OUTFRONT Media Inc. Citi’s 2026 Global TMT Conference

Matt, thanks for coming. Thanks for having me, and I apologize for those expecting Nick Brien.

You are stuck with just with me. He is out sick today. Had a tough weekend. All right.

What is happening? I think it's a number of things, and we've observed the same thing.

We've been not as surprised as you are. We think we're impacting some. Some of it is, we saw in the first quarter, the market is coming toward out-of-home. You saw all three public companies report good numbers, comparable to each other, comparable to our expectations. In the second quarter, we think we outperformed and distinguished ourselves. There was some help from World Cup, certainly. I think for us, I can't tell you what the other guys are doing. We're putting a lot more focus on how we sell, what we sell. We've talked about it probably, I would think probably everyone in this room. We've changed over our management, so we have a lot more focus on the digital ecosystem.

We're pushing price more both in transit and in billboard. We're spending more time focused on programmatic. I'm sure we'll talk about that in a little bit. The industry is getting more vocal about itself. Look at us. We're not just accepting the historical trend. We're talking about competing not just with each other, but outside of out-of-home. For years it's been the cheapest CPM, which imperfect metric, but still a fact, and that gives us, I think, a runway which we're taking advantage of now and probably into the next few years, to catch up and on a good value. A lot of things are happening all at once. We think we're contributing and frankly, Nick Brien's loud voice, both within the industry and outside, I think is getting a lot of people to take notice.

This kind of move toward IRL, in real life, maybe a backlash to AI and other online media. That they want to take something, they want to see something that they can't really touch it because it's pretty high up. But they can take their picture in front of it. They can point to it. They can see it as a copy of something that they've seen someplace else.

Right. It is real, and we are benefiting from that.

We are pushing that. In addition, we are spending more time on what we call experiential. Some temporary things that we are bringing out. Again, you can touch them. Right now in Duffy Square, we have a kiosk that you can actually touch for Dancing with the Stars. We had something similar for Game of Thrones back in Times Square. So it is much more in real life than we have been in the past. That, for us, that is not driving as much revenue or earnings as we would like it, but it is driving a lot of discussion, a lot of marketing. People taking notice again at our media and say, "Oh, we can do some interesting things." I think people are coming back to that.

Look, it is certainly meaningful. Whether it is AI, retail media networks, anyone with audience. We have had calls from retailers and others. "Can you help us sell advertising?" Things like that. Everyone thinks they can take dollars out of the U.S. media market. Media inflation is about 5% a year every year for a while. So it cannot feed everybody.