Greetings, and welcome to the National CineMedia, Inc. Full-Year and Fourth Quarter 2018 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded.

It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Ms. Katie Scherping, Chief Financial Officer. Thank you. You may begin..

Thanks, Michelle. Good afternoon. I’m joined here in Denver by Cliff Marks, our President and Interim CEO; and Tom Lesinski, our Chairman of the Board.

I’d like to remind our listeners that this conference call contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended.

All statements, other than statements of historical fact communicated during this conference call, may constitute forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties.

Important factors that can cause actual results to differ materially from the company’s expectations are disclosed in the risk factors contained in the company’s filings with the SEC. All forward-looking statements are expressly qualified in their entirety by such factors. Further, our discussion today includes some non-GAAP measures.

In accordance with Regulation G, we have reconciled these amounts back to the closest GAAP basis measurement. These reconciliations can be found at the end of today’s earnings release, which may be found on the Investor Page of our website at www.ncm.com. Now, with that, I’ll turn the call over to Tom..

Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome, everyone. Before I turn the call over to Cliff Marks to discuss our results, I’d like to take a few minutes to welcome – or should I say, welcome back our newest Board Member, Kurt Hall. As announced a few weeks ago, Kurt was unanimously approved by our Board of Directors.

Those of you who’ve been following NCM for years know that Kurt has served as NCM’s President, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board until January of 2016, when he retired to spend more time with his family and pursue his many outdoor interest. He continued to work with NCM as a consultant from January 2016 until January 2018.

After many years as a theatre company executive, Kurt Hall has found NCM and was instrumental in building it from the ground up, taking NCM from a media startup to a mature public company.

He brings an unmatched level of experienced insight, historical perspective and the industry relationships at the table, and I’m pleased that he’s back on the NCM Board.

We are continuing our CEO search to identify a visionary leader, who can capitalize on the strengths of our company and our unique cinema advertising medium and innovate around NCM’s core business to ensure that we’re best positioned for sustainable, profitable growth and value creation for our advertising partners and shareholders alike.

We are actively interviewing candidates for this role, and we believe it’s important to take the necessary time to find the right fit for NCM. While we look for our next CEO, Cliff has been doing a great job in leading our company as Interim CEO and continuing to spearhead our media sales strategy.

Cliff has also intimately been involved with our CEO search and will play an important role to ensure a seamless leadership transition when a new CEO is hired. With that, I’ll turn it over to Cliff for a few remarks on the business before Katie reviews the financial results for the fourth quarter and full-year 2018..

Thanks, Tom, and thanks to everyone for joining us on today’s call. I will be reviewing the company’s fourth quarter and full-year 2018 operating results and highlights. And Katie will then provide a more detailed discussion of our financial performance and our 2019 revenue and adjusted OIBDA guidance.

As always, we will then provide time for questions you may have. Our year began very strong with solid Q1 and Q2, but Q3 saw several clients shifting their spending to Q4. While we couldn’t totally capitalize on this high Q4 demand due to an unusual film slate rating mix, it has set us up strong for 2019.

I’ll now walk you through fourth quarter of 2018. Despite the film mix challenges, demand was strong. Total revenue for the fourth quarter only decreased 2.3% from last year’s fourth quarter, which happen to be the second highest fourth quarter in our history.

Our national sales revenue decrease of 3.7% versus fourth quarter 2017, excluding beverage was related to a higher percentage of the box office being generated by G and PG films like Mary Poppins rather than the PG-13 and R films like last year’s Star Wars, which were in higher demand by our advertising clients.

So while our national sales team did great and we saw a strong demand for our inventory, especially in PG-13 and R categories, we just didn’t have enough impressions to satisfy demand in those ratings.

Also, while attendance was up 3.7%, overall in fourth quarter, a sharp decrease in attendance in the last two weeks of December compounded the unfavorable ratings mix and adjusted in a record $8 million make-good, without which we would have been within the higher-end of our revenue guidance.

Due to the high incremental margins of our national business, the shift of revenue in Q1 2019 contributed to an adjusted fourth quarter OIBDA decrease of 7.7%.

The good news is that, this is only a timing issue, as those makers will benefit our Q1 2019 national revenue, which is currently trending above this year same time last year, which was a record Q1 2018 in advertising revenue.

As a result of all the changes we’ve been making to the right – to right-size our local and regional sales structure, our team has began to turn things around in the fourth quarter, as revenue increased just under 1% versus fourth quarter 2017. Let’s talk about full-year 2018. 2018 reflected a year of progress on several fronts.

Our national advertising business rebounded nicely over 2017, as we made significant strides in growing our national ad categories, including telecom, digital entertainment and online media, military and pharmaceutical.

We also continue to strengthen our ability to provide marketers with digital extensions of our core business as we made our Noovie Digital ecosystem much more robust with the roll out of our augmented reality app, Noovie Arcade and the alpha release of our noovie.com, which I’ll get into more in a minute.

Total revenue for full-year 2018 increased by 3.6%, but an increase in theatre access fees related to higher industry attendance and some one-time operating and administrative costs, resulted in only a small increase in adjusted OIBDA. Katie will discuss these higher costs in more detail later in the call.

Our national advertising sales team had a very strong year overall, as national revenue grew by 5.3% versus 2017, excluding beverage. As the team expanded several key client categories and leverage a strong scatter market that continues to break closer and closer to campaign air dates.

The $15.7 million increase in national advertising revenue was due primarily to a 2.2% increase in national advertising CPMs, excluding beverage and a 3% increase in impressions sold.

The increase in impressions sold was primarily related to a 7.5% increase in network attendance, partially offset by a decrease in national inventory utilization from 118.5% in 2017 to 113.5% in 2018.

The increase in national advertising CPMs was due primarily to an increase in scatter market demand and the completion of more contracts closer to the advertisement air dates, which are typically sold at higher CPS.

We welcomed over 42 national brands to our Noovie pre-show in 2018 from top categories, including financial products and services, hotels and resorts, insurance, pharmaceutical, telecom, software and notably, digital entertainment and online media, which was up over 50% in the last – 50% in the last year and becoming an increasingly important category for us, as these brands are replacing more traditional entertainment media advertisers on the big screen.

We’re also continuing to aggressively participate in the 2018/2019 upfront marketplace. And it’s worth noting that we are already pacing 13% ahead of our 2017/2018 upfront.

This strong upward pacing is due to a fewer, but a larger 2018 scattered market customers placing significant 2019 dollars upfront, as they’ve come to recognize the value of locking up key cinema inventory in advance to align with our marking priorities.

While our 2018 local and regional sales were down 1.9% versus 2017, as mentioned, we finished the year up as the changes we made to our sales team structure and selling strategies began to take hold. We had an 8.7% decrease in total contract volume, partially offset by a 6.2% increase in average contract value.

The decrease in total contract volume was primarily related to the decrease in the number of contracts over $100,000 within the automobile and airline categories compared to the previous years.

We have realigned our regional sales team to continue to build on the success of our National Spot TV strategy, as Spot buyers are increasingly turning to cinema in the Mediaocean and free world systems for media planning and buying to make up for their last [era piece] [ph] due to declining TV ratings.

Also, with a leaner and more focused local sales team now in place and some growth already evident in first quarter, we have turned the corner and are optimistic that both our local and regional business as we head into 2019.

The expansion of our Noovie Digital ecosystem to support our core on-screen business continue to be a bright spot throughout 2018, as nearly 43% of our national and 30% of our local and regional ad buys included a digital component.

This is nearly 12% and 8% increase in our national and regional/local integrated ad buys, respectively, over 2017 and is proof that our digital products are helping to drive our core high-margin on-screen ad business.

These integrated packages continue to be increasingly popular with advertisers and have helped us led several major on-screen buys from advertisers who are looking to engage more directly with our young, hard to reach movie audience throughout their online, mobile and in-theatre movie going experience.

As mentioned earlier in the past, we launched Noovie ARcade, the revolutionary new companion app for Noovie pre-show the lets audiences play big screen interacted augmented reality games on their mobile phones.

The biggest plan in the entertainment industry took advantage of this opportunity as moviegoers nationwide played along with Walt Disney Studios, Wreck-It Ralph in a new Wreck-It Ralph Breaks the Internet game, our first studio collaboration and an industry-first in-theater AI activation.

Noovie ARcade now has been downloaded nearly 2 million times and that figure will continue to grow as we introduce new ARcade games and experiences in 2019.

We also began a soft launch roll out of noovie.com, which will serve as our official Noovie search and discovery platform for movies and games, with more unique and interesting movie content being added everyday. And we’re currently working on a new Noovie Trivia game that will be rolled out in the first-half of 2019.

Trivia [ph] remains one of the top gaming request from our young and games movie audiences according to our research. By having a suite of newly digital owned and operated properties, it allows us to capture unique and valuable first-party movie audience data that will also increase the operating margins of our digital revenue.

And speaking of audiences, we reached an even larger cinema audience in 2018, growing our national theater network footprint over 21,100 screens and 750 million attendees as of the end of year 2018.

We welcome several new affiliates such as Pecan Pie Productions and its independent theaters, Regal Cinemas, Foundation Stone Theaters and West Mall Theatre to America’s Movie Network.

As you may have seen yesterday, we also just renewed our long-term affiliate partnership agreement for Movie Tavern theaters and that has recently been acquired by Marcus leaders. I’m very happy to be working alongside Rolando and his team to continue to bring the Noovie pre-show to these terrific Movie Tavern by Marcus Diamond theaters.

We significantly strengthened our leadership team in 2018, with the addition of Senior Vice President and General Counsel, Sarah K. Hilty; Chief Digital Officer, Rick Butler; and Vice President Digital Ad Sales, Jerry Canning.

2018 was also significant for NCM on the financial side as we prepaid some of our debt for the first time since we became a public company. We intend to continue to opportunistically pay down debt going forward, while maintaining financial flexibility and deliver a sustainable dividend for NCM stockholders.

We also currently have enough net cash available to cover five quarters of dividends in NCMI, with $0.90 per share of cash on hand at the end of 2018, $0.90 per share of cash on hand at the end of 2018. Katie will go more into that detail shortly.

While there were some changes to our leadership and ownership in 2018, we continue to to bring value to our clients and shareholders. It was perhaps no [indiscernible] confidence in the future of our business than demonstrated by Cineworld and Cinemark’s increased investments in NCM this year.

We are pleased to deepen the collaboration with two of our founding members on our future business plans and strategies for continued financial growth, while continuing to work closely with AMC and servicing their cinema advertising needs under our Exhibitor Service Agreement, which has approximately 18 years remaining.

I’m also pleased that our management team stayed focused on growing revenue and adjusted OIBDA and improving our long-term prospects by continuing to increase and diversify our customer base and invest in our digital products to create an important extension of our core on-screen business.

I look forward to 2019 and beyond as I work with Tom and our Board to bring on a new CEO and with our exhibitor partners to continue to drive our strategic vision of leveraging our unique position in the media marketplace as the connector of brands to highly desirable movie audiences throughout their entire moviegoing experience.

And with that, I’ll now turn the call over to Katie to give you more details about our Q4 and full-year operating performance and talk about our 2019 guidance estimates.

Katie?.

one, cash interest expense of approximately $53 million to $54 million; annual scheduled debt principal amortization of $2.7 million; plus any potential additional debt pay down up to $15 million annually; capital expenditures of $15 million to $16 million; and for our non-cash stock comp for Inc.

employees of approximately $3.5 million – $2.5 million to $3 million. These are the components that will allow you to arrive at a projection for available cash at NCM LLC in 2019, which will be paid to the three members of the partnership, Regal Cineworld, Cinemark, and NCM Inc., quarterly based on their ownership at the end of the quarter.

In addition to the available cash distributed to NCM Inc for NCM LLC in consistent with prior years, we project an approximate $5 million to be paid to NCM Inc. from NCM LLC for management fees, plus $1 million of interest earned on NCM Inc.

cash balances reduced by the expected payout of $15 million to $16 million for payments under the tax receivable agreement to our founding members. This will allow you to arrive at the net cash available to fund dividend payments in 2019. That concludes our prepared remarks. And Michelle, I’d like to open the line up for questions..

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Eric Handler with MKM Partners. Please proceed with your question..

Yes. Good afternoon, and thanks for taking my question. Katie, I wonder if we could just talk a little bit about the guidance and let’s just for round number purposes assume revenue of 2% to 5%.

How much of that do you feel will be national versus local or maybe what will be stronger? And then as you think about your national outlook for the year, do you expect it to be driven more by CPMs or utilization?.

So the mix, we don’t really expect to see change materially. So still about 70%, 71% national, 25% – 24%, 25% local/regional and the balance is beverage. From a national perspective, a lot of that depends on the pricing for CPM-wise. Scatter was very strong in 2018. We see a lot more money upfront in 2019. We set our upfront as up a little bit more.

So that will put a little bit of pressure on CPM depending on where the scatter market ends up for the full-year. So on a national basis, I would say, CPM is up a little bit, but it all depends on the mix during the year..

Okay. And then as a follow-up.

As we think about your first quarter, which is normally the slowest quarter of the year, you’ve got $8 million of make-goods coming through, which I imagine should help your utilization quite a bit and maybe leave you with less impressions to sell, is that a fair impression to – is there a fair statement to make?.

I would say, Q1, we always have a lot of inventory, and we’re not worried about being able to both deliver on the make-good, as well as be able to sell into all the available inventory that we want to sell into..

Okay, great. And then one last quick question.

As far as the affiliates are concerned for 2019, are there any plan new affiliates joining the network in the year, or how should we think about that?.

This is Tom. I can talk about that specific question. Typically, we don’t comment on active discussions that we’re having with affiliates. We’re always evaluating new ones. So we don’t want to go on the record to talk about that at this point on this call..

Okay. Thank you..

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Mike Hickey with The Benchmark Company. Please proceed with your question..

Hey, guys, congrats on a quarter and year. Thanks for taking my question. Just to clarify Q1, obviously, you have a solid make-good here. Consensus is a little bit below Q1 2018.

Should we think of Q1 is growing this year over prior year?.

Yes, Mike, we already – where we sit today versus where we were a year ago, we’re trending higher. So we’re really optimistic about Q1 of 2019..

Good. Okay. The – obviously, you have an active CEO search. It sounds like you have a few candidates I’m guessing, maybe we have someone new in the position here short-term. But curious if any visibility on timing? And also sort of wondering, as you hit your numbers in 2018, cash looks good.

We do think that you’re guiding to some growth in 2019 in both sales and OIBDA, just sort of how you reflect on your current strategy if you think that’s working that can sustain profitability, you sort of moving in the right direction and the investments that you made and how that sort of fits into a new CEO coming in, and any sort of visionary investment plan that they may have? Thank you..

This is Tom. The – right now, we’re not going to comment specifically on the timetable that we have for a CEO, but we’re optimistic that we’ll have at least a candidate identified sometime in May.

Having said regarding your strategy question, we’re happy with the current strategy, and we know it’s doing well to drive at a business, both this year and going into next year. Having said that, our expectations is that a new CEO will add his own nuances and his own ideas going forward. So, [at order] [ph] for that matter, sorry. Thank you, Katie..

Okay..

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Jim Goss with Barrington Research. Please proceed with your question..

Thanks. One more thing about the make-goods issue and the development of it in recent quarters.

Were there any particular issues you thought that drove the necessity from make-goods? Was it ad positioning or anything else should point to that created it? And well, maybe first go with that?.

Yes, it’s Cliff, I’ll answer that. The make-good issue was primarily a result of the last two weeks of the year, the box that we had projected didn’t achieve our numbers. So that was really what drove it for the – drove it up to $8 million..

…in addition to the ratings mix..

Yes. For sure, the ratings mix made a big difference. When you lose this – when you have a lot less PG-13 in our content, you have more G and PG, that kind of put us in a little bit of a tougher sales position as well for sure..

And that – this is one time where the make-goods actually did pursue and that you couldn’t make up for – with either better pricing for the other available inventory or pushing it out to the next quarter when you had the available slots, where would it really had an impact?.

That’s true. Just the last two weeks should you know, you don’t have the opportunity to make-good in a year..

Okay. The other thing – you laid out a pretty compelling argument that there shouldn’t be any risk to the dividend, given that your leverage has declined and you have quite a bit of cash on the books. But as Katie was outlining, how you get to the cash available to pay the partners and pay dividends.

I’m just wondering where the – are there any categories that aside from OIBDA, I guess, that she should be at risk or benefit as we’re looking out to give some assurance that you don’t really have a big concern about a dividend cut since, I think that’s very important to investors in the stock?.

So, Jim, even – with the guidelines that I laid out with available cash, if you do the all – the math all the way down, the payout ratio of cash coming in this year to the dividend of $0.68 pays out somewhere an average of about 80% of the total incoming cash flow to NCMI. So I don’t – there’s no risk there.

Ecos is potentially as high as 90% payout is depending on what your mix of those items or those variables that I outlined. But you could be anywhere between 90% and 70% payout, but we feel like it’s probably close to the 80% on average, which is a very comfortable dividend payment at NCMI..

Okay. And for the most part, it seems like you tried to match up what investors and NCMI get relative to what the founding members get.

Is that sort of a conscious decision or kind of something that you try to do?.

Well, we just want to illustrate kind of the cash flow coming from the partnership up to the three founding member – up to the founding members, Regal and Cinemark and then NCMI, so that everybody can do the math equally on whether adjusted OIBDA numbers in our models are coming out.

So that flows all the way through to giving them confidence again that – with that dividend number..

Okay. And then last question, you made a special mention of Kurt’s involvement now at the Board level, which I’m glad to hear of quite frankly also.

Is there anything special you expect him to bring aside from just being a regular working member of the Board?.

I would say that, Kurt brings just an unbelievable wealth of history and experience in the company, both from a financial side and from an affiliate and exhibition side. So he’s going to involved across the company.

But I think you know what his strengths are from all the years of working with them and we’re really happy to have him as one of our leaders on the Board going forward..

All right. Thanks..

Thank you. We have reached the end of our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the call back over to Mr. Marks for any closing remarks..

Thanks, Michelle. We’ve made great progress on our overall strategy in 2018. In the past year, we continued to introduce new Noovie Digital products and to enhance our core business, pay down debt, strengthened our relationship with our exhibitor partners and continue to pave the way for growth for long-term growth into the future.

With the first quarter already looking strong and an exceptional films like coming for the rest of the year, we continue to feel very optimistic about 2019. Thank you for participating in our Q4 and full-year 2018 earnings call, and I’ll see you at the Noovie’s..

Thank you. This concludes today’s teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation, and have a wonderful day..