, it's, it's not a question of demand. It's, it's really a question of how quickly we can get them out there.
Can you just refresh on what the revenue uplift is, cost uplift, what you typically see?
Sure. So, you know, you've got static billboard on the interstate. Let's say we're getting $3,000 a month for it.
Yeah.
All right? We take it down, we put up a digital, and we're gonna get, give or take, $15,000-$18,000 a month for it. Right? Now, from the customer's point of view, they're paying about the same aggregate dollars. You know, they paid $3,000 bucks. Now, they had to buy the substrate, right, that they amortize over the length of the contract. That's the vinyl with the image on it. With digital, they don't have to buy a substrate-
Yeah
... so they save there. And they can obviously change their copy from their desktop. But so what changes for them is the cost per thousand impressions. They were paying, let's call it $3-$5 cost per thousand impressions. Now they have shared space, 2.6 views per car, right?
Yeah.
If you do the arithmetic, they're now paying, you know, give or take, $8, like I said, $8, $9, $10 ish, right? Depending on the market, those are kinda aggregate numbers. It's gonna be different in Vegas than in Baton Rouge, but, you know, sort of give or take. And then, you know, because we manage the real estate under our digital unit so aggressively, and our lease costs are about, run about 9% of revenues, the incremental margin contribution from digital is huge, right? I mean, you can do the arithmetic. It's, it's quite good.
Great. I wanna touch on, transit, which is strong in the quarter, 12% growth. You did have an extra day we talked about. Super Bowl in Las Vegas probably helped. But there was some improved benefit, from ridership. Maybe you can unpack a bit, what you saw in the quarter. Does that ridership benefit kind of flow through on the whole?
Sure. So, most of our transit is wrapped buses. So the audience is not the ridership. It's not the people on the bus. It's really the whole DMA as the bus moves around.
Mm-hmm.
Okay? That's most of what we do. That came back much faster after COVID, so that has fully recovered and is doing quite well. We have really sort of one exception to that, which is Vancouver, which is a traditional rail subway system. The audience is the ridership, and it hasn't fully recovered, although it's recovering. And I'm thankful to say that Vancouver is, I think, back, right?
Yep.
So some of that 12% was the recovery of Vancouver, right? And then another big chunk of it was our airport division, which is just knocking it out of the park. You know, it had recovered last year, but this year it's just... And you heard the same thing from Scott at Clear Channel. I mean-
Yep
... our respective airport divisions are really doing well.
What's driving that? Is that just-
It's airports are packed.
Okay.
Just packed.
Yep. Wanna move to the expense side. You've talked to 2%-2.5% annual increases for the long term. Should we think of that growth as kind of given, as part of that variable expense, tied to the top line? I guess what we're getting at is what's the operating-
Sure
Leverage profile of the company over the long term?
Tremendous operating leverage in our business. There are some expenses that toggle with the top line. Sales commissions. We have some revenue shares, not many, but some revenue shares with our landlords. We have revenue shares with our transit partners, right? So as that revenue goes up, that expense base grows slightly faster than the rest of the expense base. But the way you should think about it, our largest expense is our ground lease portfolio. It's some 65,000 ground leases with every conceivable term you could imagine, from month to month to 99 years. It tends to grow at 1% a year, year in, year out. I mean, even when inflation was running rampant, a couple of years ago, that expense base grew 1%.
Yep.
Right. The next biggest expense we have is people, right? That runs, you know, give or take 18% of our revenues. The ground lease expense runs about 21% of our revenues. But people, some of that's variable. You know, you have incentive comp for management. You have, as I mentioned, your salespeople that are on commission. But again, a lot of that is fixed as well. And then you get down to our electrical bill. You know, you go from those two big expenses all the way down to our electric bill, which runs about 3%.
Yeah.
And then you get into nickels and dimes, right? So, all that adds up to a give or take 53%-54% operating margin at the operating level, and close to a 47% consolidated operating margin.
Good. Just wanna go to the room. If anyone has a question, feel free to raise your hand. We got two here.
You said how many of the 44,000 are convertible?
Maybe just repeat the question.
Oh, that was the 160,000 faces, but only 4,500 are digital?
No, no, the yeah, the billboards. Yeah.
Yeah. So again, the gating issue is supply. I mean, going as fast as we can, we're gonna do, you know, 350 a year.
I know, but how many- I mean, are they all eventually convertible?
Oh, that, that's a good question. From our customer's point of view, no, 'cause we have customers like Cracker Barrel. All they want is the static face on the interstate that says, "Pancakes, $7.99. Get off here," right? So there are a number of our customers who only want static. All right? And then there's our customers that wanna buy across static and digital. Think McDonald's, right? And then we have customers that only wanna buy digital. So, you know, when I think about in a perfect world, you know, where are we going with this? You know, we're If we could get to 50% of our revenues being digital, that's a good thing to shoot for.
That's like 15% of the billboards then, right?
Well, we're doing 30% of our revenues on about 3% of our billboards right now. Yeah.
Surprised it's that small looking to being converted.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, look, our customers really like it. It's a great product. It really is.
One here in the front.
Just so, Cracker Barrel, you mentioned they're having some real problems, and they have a CEO that was there within the last year. So does she think about static differently, and have they cut back at all?
You know, Cracker Barrel was one of those long, long, long-time customers that we really love, right? But they occupy the same space over a span of decades, right? I'm talking about the same board, renewed over and over and over again. They dropped some of those terms. We had a friendly but protracted negotiation with them about their buy. The good news is, those boards, because they had been bought over the course of decades with, like, sort of 2% or 3% increases, we've been able to sell for more to our local customers. So we're comfortable where Cracker Barrel is. You know, they're still a great big customer of ours. But at the end of the day, they're running. They're about 0.6% of our book, something like that.
We have no customer that's over 1% of our book of business. Our largest customer being McDonald's, and they're kind of right at 1%.
There's one in the front.
What's the payback on a conversion, and what's the gating factor, or how do you think about the payback? Give me the-
The gating factors, I'll hit that. It's one of them is regulatory, right? You gotta get a slew of permits to convert a static to a digital. In some jurisdictions, you can't, like Los Angeles, right? They ban digital billboards, right? So it's just a tougher slog in some areas than other areas. They're little construction projects, right? You've got to have a big, huge digital screen arrive at the right time, at the right place with a construction crew. Hopefully, it's not raining. And then, the payback has, like I said, been remarkably consistent. Digital 14 by 48 costs a little north of $200,000, and you've got to retro the structure a little bit. Like I said, it's a construction project. Let's tack on another $20,000 or so.
So that's your CapEx. Your revenue's $15,000-$18,000 a month times 12, subtract sales commission of give or take 6%, and subtract your ground lease expense, which is about 10%. So your incremental margin is in the low 80s%, and you do all that arithmetic, and you see a very quick payback and a nice ROI.
It's just permits and construction?
It's permits and construction, yeah. Pretty much, yeah. Mostly regulatory, though, is the big gainer.
I wanna touch upon M&A. You've talked to $1 billion in investment capacity by year-end. Part of that comes from the slowing of the digital conversions. We assume, you know, you see some potential for material deals next year. I guess, first, what gives you confidence on that? And then maybe second, assuming those deals or larger deals didn't come to fruition, you know, could you make that up in a, in over a more fragmented market?
Sure. So the—let me talk about the industry and its fragmentation and, and the sort of where we are in the consolidation. So you've got, you know, maybe this many companies outside of the big three that have asset values of, let's call it, $500 million-$1.25 billion.
For those on the webcast, you're holding up a five.
I'm holding up five fingers.
Yeah.
Right. Then, you know, asset value between, you know, let's call it, $50 million and $500 million, you've got... I'm gonna hold up two hands, all right? You've got about that many. And then asset value under, you know, let's call it, $100 million, there's literally hundreds of them, right? So you've got a long tail of smaller independents. And, you know, traditionally, in a given year, we've done, you know, give or take, $120 million-$150 million worth of those little deals, like, lots and lots of deals averaging $8 million-$9 million, right? This year, we curtailed that activity a little bit because, again, we wanna pay down this term debt. I got a lot of questions about that at the beginning of the year when it looked like the Fed was gonna have six rate cuts.
Some people wondered why we were doing it. Now, they're—I'm not getting that question so much, and people are saying: "Yeah, y'all should probably pay that debt down." So, anyway, so that's sort of the sort of structure of the industry as we sit today. So there's plenty of capital to deploy, and we've got lots of powder.
Just in terms of M&A generally, what's the typical playbook on deal synergies?
So those little deals that I'm talking about, let's call them, you know, $5 million-$50 million, that we do day in and day out, those are predominantly tuck-ins. You know, we don't need to buy people or trucks or operations. We're just buying billboard structures, permits, ground leases, and customer contracts, right? And you just fold it into your existing operation. Those are incredibly predictable, very accretive, a great source of shareholder value creation. Over the years... I mean, I've been doing this for 30 years, and I've probably done well over 1,000 billboard deals. And if you look at our footprint, and I would encourage you to go to our website, go to the Browse Inventory thing that pops up first, you'll see a map of the United States.
You'll see some green dots. Drill down to the green dots, and you can get down to the individual billboard, and you'll just note that we have billboards everywhere. I mean, virtually everything is a fill-in for us, right? Which gives us a tremendous advantage when it comes to M&A.
Got it. All right, we got about 30 seconds left. I think it's a good end there. Thank you.
Yeah, great. Hey, thank y'all.
All right.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Yep.