Nicholas Zangler: Understood. No, we heard it directly from fuboTV yesterday that they want that local content back, but understood there. And then just a second question here. It’s great to hear auto continue to come back, obviously, a huge vertical for you guys. Curious if you could size that up a bit. I’m wondering how auto is performing when you look back relative to those pre-COVID levels. Are we bearing full normalization here? Or are there still significant room to run on auto getting back to maybe a more normalized rate in that 2019 pre-COVID era?
Perry Sook: Yes, we are not back to 2019 levels yet. We are seeing some sustained healthy increases off of that lower base. I think we have another couple of years of these kinds of increases before we begin to approach 2019 levels, both from a national SAAR as well as unit spending. But it is certainly a tailwind in core advertising revenue that auto is up and up double-digits, and we see that continuing throughout the year.
Nicholas Zangler: So basically, auto under — the way you’re describing it. Auto is likely a multi-year tailwind as we continue to push to normalization, which would require SAAR levels back in that $17-ish million — or million unit range bag in pre-COVID era?
Perry Sook: Yes. We see it as a multiple year tailwind for our company, certainly.
Nicholas Zangler: Got it. Thanks so much guys.
Operator: Our next question comes from Jim Goss with Barrington Research.
Jim Goss: Thank you. Your comments about rate of drawing attention to the CW. Could you talk a little bit about how else you are going to try to navigate that process of changing the content and publicizing the changes in the content to attract the desired audience since that transition could pause its own challenges.
Perry Sook: Sure. Well, I don’t think because other networks might be listening. We want to necessarily put our playbook out there, but I think you’ll see as we move towards the upfront level and the programming schedule that will be displayed and deployed for the fall. I think you’ll see some higher profile programming there, certainly in the unscripted than you have seen historically. Dennis Miller and Brad Schwartz and their teams are hard at work putting that together. They’re fielding tons of pitches. We’ve signed some things. We haven’t announced yet that I think will be of interest. And so I think it’s an iterative process. It’s a gradual process, but I think you’ll see just generally less of a reliance on scripted, although we’re not going to totally abandon the genre.
But more reliance on unscripted, but a higher quality of unscripted, a higher profile, something that’s maybe a little bit more noisy that will get some attention and get some eyeballs. And we’ll continue to look for additional sports opportunities that may or may not be on weekend afternoons may bleed into prime time upon occasion. I mean, we wouldn’t rule any of it out. And we know that from everyone we talk to, people understand the power of broadcast and what broadcast has that no one else has, which is superior reach. And so we’re interested and quite frankly, very pleased with the reception we’ve had in the marketplace that there may be another voice out there, another national opportunity for distribution over the air and through the broadcast model.
And people are enthusiastic about engaging in those conversations.
Jim Goss: Okay. Thanks Perry. And the one other one with NewsNation. It seems like you’re pretty much through with the reshaping process there. I wondered what the next steps are. And I assume you — the initial bogey was to basically do better than we were with off-network sitcoms. Now you probably want to raise your sights in terms of the margins and the profitability you can generate with that station or the network. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit, too?
