Eileen McLaughlin - VP, IR Rich Bressler - President, COO and CFO Brian Coleman - SVP and Treasurer.

Avi Steiner - JPMorgan Jason Kim - Goldman Sachs Lance Vitanza - CRT Capital Group Aaron Watts - Deutsche Bank.

Ladies and gentlemen thank you for standing by. Welcome to the iHeartMedia Inc. and Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings Inc. 2016 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Eileen McLaughlin, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead..

iHeartMedia Capital One, LLC; and iHeartCommunications Inc., Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings Inc., and Clear Channel International BV.

For purposes of this call, when we describe the financial and operating performance of iHeartMedia Inc., that also describes the performance of its subsidiaries; iHeartMedia Capital One, LLC and iHeartCommunications Inc. After an introduction and a review of the quarter, we will open up the line for questions.

Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that this conference call includes forward-looking statements. These statements include management's expectations, beliefs, and projections about performance and represent management's current belief.

There can be no assurance that management's expectations, beliefs, or projections will be achieved or that actual results will not differ from expectations. Please review the statements of risks contained in our earnings press releases and filings with the SEC. Pacing data will also be mentioned during the call.

For those of you not familiar with pacing data, it reflects revenues booked at a specific date versus the comparable date in the prior period, and may or may not reflect the actual revenue growth rate at the end of the period.

During today's call, we will provide certain performance measures that do not conform to generally accepted accounting principles.

We provided schedules that reconcile these non-GAAP measures with our reported results on a GAAP basis, as part of our earnings press releases and the slide presentation, which can be found in the Investor sections of our websites, iheartmedia.com, and clearchanneloutdoor.com.

Please note that our two earnings releases and the slide presentation provide a detailed breakdown of foreign exchange and non-cash compensation expense items, as well as segment revenues and OIBDAN.

Please note that the information provided on this call speaks only to management's reviews as of today, May 4, and may no longer be accurate at the time of a replay. With that, I will now turn the call over to Rich Bressler..

Thank you, Eileen and good morning everyone. Thanks for joining us. We are pleased with the success of our growth initiatives in the quarter. It shows that the investments we've made and are still making to transform iHeartMedia into 21st century multi-platform media and entertainment company are continuing to pay off.

With our diverse portfolio of assets, we have the ability to reach consumers wherever they are.

More than ever, we're confident that we have the right strategy to maximize the value of radio and outdoor as true mass market mediums, while building our other platforms including digital, events, and social on top of that base, and that's because fundamental trends continue to drive powerful opportunities for our businesses.

As [Neilson’s] latest comparable metrics report shows, TV's weekly reach keeps falling from its historic high of 95%, now reaching just 86% of American adults over 18, and with millennial that reach is even lower, at 75%, quite a drop from its record high of 95%.

By contrast, broadcast radio's reach remains the highest and most stable of all media continuing to reach 93% of all US adults 18 plus, with millennials’ reach almost the same, at 92%. So radio has now surpassed TV to become the number one reach medium. Put another way, more adults and more millennials are reached by AM/FM radio than any other medium.

Back in 1970, radio also reached 93% of American adults. That's remarkable stability, showing that radio is not being negatively affected by digital, unlike newspapers, magazines, and TV. To the contrary, digital has proven to be a nice add-on to broadcast radio.

With broadcast radio as its core platform, iHeartMedia also drives social media engagement to a level few other companies can match.

For example, just look at the 115 billion, that's billion with a B, social media impressions in the US alone that last month's iHeartRadio Music Awards promotion and event recently generated, far surpassing the combined social engagement for the Oscars and the Grammys, and [Neilson], Twitter TV ratings ranked the same awards show as the number one trending program of the week.

When you think about it, given radio's roots in local communities and its close personal connection to millions of listeners, it's no surprise we have such a major social following and impact. Radio is America's companion, the best friend sitting in the empty seat next to each of our listeners.

We are keeping them company, while they’re getting ready in the morning, commuting, working, or going about their daily lives. Before digital, they call on the telephone to interact with us. Today they contact us through social media, and they now also bring along their friends.

That companionship we have with our audience drives the impressive number of social impressions generated by our events; and social has turned into yet another important platform for our company. In another key trend which we've discussed before but bears repeating, consumers continue to spend more and more time out of home.

This trend obviously benefits our radio business, as well as our outdoor business, especially since about two-thirds of radio is consumed out of home, making it more mobile than what's traditionally considered to be mobile.

In fact, two-thirds of what people think of as mobile media is consumed in the home, and 80% of that data is consumed through Wi-Fi. That's why we believe no other media company is better positioned than ours to capitalize on this increasing consumer mobility.

For all intents and purposes radio functions like a digital device, with an important distinction. There are about 200 million smartphones in use across the US, but 1 billion radios. We are now able to use all of these smartphones to expand our existing and leading reach in broadcast radio like no other media company.

Finally, the advertising marketplace continues to evolve dramatically. Agencies and advertisers are demanding automated and programmatic sales processes, as well as data infused and measurable solutions from all media, which is currently dominated by digital companies.

For the past year, as you know, we've been investing at building a programmatic and audience-based ad buying solution that enables broadcast radio to be bought and sold as easily and seamlessly as digital media, closing the gap with what the digital companies offer.

I'm happy to say that we are now offering automated and data infused buying to our advertisers across our broadcast stations and iHeartRadio, which we believe will provide a frictionless programmatic platform for marketers that looks and feels like digital to them and integrates seamlessly into their planning and buying systems.

In addition to our automated buying, we are now for the first time, able to sell impression based advertising in a way that's complementary to digital [mind]. This is in addition to our premium time based inventory.

Although we expect there to be gradual adoption of our programmatic platform, we believe it will enable us to more effectively sell across our entire broadcast and digital inventory.

To better serve the needs of our advertising partners, we've been developing the kind of rich data and research insights to deliver our reach in a very specific demographic, behavioral, and consumer segments that markets are targeting in their digital campaigns.

About one-third of our broadcast station listeners also use the iHeartRadio platform, and iHeartRadio's digital listener base which is built almost entirely through the promotion and advertising on broadcast stations.

So we're able to use this [synonymous], aggregated data to create insights into our broadcast listening audience and talk to consumers based on those insights.

So now we can provide the same ad buying experience that was once only available from the digital only companies, and I'm pleased with the positive responses we have received from many of our major agency partners to our new ad buying tools, and a number are already participating.

All of these capabilities have also helped drive the success of our political ad sales, a significant contributor to this quarter's solid revenues. This strong progress in programmatic, data infused ad buying at iHeartMedia is also a priority at Americas Outdoor.

We recently introduced RADAR, a data analytics solution that uses anonymous, aggregated statistical insights from third party providers to enable marketers for the first time to plan and buy our out of home inventory just as they do in their digital campaigns, and importantly, we're able to share our data learnings and advertiser relationships across all of our businesses.

At International Outdoor, we continue to expand our innovative marketing solutions, adding 962 new digital displays in the quarter. With nearly 1,000 new digital displays around the world added in the quarter, we are providing much more choice and control to our outdoor advertisers, and that's helping the company to grow its digital footprint.

To sum it up, our investments in these core strategic initiatives are enabling us to keep building our leadership in the power of sound, the power of outdoor, the power of social, the power of data, the power of mobile, and the power of our national and local brands, as well as our industry leading personalities, all while maintaining our tight operating and financial discipline.

Now let's turn to slide 4 and review our key financials; to improve comparability in this quarter's results to the prior year on this call, I'll refer to all results excluding the impact of FX and the impact of non-strategic Americas Outdoor markets that we sold in the first quarter.

You can find our reported numbers in our earnings releases and SEC filings. In addition, as noted in the iHeartMedia release, our OIBDAN calculation excludes the incremental lease expense from the sale lease back transactions related to our tower portfolio and San Antonio office buildings.

Consolidated revenues increased 4.1% to $1.4 billion, with growth of both iHeartMedia of 5.9% and Americas Outdoor of 4.2%, International Outdoor was essentially flat. Consolidated OIBDAN was up 11.8% to $300 million.

This solid performance of our operating businesses provides us with the flexibility to manage our capital structure in a prudent way, and allows us to keep evaluating opportunities to strengthen our balance sheet and our businesses. I'll provide additional detail on these results as we discuss each segment's financial performance later in the call.

Now, let's review our key non-financial highlights. Moving to slide 5, the reach of iHeartMedia's broadcast radio stations means that we are one of only a few media players in the United States with a reach of over 200 million people per month. Others include Facebook and Google.

We think this unique position gives us the ability to create dynamic new platforms like the social we discussed earlier, as well as events and digital.

Indeed, iHeartRadio reached 84 million registered users, a 32% increase year-on-year, and at the end of April, we reached 85 million registered users, hitting that milestone faster than any other digital radio or music service marking a 35% increase over the first quarter of 2015.

Total listening hours were up 22% over the first quarter of 2015 and mobile listening accounted for two-thirds of iHeartRadio's total listening. Downloads and upgrades increased over 900 million at quarter end, and all of this iHeartRadio listening is additive to our expanding base of broadcast radio listening.

As discussed earlier, we and our partners launched a programmatic platform that provides not only the automation that ad buyers want, but also the ability to target very specific audiences and buying characteristics, as well as correlating with other key data and situations important to advertisers.

For example, advertisers can target consumers by political affiliation, what kind of mobile device a person is using, what kind of car the listener drives, what the weather is, and more. It enables us to use more than demographics to target consumers at scale.

We believe that being able to provide this kind of data infused buying, with the impressive scale of our broadcast stations opens new doors for advertisers and for our iHeartMedia.

We also continue to leverage our roster of major annual events as part of our overall sales strategy, while providing promotion and brand building opportunities for our advertisers.

So far this year, we have staged three major events; the third annual iHeartRadio Music Awards, the first ever iHeart80s Party, and this past weekend, the iHeartCountry Music Festival.

The award show was broadcast to millions with a live TV tri-multicast across Turner's TBS, TNT, and TruTV networks, as well as a live simulcast on iHeartMedia broadcast stations and the iHeartRadio digital and mobile platforms.

Broadcasting on the Turner networks brought the show to new audiences, and its success benefited our users, our digital platforms, and our partners, including our advertisers in the music industry and the artists themselves. The success of the iHeart80s Party has created a new ten-fold event for us.

It featured some of the 80s' biggest music superstars that performed in Los Angeles on February 20, which was streamed and broadcast live on iHeartMedia mainstream AC, hot AC, and adult hits radio station nationwide; and televised nationally on the AT&T audience network on DIRECTV on March 18.

Turning to Outdoor on slide 6, our key partnerships and initiatives have demonstrated our Outdoor businesses' continued focus on innovation.

As I mentioned earlier our data analytics solution called RADAR allows Americas Outdoor to be integrated into the broader marketing data ecosystem, what we believe gives brands the unique ability to map real world behaviors, consumer habits, and travel patterns against specific Americas Outdoor opportunities.

With this solution advertisers can better navigate our vast and diverse out-of-home media solutions, highlighting the locations and inventory types that are most relevant for their specific objectives.

Using aggregate and anonymous mobile consumer information from our partners, it overlays this data against our out-of-home inventory to create a comprehensive map of how specific audience segments are most effectively and efficiently targeted by Americas Outdoor.

It represents another example of our company's push into programmatic, digital and social.

In addition we expanded our leadership in digital out-of-home media in the Washington DC, metro area by winning the eight year contract that provides state-of-the-art display advertising, with interactive technology at Dulles and Reagan National Airports to reach 41 million travelers annually.

This new relationship further augments Americas Outdoor position as the leading digital out-of-home media provider in the Washington DC metropolitan area. Americas Outdoor's digital portfolio reaches nearly 50% of the Washington DC market, accounting for 8.5 million impressions per week.

At International Outdoor, we continued to develop our innovative marketing solutions and invest in digital displays. In Australia and New Zealand, we’re expanding our digital street furniture network with an additional 365 digital screens and launching our creative ad serving platform, Adsmart.

In addition, we've been awarded a contract for the Asda stores in the UK, including a complete rebuild of Asda's outdoor billboard and poster sites, as well as digital screens powered by our intelligent content management system, Play iQ at up to 300 superstores.

As a result of these initiatives among others, we continue to grow our digital displays worldwide heading almost a thousand digital displays within all of our markets in the first quarter. Now let's review our segment financials; starting with iHeartMedia on slide 7, revenues were up 5.9% in the first quarter.

Excluding political advertising, our revenues increased 4.6%. Our key performance drivers included increases on our core radio business, both broadcast and digital, which include the impact of barter and trade and political advertising revenues, as well as increases in our traffic and weather business.

Our results reflect our growing audiences and success across broadcast radio, digital, social, mobile and events, as well as our enhanced ability to monetize them. We think that all of these have led more and more advertisers to return to radio and to iHeartMedia and to include radio as an important component of their ad campaigns.

We are seeing a growing interest in audio, sound, and radio. As briefly covered earlier, our new political team has been in place less than a year. But in the first quarter, they were able to substantially increase political revenues, although off of a much smaller base, given 2015 was a non-political year.

When you compare the first quarter political revenues for 2016 to 2012; the last presidential election year, 2016 revenue is up over 40%. Of course, it's still early and the first quarter performance is not necessarily indicative of the full year. But we are off to a good start. One of the areas we been investing in is our traffic and weather segments.

Advertisers understand the value of being alongside traffic and weather reports, allowing us to improve rates and sell-through our inventory. The advertising categories with the strongest year-over-year dollar growth included professional services, automotive parts, and home building and improvement, in addition to entertainment and beauty.

We once again outperformed the radio sectors measured by Miller Kaplan. Our outperformance is a testament to the unique value proposition iHeartMedia offers our advertising partners and our unique scale. Expenses were up 3.7%, less than revenue growth, and so improved our operating leverage.

This is due in part to our efforts to maintain our tight operating discipline. The increase in expenses results primarily from higher barter and trade related to our award show, higher programming costs, and higher variable compensation costs related to the increase in revenues. Now let's review our second quarter pacings.

These pacings are just a snapshot in time and certainly do not include everything we do as a company. Our second quarter pacing at iHeartMedia through the end of last week are up 1.7%.

In terms of political advertising revenue, last year we had approximately $5 million of political advertising revenue in the second quarter, and 7 million in the second quarter of 2012. Historically, political spending is weighted towards the second half of the year.

Turning to Americas Outdoor on slide 8; as we have previously discussed, last year we completed an extensive review of business, including determining which markets were strategic markets, where we have a strong presence, and scale.

Through this process, we identified a group of markets that were considered non-strategic to Americas Outdoor, and were able to sell these nine markets for about 600 million at an impressive multiple of 12.5 times OIBDAN. The sale of these non-strategic markets allowed us to realign the business and be more customer focused.

Having sold these nine non-strategic markets, we were able to better leverage the scale of our assets and to react more quickly to our customers, and in the first quarter we were able to deliver a 4.2% increase in revenue.

The revenue increase was driven by higher revenues from digital billboards, due to new deployments at a higher occupancy, as well as greater revenues from higher occupancy of static billboards with both local and national up in the quarter. The Latin America market also grew revenues this quarter.

The top selling categories in the quarter were business services, retail, media, and healthcare and medical. Operating expenses increased 4.1%, due primarily to an increase in variable compensation and variable site lease expenses related to the increase in revenues. OIBDAN was up 4.5%.

As for our pacings which again reflect just one point in time, our second-quarter pacings were up 4.4% as of the end of last week, with strength in digital as well as airports. Please note that this pacing data has been adjusted for the sale of non-strategic markets and is on a comparable basis.

Turning to slide 9, International Outdoor revenues were essentially flat in the first quarter, after adjusting for foreign exchange rates. Strength in Australia, China, France, and Belgium was offset by declines in the UK and Switzerland. The decrease in UK was expected and is attributable to the loss of the London bus contract.

As we mentioned last quarter, our financial discipline will result in our not winning contracts from time-to-time, and this will put near-term pressure on our revenue growth, but we think it's the right economic decision for our bottom line.

Expenses were down 1 million after adjusting for a $10 million impact of foreign exchange, with OIBDAN essentially flat.

The decline in operating expenses is due primarily to low rent expense, resulting from the lower revenue in the UK, primarily offset by higher variable site lease and maintenance expenses in other countries, as well as higher sales force and office renovation costs in the UK.

Our second quarter pacings for Intentional Outdoor were up 4.5%, with some of our largest markets, France, China and Australia showing positive momentum, which is encouraging. Once again pacings are a point in time metric and as you expect, there's an inherent level of volatility week to week.

These pacings reflect the impact of the contract loss in London. A few quick comments on CCIBV; CCIBV's consolidated revenue decreased 12.8 million to 261.1 million in the first quarter of 2016, as compared to the same period in 2015. This includes a $10 million decrease resulting from movements in foreign exchange rates.

CCIBV's operating loss decreased 6.1 million to 14.6 million in the first quarter of 2016, compared to the same period in 2015. On slide 10, we show some of the items that affected year-over-year comparability.

As I mentioned earlier, the results have been adjusted for the impact of the sales of the nine non-strategic Americas Outdoor markets, which were sold in the first quarter.

As you can see from the slide, these markets generate 2.5 million in revenues in the first quarter of 2016, compared to 22.3 million in the first quarter of 2015, and there were 1.8 million of expenses in the first quarter of 2016, compared to 14 million of expenses in the first quarter of 2015.

In addition at iHeartMedia, we generated 11.5 million of political advertising revenue in the quarter compared to 2.6 million last year. Katz, our media representation business included in other, delivered approximately 3.8 million of political advertising revenue in the quarter, compared to only 400,000 last year.

The majority of political ad spending is expected to be in the second half of the year. And lastly, the impact of foreign exchange drove decreases in both revenue and expenses by 15.1 million and 14.3 million respectively in the first quarter of 2016.

Turning to slide 11, capital expenditures for the quarter totaled 57 million, compared to 56 million last year. The majority of the capital is being invested in our international markets, as we continue to expand our digital displays and grow our street furniture business.

Moving to debt on slide 12, we are staying focused on maximizing the value of our business and improving our capital structure and liquidity through capital markets and strategic transactions. We are happy with our broadcast radio station footprint; and in certain situations we have room for adding stations.

However, we are continually evaluating our businesses and asset portfolios, and as we have demonstrated through various sales of non-core assets, we will continue to look for ways to optimize our assets, especially when we can sell non-strategic assets at high multiples, as we did with the sale of the nine non-strategic Americas Outdoor markets, which generated almost $600 million in proceeds in the first quarter.

As of March 31, iHeartMedia Inc. debt was $20.8 billion. As I have mentioned, we continue to focus on growing the top and bottom lines across our business segments and taking disciplined proactive steps to address our capital structure needs, interest expense payments, and liquidity needs.

Back to the slide; our consolidated weighted average cost of debt was 8.5% as of March 31, flat with year-end. We expect cash interest expense for the full year to be 1.8 billion for 2016. As you will see on the next page, as of March 31, 2016 cash totaled approximately $979 million.

Over the next two years, we have manageable debt maturities in 2016 of 197 million, and the maturity of any amounts outstanding under our revolver in 2017. As of March 31, 2016, we had $230 million in borrowings outstanding under our revolver. Now we turn to our balance sheet information and debt ratios on slide 13.

iHeartMedia's consolidated cash totaled approximately 979 million at March 31, and our secured leverage ratio was 6.6 times. Outdoor ended the quarter with 490 million in cash, with its senior leverage ratio of 4.0 times, and its consolidated leverage ratio of 7.6 times.

The largest use of cash for iHeartMedia during the quarter was related to interest payments, which totaled $549 million. Due to the timing of semiannual interest payments, the first and third quarters have a disproportioned amount of interest payments. The large use of cash for Outdoor was 754 million in dividends paid.

Other uses of cash include capital expenditures and funding of working capital needs. The increase in working capital in the quarter was driven in part by a decrease in accrued expenses, partially offset by a decrease in accounts receivable.

The decline in accounts receivable is due to seasonal fluctuations as we generated more revenues in the fourth quarter of 2015, most of which was collected in cash in the first quarter, than we did in Q1 of 2016.

The decrease in accrued expenses is driven in part by annual bonuses, which were paid in the first quarter, as well as [time in] loan interest payments. So before opening up for questions, I want to thank you again for joining us this morning.

We continue to strengthen our position as a leading 21st century multi-platform media and entertainment company and we are pleased with the progress that we have made in building out our capabilities in broadcast, outdoor, digital, mobile, social, and events.

We believe our platform has been enhanced by digital, as opposed to diminished by it as other media companies have been. It’s provided us more opportunities to connect with our consumers on a daily basis.

It's also a truly unique opportunity for advertisers, agencies, and brands to engage with the right audiences at the right time with the right level of cost efficiency like no other major media company can offer.

We believe that both radio and outdoor are underutilized and under-monetized by advertisers, and we are taking aggressive steps to change that since our biggest growth opportunity lies in us more effectively monetizing our existing portfolio of assets. Moreover, we are more mobile than what's traditionally considered to be mobile.

Our social [purpose] makes one of the leading social media companies in the US that doesn't own its own platform, and the concerts, award shows, and other major events we stage have positioned us as one of the top, if not the top, major event companies in the US.

Our investments are paying off, and we are pleased with the growth we have shown this quarter. Now let's open up the line for questions..

[Operator Instructions] and our first question will come from the line of Avi Steiner with JPMorgan. Your line is open. .

The first question, I'm going to try and bucket in different categories. But the first question here on domestic outdoor, the growth at 4% was better than we've seen in that division in a while.

Your pacing, I know it's a point of time also strong, and I'm trying to understand the way for your occupancy comments, if there's any one-time drivers in there, with the Dulles win or the Dallas loss in those numbers. Really I'm trying to get at sustainability.

And then lastly on domestic outdoor, how do we think about margins in that segment this year, given how strong Q1 was on the top line, I would've thought it would have been a little stronger on the EBITDA line..

Look, I really kind of went through when I covered in my highlights; first of all, these numbers are apples-to-apples. So you know we've always have wins and losses, but there's nothing material on either side.

As I tried to point out and go into a little bit of detail on the (inaudible), the revenue is really driven by high revenues from the digital billboards and new deployments and higher occupancy on static bulletins with both local and national up in the quarter.

So I'm really pleased, it’s really kind of across-the-board, and just to go back, we've made a number of management changes and you've all heard me talk about this before, but I can't overemphasize that it's really about execution. We made a number of management changes last year, starting with Scott Walls and his teams.

We then brought in Bob McCuin that you've heard me mention before, to run all of advertising sales. I think we are seeing the benefits on that execution. We see it in the first quarter.

I mentioned the second quarter pacings; again, pacings is just a point in time but for both sides out there, and also when we announced the asset sales in the beginning of this year, the real focus on saying okay, what's not core to the company? What's more valuable in someone else's hands? (inaudible) a good price and we've talked about that, we got 12.5 times approximately on the assets that we announced the sale of.

And I think it's managements’ execution, that focus, and then on cost we are always looking whether it's any of our divisions, to continue to work to optimize our cost position effectiveness.

The fact that margins were up 20 basis points is from both a higher mix of the assets, including digital, that I just articulated, and the ongoing efficiencies which again quite frankly, are a way of life in our company..

And then, staying on the outdoor topic, I noticed in the 10-Q you swapped more assets for additional cash.

Could we talk about the revenue and EBITDA impact around that, if any? Can you confirm that the cash from the swap is not a required for debt repayment? And lastly on that topic, given your healthy cash balance which I think is lower this quarter, maybe what's behind some of those actions. Thanks..

Well, I’ll let Brian field with me as always, answer the question on the cash, but just to make sure that everybody has had the chance to look at the 10-Q that I was talking about, during the first quarter of this year, we entered into an agreement to sell Indianapolis Indiana market for certain assets in Atlanta, Georgia for approximately $41 million in cash.

The transaction is subject to regulatory approval. We expected it to close in 2016. Again, it's really just overall pods that we continue to evaluate our business and asset portfolios, and we continue to demonstrate through various (inaudible), I think we know how to clearly maximize the value of our balance sheet.

In terms of the amount of cash that's on the balance sheet, again, what we're looking to do to say if you can sell non-strategic assets at a good price.

I would suggest that like the 12.5 multiple that we publicly disclosed again, for the assets we've sold this year, it was a good price, more valuable in someone else's hands, and for all of our shareholders and stakeholders it's better value for us to sell those assets and get the cash..

Yes, and to continue on, Avi, this is Brian. To continue on with the remainder of the question, I think it's important to note that while the transaction that Rich referred to is disclosed, it hasn't been consummated, and so we really aren't talking about how that will run through the debt agreements. That's at some point in the future.

Obviously as you look in historically, we've utilized our capacity under the debt agreements to optimize liquidity, and you should assume that is the way we will think about our future asset sales as well.

Continuing on I think to the remainder of your question, it is true cash balances perhaps went down in the first quarter versus pro forma year end cash balances for some of the sales transactions that occurred and that should not be a surprise. Our first and third quarter have a disproportionate amount of debt service.

Our second and fourth quarters have the reciprocal of that. What we've done, kind of in a macro sense is since at the end of the third quarter last year is done a number of things to generate liquidity.

You should assume the company will continue to do those things and put ourselves in a position, where we have resources available to us should the opportunity present itself to be proactive in the (inaudible) markets as we have done in the past.

So, we have to take that in consideration with the context of everything else that's going on, and we have to be focused on preserving liquidity for operating purposes. But I think we continue to operate as we've done in the past, and we've set ourselves up to be opportunistic.

One clarification and then my last question or the clarification, international pacing plus 4.5, is that apples-to-apples in other words, including the change-over in the UK contract and everything that's gone on?.

Again we're consistent, we have been just like you asked the question, we have not, we're always winning contracts, losing contracts, so we haven’t adjusted for the loss of the London contract that you referred to. So the UK pacing is apples-to-apples operating, but we're always winning and losing contracts and we have not factored anything out.

But the largest markets, France, China, Australia, we're really sort of feeling some really great momentum for those markets. So that's relative to the benefit of the pacing, but not adjusting. I probably should point out also on CCLA, you didn't ask this question, but on the pacing of the 4.4, we did adjust for the sale of the non-strategic markets.

So CCLA adjusting for the sale of the non-strategic market that we sold the first quarter this year, and we have strong growth in digital airports, that's what's driving the pacing. CCI not adjusting for the loss of the London contract, a 4.5 driven by France, China, Australia. Just to be clear..

I'm going to end on this, and thank you for the time. I'm sure you can't discuss ongoing mediation, so not going to ask about that.

But as you think about the capital structure is the priority just to address front-end maturities or is it broader? And then is the balance sheet, I guess this is for both of you, but is the balance sheet in any way limiting you from M&A, maybe Rich, relative to some of the radio comments you made, or is it limiting you from doing anything on the outdoor side, given some high profile contract opportunities this year..

So, Avi, I'll take those in reverse orders, and then give Rich the opportunity to kind of come over the top if he'd like.

I think first, we feel like we've been able to manage the company's capital structure and its liquidity position in a way that hasn't inhibited the operation of the business, and I think you can see that our investment in the business continues at levels that are consistent with historical levels, and we continue to invest in the businesses where we think we can get the best return.

In fact I think that part of our success story, over the historical period is related to successful investments that we've made. So I don't see that has been an issue with respect to investing with the business, and I'll let Rich comment on that.

The other part of the question is what is our focus? Our focus is broader than just (inaudible) term maturity.

It is what can we do that best positions the company for growth in the future? You know operationally we continue to have success, but we have a significant amount of debt and there is an opportunity, a window of opportunity where we have the ability to go out and address this issue, whether that's a holistic approach, whether that sequential, and there's a variety of things we have to look at.

Liquidity is one, and addressing near term maturity, particularly at a discount directly affects liquidity. The capturing discount and the ability to right size the debt portion of our capital structure in the face of EBITDA growth is also a priority. So it's difficult to say at any point in time, what the priority is.

I think a lot of it depends on where the opportunities are, and that's really the formula that we have to look at. I know that's probably less satisfactory. But I think you'd be disappointed if I put all my chips in one bucket and told you on this phone call.

So that's really the kind of the way that we look at it and, Rich, I don't know if you had anything to add..

The only thing I'd add, Avi, is that overall I think again, just look at, I'd look at a couple things to answer your question holistically. First of all, we just looked at our operating performance. I think we continue to like on iHeart, you didn't ask we talked about Outdoor a little bit. But we continued to significantly outperform the industry.

We continue to significant, over any period of time last year, year-and-a-half, outperform media companies. \ Obviously you have Facebook and Google, the big digital companies are performing, are growing their revenue quicker than we are (inaudible) if you look in the media industry.

So I would say, if you point to the evidence, I think what we are doing is a good job of harvesting and selling things that are non-core and if you look on stuff that is important to us, I mean just go back over the last couple of years and remember we bought [WLR] in New York, a radio station.

We bought some radio stations up in the northeast, up in Boston, everything. We've made investments to help drive everything is important to us in terms of programmatic, ad serving, data analytics, in terms of where the world is going, which is starting to show up in our performance.

We've made an investment in [Jelly], which enables us to make broadcast look like digital and make it easy to buy for advertisers and advertising agencies, which is absolutely critical to our future. We've made investments in unified social to data dashboards.

So I think, within our capital structure, we have been very good about thinking about ways to make investments that will drive the operating performance of our business that have continued to enable us to serve our advertisers well and outperform the industry..

Our next question comes from the line of Jason Kim with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. .

On the working capital side, it looks like the accounts receivable did normalizes this quarter, which was good to see especially at CCO.

Can you comment a bit on what you're seeing there, and if the improving accounts receivable collections can be sustained for the balance of the year?.

Yes, this from an accounts receivable perspective, it's just timing. We continue to really focus on accounts receivable, it's really just seasonality in terms of timing.

But I promise you no different than folks of operating expenses, no different than folks (inaudible) I think we've done a good job in terms of margin, a good job in terms of capital expenditures. The only fluctuations we've seen is seasonality there, but there's nothing else really to focus on..

Got it, and then for your ‘16 CapEx guidance, I know you have 300 million to $350 million for total company guidance.

How much of that is expected to be at CCO for this year?.

Yeah, I don't think we've broken that out, but I think that if you kind of look at historically, the way that the allocation of our expenditures and the way we allocate capital, I would think look historically to think about the future, I don't think you'll see any major changes in that..

Our next question comes from the line of Marci Ryvicker with Wells Fargo. Your line is open. .

The strength in Outdoor Americas it seems to me that this very company specific, its execution, you're taking back some share. Is there also the chance that the industry in general has gotten better, it's kind of giving you wind at your back? And then is there any update on the LA situation, and then I have one follow-up..

Look I can't, I know in terms of people reporting, so I won't comment on other companies out there. What I can comment on is a little bit when I alluded to before and talked about in my script, and talked about in the opening remarks and we've been talking about for some time. It is about execution, execution, execution and management.

And I think you could almost track to the day we made the changes for the leadership in Clear Channel Outdoor America and throughout the year, and you'd see the results showing up on the bottom line. I think our team is doing a really great job of being out there, of being facing the clients.

I think we are doing a great job of responding [RSPs] very quickly out there, and I think Outdoor is a great product. It's a really great product from an out-of-home experience, with people spending more and more time out of home, but we all know that and continue to deliver values to the advertisers. On LA digital, there's really no update.

I'd say it and we continue to stay away from exactly when we're going to be at resolution on that, other than we continue to work our way through the process of the legalities in LA.

But just as reminder, we still have approximately 50 digital boards around the LA market even with the ones that were taken down, and we've been able to convert about 80. Again, these are not big numbers, but we're not sitting on our hands and standing still.

We've covered about 80 billboards for static (inaudible) and traditional displays, during this period of time also. So we're trying to maximize, to the extent that’s feasible, the opportunities there..

And my one follow-up is on the programmatic platform; is this something that you can open up or will open up to the industry, or is it going to stay something that's very company specific?.

Well first of all you have, from our standpoint, from an iHeart standpoint as you know we’ve been investing in programmatic and audience space, ad buying solutions, and if you think it, that enables radio to be bought and sold as easily and seamlessly as the big digital media companies, Facebook and Google, and so closing the gap with what the companies have to offer.

I'm also happy that we’ve - because it is kind of ordinated data-infused buying to our advertisers across our broadcast stations and iHeartRadio, we now have the ability to provide frictionless programmatic platform for marketers that looks and feel like digital and integrate them seamlessly into their planning and buying systems, and also, for the first time, and then I'll come back to the industry for a second, we're able to sell impression based advertising in a way that's complementary to our digital buying.

So just to be clear, we can do impression based advertising, so if people want to buy impressions, and that's in addition to our premium based inventory. So the ability to do that and although there will be a gradual adoption of programmatic platforms, it will enable us to effectively sell our entire broadcast and digital inventory.

And just as a reminder, about a third of our broadcast audience registers with us for digital. Just also, you probably have all assumed we now have crossed 85 million unique usage for iHeart, for the iHeart app. We're growing faster than any other streaming service out there.

But the importance of crossing 85 million is once we've seen about a third of our broadcast listeners have now registered and about a third of our broadcast listeners register us on digital, and once they register we have all their information.

And no different than the big digital players, we can take that third and all their registered information and extrapolate over our broadcast audience. So long-winded, and to the first part as to why we're so excited about our future in serving our advertising partners.

In terms of the industry, just as a reminder, we have caps which serve the industry. We’ve made an announcement that we'll bring the programmatic to the industry through Expressway from [cast] to enable the programmatic buying across industry and that's being rolled out as we speak..

Our next question comes from the line of Lance Vitanza at CRT. Your line is open. .

I wanted to ask a more general question about radio, the revenue growth impressive. How did your overall markets perform, presumably, you took a lot of share. And then I have a couple of follow-ups related to that..

Certainly we're really pleased, great results; great team effort here, and it is I want to emphasize; we have a great team, great senior management team. Based on Noah Caplan data, I think the total industry was just up about 1%, maybe a little over 1%. So clearly, we outperformed the industry.

I think the reason for the outperform continues to be our multi-platform asset base, which helps drive our growth and it differentiates in the marketplace, and you've seen our track record. It's a sustainable period of time, over the last years that we continue to outperform the market.

That is also contributing, as a reminder and I mentioned this briefly in my remarks, but it's worth repeating. Our reach remains at 93% for all US adults 18 plus and 92% for millenials, and while TV, which used to be the reach medium continues to decline, they were an historic high of 95% of reaching adults.

They are now at 86%, and they are actually at about 75% for millennials. So one in four millennials do not watch advertising supported TV, and so to think about it simply, more adults and more millennials are reached by AM/FM radio than any other medium. Kind of full-stop, period.

If you look to a little more detail the revenue drives in the quarter, spoke about traffic and weather and political. We had strong growth in our top five markets, which I'm very pleased about. Bob and I are both pleased and the management team’s at LA, Chicago, Dallas, New York and San Diego. Events were up.

We've got great strength in the auto, the entertainment, the financial services categories, homebuilding professional services.

So really, really nice strength across the board, and I just previously mentioned to answer the previous question, I think from Marci, that we also crossed 85 million registered users, which is faster than any of the digital music service, even faster than Facebook.

So I think there's no one piece that's contributing to all of the growth, and that's why I continue to emphasize we are a multi-platform asset base, so everything is contributing to the growth..

And then on the EBITDA side on radio, it looks like about 60% of the incremental revenues flowed through to the EBITDA line.

Is that about what we should expect generally going forward?.

I'm not going to comment specifically exactly on margin expansion, other than to tell you that, over any period of time there could be a quarter here or a quarter there.

But over any period of time, we're going to continue to look for margin improvement through tight operating and financial discipline, through rigorous capital and cost allocations, and at the same time we're going to invest, as I highlighted before, on things like [Jell] and Unified Social.

We're going to invest back into the business, where we think it's appropriate, but it's going to be a very, very prudent way. And just as a reminder, we did have about $16 million of revenue in the first quarter on political, I think about $11 million on the iHeart one on this 12, and about $3 million last year in the first quarter.

So we did get the benefit of that because political is a high-margin business..

And then lastly for me, could you talk about how the revenue trends progressed through the quarter, presumably, they decelerated given the pacings, and I know what you think about pacings.

But is that accurate, or what could we say about that?.

I'm not going to comment. I would just - you guys have probably are ready to throw up every time I say this, but I'm not going to keep (inaudible) today, but I just can't overemphasize about that point of pacings as a given point in time.

So I'm not going to comment on any specific months out there, other than to say that we feel really great about our business. We feel bit of like [used] to stay in a little bit longer than the election, that's for sure.

But we feel really great about our business, we feel great about the (inaudible), feel great about all the stuff we're taking on things like that I've been talking about in terms of programmatic. Look the most important thing from us is, and I would it and I've said this before also is that our biggest opportunity is on the radio side.

It continues to be dramatically, with all of our success, we continue to be dramatically under monetized. I talked about (inaudible) being the reach medium. We deliver as you know from all the [Nielsen] data, not our data Nielsen data, an average of six to one ROI, our return on investment.

Simply you give us $1 we give you $6 back, and that just says we have a lot of room to continue to increase our revenue, even irrespective of what our ratings are, and again, our ratings have been up 10%, close to 10% last year on broadcast ratings, roughly close to 30% on digital ratings.

So we've had great rating success, but the most important thing is that we are under monetized, and we need to continue to focus on being better at driving ad revenue based on our reach and based on our consumer engagement..

We are going to take one more call and then that will be it..

And that will be from the line of Aaron Watts with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open. .

Just two quick ones on the radio side; first, Rich you mentioned how you did in political last year, and I think in the last cycle it was strong in the first quarter.

Just any thoughts on what you’re seeing here in the second quarter and maybe expectations in the third and fourth, and then secondly, more bigger picture, you highlighted how out-of-home is where the majority of radio listening occurs, and I think it's fair to say that the cars’ always been a home base for terrestrial radio.

As connected cars become more prevalent, and perhaps open the door a little wider to competing services, how do you see that impacting your business to the positive or negative?.

So couple things, first of all on political as you know, we don't provide specific guidance. We wanted to make sure we shared with you what we actually had recorded in the first quarter. We are very confident in our DC based political team.

We hired just a great guy in political media (inaudible) Kenny Day, a number of months ago, and Kenny has hired a couple team members and they are just doing an outstanding job and I think you're seeing the (inaudible) in the numbers in leveraging data and mobilizing our local sellers to assist the campaign, all the campaigns.

By the way this goes not just the national campaign, this goes to local campaigns, local issues, just to be clear. They're really targeting specific demos.

So we believe that we're positioned to continue to maximize our share of ad spending and we're really pleased, we talked about it last year going into this year that the sophisticated (inaudible) should be built for the election cycle and what they delivered.

Again I'm not going to talk about going forward, but just to give you some perspective, as I mentioned, we had in total about 16 million in the first quarter of this year of political revenue. We were at about 4 million last year in political revenue.

And the first quarter of 2012, if you go back to the last presidential cycle, in the first quarter, we had about 10 million in that first quarter. So hopefully that helps.

And I'm sorry, what was the second question?.

On the connected car..

On the connected car, yes, sorry about that.

Look just as - remember all of the research that we've done, we've done all third-party research, not our research, not like some other people on internally generated research, but all third-party research is that 99% of consumers are comfortable with the current AM/FM generation of the car and 91%, just to be clear, 91% would prefer traditional buttons, dials and buttons in the car, in the car dash.

I think the auto-makers are laser-focused on that. It is by far and away the number one media entertainment option when consumers make a buying decision, is to make sure AM/FM radio. You know, by far out there.

So if anything in this world with lots of choices, we continue to see the foundation of AM/FM radio, consumers engagement, consumers desire to have dials and buttons in the car, that are easy to use as high as it's ever been and we feel great about that.

By the way, the only last thing I would add to that is obviously they will always have the option as you think about a digital option with iHeart. We'll always be in the car also as a digital option, but that doesn't change the initial part of your question on the AM/FM radio and the strength of it based on what consumers want..

Okay, thank you, operator. And this will conclude our first quarter 2016 earnings conference call, and I’m certainly available to answer any questions later on today if anybody would like to call. Thank you..

Thank you..

1-800-475-6701 or 320-365-3844 and enter the access code of 389575. That does conclude your conference call for today. Thank you for your participation and for using AT&T Executive Teleconference Service. You may now disconnect..