Clear Channel Outdoor CEO Scott Wells appeared at the Wells Fargo TMT Summit this week. A selection of his comments.
Clear Channel’s San Francisco market is showing signs of life
The end of summer was not particularly robust but people are spending now. I think that the completion of the various strikes is a bullish signal… I think you know we’re seeing some signs of life in San Francisco which has been our our…toughest market all year…it definitely seems to have stabilized and started moving in the right direction so all those things taken together make us feel good about about where things are right now
Packaged goods companies like programmatic
We’ve been reaching back to packaged goods companies because they have really embraced the the kind of pay for performance and so it’s just very natural for them to look at buying things that come along with data that either we or the DSP’s are providing them…
The multiplier effect of out of home and social media
The thing that we have not exploited as well as as an industry…is just how much more effective our medium makes other media. if you’re spending a bunch of money on TikTok or Facebook and you’re not spending money on out of home you are missing out on a multiplier effect that is is basically free money
Clear Channel’s airports business is thriving
We’ve always liked the airport business…in aggregate this year when the dust settles air travel in the US is going to be up in the mid-teens and our airports business is going to be up a similar amount…it’s a nice business it’s it’s reasonably capital intensive but it’s not capital intensive in in the way that some of the tougher businesses in Europe were…we think it’s a good part of the portfolio…
Wells would like to see interest rates fall
For us the the interest rate environment has been a challenge…this year we’ll be up $70 or $75 million in interest expense…that’s almost as big as our our domestic corporate expense …it’s a very big number and so we’re certainly enthusiastic about the talk about…some rate cuts on the horizon.
Billboards is a 40% cashflow margin and airports is a mid-teens cashflow margin
We’ve been pretty consistent saying we’re kind of a low 40s margin in America and we’re…high teens in airports at run rate and I think those numbers those numbers hold up well if we can optimize that mix to the fixed site locations and get some real nice revenue growth….maybe we can push those numbers a little bit higher.
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