comScore, Inc. Common Stock 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Please go ahead. Before we begin our prepared remarks, I would like to remind all of you that the following discussion contains forward-looking statements.

These forward-looking statements include comments about our plans, expectations, and prospects, and are based on our view as of today, August 12, 2026. Our actual results in future periods may differ materially from those currently expected because of a number of risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties include those outlined in our 10-K, 10-Q, and other filings with the SEC, which you can find on our website or at www.sec.gov. We disclaim any duty or obligation to update our forward-looking statements to reflect new information after today's call. Please note that we will be referring to slides on this call, which are available on our website, www.comscore.com, under investor relations, events, and presentations. I will now turn the call over to Comscore's Chief Executive Officer, Matt McLaughlin.

Matt? Thank you, Kevin, and thank you, everyone, for joining us this afternoon.

We closed the quarter in a far better structural position than we began, highlighted by the elimination of $40 million in long-term debt, which freed up roughly $7 million in related annual interest and principal payments. These critical actions were made possible through the sale of our Movies business in late May, and in turn provide us with improved financial flexibility that allows us to refocus on our core strengths to drive growth. Since joining as CEO in June, I have spent significant time evaluating our business, our product portfolio, and our organizational structure. Our Q2 performance, with revenue of $79 million and adjusted EBITDA of $1.3 million, made clear that we need to make change with urgency. Comscore has tremendous assets, longstanding client relationships, and real value in the market.

We are not yet organized or operating in the way required to fully leverage that value. Simply put, we must do better. That is why yesterday we announced our new ROI strategy and operating model, a plan to realign the business, optimize how we operate, and invest in future growth. Before we can move forward, we need to be clear about where Comscore is strong, where we are underperforming, and where we have the greatest opportunity to create value. Our strengths are real. Unique data assets and intelligence algorithms, client relationships built over decades, and a trusted position as an independent measurement partner across channels. The opportunity is also concrete.

Expanding our activation footprint across enterprise buying platforms, strengthening our publisher and advertiser digital intelligence products with AI and creator metrics, and capitalizing on the strength of our local TV product to win market share are all clear dimensions where we can grow. At the same time, we need to acknowledge the issues that have held us back. Our cost structure does not match the realities of the business today. Established business lines face secular pressure as consumer media consumption changes. Newer products have not yet achieved the scale we need, and our organizational alignment has eliminated our ability to capitalize on the many strengths we already have. The issue is not effort. The issue is focus, accountability, scalability, and investment capacity. Those internal challenges are being compounded by a media market that is changing quickly.

Linear TV remains a critical foundation while consumer behavior evolves across streaming, digital, and other environments. AI is lowering barriers to entry and changing how intent is expressed and how content is consumed. Client consolidation and platform-owned measurement are increasing the pressure on the way we've historically operated. Collectively, these dynamics make urgency important, but they also increase the value of an independent company that can help customer understand audiences, content, and advertising exposure across a complex ecosystem. In my first 2 months as CEO, I spent significant time with leaders across the company to understand how we were operating. As we looked across the business, a clear pattern emerged, one that was less about any single decision and had more to do with the cumulative effect of how business challenges were being addressed.

The operating model was built for a business larger than the one we currently operate, and the market backdrop adds to it. Our largest fixed data expense supports a linear TV business facing well-understood secular pressure. So our biggest non-personnel cost sits against our most challenged revenue. The operating pattern that emerged to address these challenges in the current period was to trim expenses or prioritize near-term revenue opportunities. Both worked in the moment, but neither mechanism produced positive compounding impact. Pursuing revenue broadly rather than strategically spread our capacity across many complex opportunities, markets, and products with limited opportunity to scale. Trimming expenses to protect the current operating cycle reduced investments that would improve our long-term outlook. Each cycle closed the immediate gap, but it left Comscore with more complexity and less capacity to grow, which brought the gap back around in a future cycle.

The most encouraging part is that this pattern doesn't impact our core strengths. Our data assets, our client relationships, and our position in the measurement market remains genuinely strong. This is an operating model issue, and that's something we can address and is exactly what the strategic realignment is built around. As we move through the second half of 2026, we need to change the definition of success at Comscore. We are not going to try to capture every opportunity simply because it is available to us. Even good opportunities will compete for resources. We need a lower, more flexible cost base, clearer accountability, simpler internal and external operations, a stronger product development mindset, and a disciplined approach to reallocating investment toward the areas that can create durable long-term value.

As you saw in our press release yesterday, we are unveiling our ROI strategy to address the issues of the past, capitalize on our strengths, and rebuild Comscore for long-term growth. Our strategy moving forward is centered on three principles. Realign the business around a more flexible cost base, clearer accountability, and a culture focused on delivering commercial success. Optimize how we operate by streamlining legacy activities, improving economics, and shifting towards scalable product development. Invest in future growth by directing capacity toward the largest opportunities that can drive long-term success. These changes are not only about organizational structure. They are about how we make decisions, how we prioritize opportunities, and how we allocate scarce resources. Going forward, good ideas will still need to compete for those resources.

Our mindset has to change from, "Can we do this to generate revenue?" to "Should we do this as part of a strategy to create long-term success?" This will be our new operating model. First, we must realign the business around a lower and more flexible cost base, clearer accountability, and a culture focused on execution. Our cost structure is not aligned with the business we are today or the business we need to become. We have taken difficult but necessary steps, including recent headcount reductions, and are pursuing additional initiatives to reduce complexity, improve efficiency, and rationalize our international commercial footprint. As we look forward, we need to strengthen our operating culture around efficiency, urgency, accountability, and ownership. We need teams to move together rather than optimizing only within their individual functions. This is not about asking fewer people to do the same work.

It's about changing what work earns resources and how the organization works together to create value. That requires clearer organizational focus and accountability. We need better portfolio discipline, a stronger product-led strategy, and clearer commercial accountability in order to deliver customer value and operational sustainability. Revenue matters, but revenue alone is not enough. The most successful opportunities will create long-term value for customers and for Comscore and our investors over time. The next phase of our plan is to optimize the organization by simplifying how we operate internally and externally and by adopting a more strategic product development mindset. We've spent many years building our reputation in technology and linear TV measurement, and it remains an important channel for customers. Every day, we gain more insights about its intersection with digital exposure.

We continue to strongly believe in our local TV opportunity, but the market is under pressure, and we must bring our costs to deliver TV services in line with that reality. That means streamlining legacy business costs, aligning data costs with current business value and strategic opportunity, and sunsetting expensive and underused features. It also means enhancing our profitability profile in those legacy businesses by improving pricing and packaging so the economics of what we deliver are sustainable. As we move forward, we will set new value standards for contracting, customization, and servicing, and scale through improved enablement efficiencies. Beyond enhancing our traditional activities, we also need to reset how we develop products. Historically, we have too often built bespoke or difficult-to-replicate solutions that have solved a specific problem for an individual use case but did not scale across customers. Going forward, the standard is disciplined excellence.