Outfront CEO Jeremy Male spoke yesterday at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference. The webcast is on the Outfront website. Male was bullish on Outfront, saying at one point “we’ll outperform GDP and we’ll outperform out of home.” He estimated the company would build 120 digital billboards in 2017. Here’s a summary of his other comments.
On the relevance of outdoor in a digital world.
Once again outdoor is right up there in potential growth rates…mobile video is number one, then cinema, then out of home. What we have in out of home is an increasing audience… …the fact that we have up on our inventory Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter and Google and Instagram is testament to the fact that they can use our medium to hit whatever medium they want.
Pricing Trends?
We’re working hard to increase yield. We’re changing how we compensate our salesforce to be focused on growth…
On Small Cell Deployment and Mobile Revenues
Small cell is a real estate play…Billboards are where people are so this will be a good spot…We’re still early days…We’re not providing numbers on this. The other side of the coin is thinking about how our billboards react with mobile…If you buy a board for a 15% uprate we’ll deliver messages to local phones triggered by a geofence….You’ll see an ad on a billboard and get an in-app message on your phone…We’re up to 500 campaigns…It works…Click through rates a higher on messaging campaigns using billboards.
On the development of Outfront’s Automated Trading Platform
We are testing now. In 2Q next year we’ll do some live trading. We’ll have a platform whereby our medium can be traded automatically…for our digital signs you’ll be able to deliver ads in real time…2017 for us is a year of transition but we believe that we can significantly increase the value of out of home when it is bought on the same platforms that a majority of media is being traded on…
On Reducing Outfront’s leverage
We’re at 4.6. What’s the answer to getting it down. It will be how quickly we can grow EBIDTA… There’s been only one deal of substance this year and that was in Dallas…We’re confident that we’ll get back down to the 3.5-4.0 range in 2018.
On Antitrust Scrutiny of Out of Home Mergers
It’s been a pretty tough regulatory environment in the out of home industry over the last few years. It’s been literally county by county how many boards have you got and how many boards do you want to buy. This seems bizarre in a world where we are competing with Google and Facebook for ad dollars…
Insider’s take: An emerging story of the Trump administration could be a more relaxed approach to antitrust. Some Trump DOJ appointees are corporate lawyers. Perhaps there’ll be less of an obsession with micromanaging outdoor company spinoffs. Male makes a good point that it’s ridiculous to obsess about billboard concentration when outdoor is competing with google and facebook for ad dollars.
