The E.W. Scripps Company (NASDAQ:SSP) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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The season drew in two million new viewers to ION a significant expansion of the audience. And as I said in my remarks 65% of the revenue we generated during that season was from new description advertisers. So we would expect to look again with discipline for additional rights opportunities on the national side as well consistent with the brand we’re building for ION, and we hope to have more to say about that in the near future.

Dan Kurnos: Got it. That’s super helpful. And then just on the CTV stuff. I mean, at least I really appreciate the incremental color. Maybe you can just give us some more granularity on just how you plan on achieving the let’s call it, 30% ex-fund setting growth next year and just what some of the drivers are there. I don’t know if that’s encompassing some of the aforementioned sports rights expectations or if that’s just simply figuring out the right way to go to market with expanded products and better lineup that you guys have?

Lisa Knutson: All of the above Dan. You just covered it. We’re seeing both, organic growth in our CTV revenue in 2024. We expect to see it — and we also as I mentioned in my prepared remarks had laid in a nice foundation from an upfront perspective in CTV, I think with growth of 60% year-over-year in terms of what we laid in. We also are benefiting continued launching of new fast channels. I think we mentioned maybe even last quarter that we were launching two new FAST networks, Laff More, which now completes our ability to have each of our networks with the exception of DeFi carried on FAST. So Laff More is now available on FAST. And we took our IP that we own related to Core TV and created a whole new SaaS channel called Core TV Legendary Trials and we’re really utilizing that asset of IP that we’ve owned for quite some time and creating value there.

So we’ve launched those two here in the last quarter we’ll continue to see some launches over this quarter and into next year. And then we are also launching on some large platforms in that guide includes in the early part of 2024.

Dan Kurnos: Got it. Really appreciate that. And just one housekeeping Jason, this may be better off line but I think you have another synergy tranche next year from the spectrum side of the ION acquisition is there any way to size that?

Jason Combs: Yeah. We had — when we initially announced the ION acquisition we talked about sort of that cadence and it was in the $15 million to $20 million range incrementally next year tied to really one big contract that’s coming up.

Dan Kurnos: Perfect. All right. Thanks very much and nice results in the quarter guys.

Jason Combs: Thanks Dan.

Operator: Thank you. And next we go on to the line for Steven Cahall Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Steven Cahall: Yeah. Thank you. So Lisa, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about just the Q4 guide for networks. It’s a little bit worse than what you did in Q3. Q3 came in a little better than what you had expected. So just trying to understand, if the market has gotten worse you’re trying to be a little bit conservative. I know you talked a bit about CTV as well. So just any more color you can provide there. And then more broadly, as more sports come on to the local side how do you see the opportunity for moving more of ION’s delivery to like across ad sales platform where you’re using both local and ION together in the sales process to maybe deleverage yourself from direct response a little bit overtime?

And then Adam, so I know you all are very excited about Tableau. Will you be sending that for sell-side analyst for trial? And then more seriously wondering what kind of marketing dollars you might be looking to put into that to get shelf space or promoted in some of the key retail channels overtime? Because it seems like free TV is compelling but it’s also pretty misunderstood or unknown by a lot of the population. Thank you.

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