Cameron Mansson-Perrone: Thanks. Morning, guys. First off, just as we think about the mix of GOV across categories for Vivid, obviously there’s a lot of moving parts to this year with the business integration, but I’d love to know, looking forward to 2025 and beyond, just how do you guys think about where that mix evolves over time and which verticals in your mind are the stronger, more attractive growth vectors long-term for Vivid, whether that’s from a GOV growth perspective or better worth take-rate opportunity perspective, we just love to hear your thoughts on kind of how you think about that medium-long term. And then Larry, following up on your comments around the kind of expectation for margin improvement over time, just curious also how you guys think about that strategically and why 50 basis points is maybe the right cadence or if it’s not the 50 basis points necessarily, because I’m sure that you’re not running it long-term for any specific target necessarily, and the competitive environment has a lot to do with this, but just how you think about the trade-offs in terms of the margin trajectory over time.
We’d love to hear. Thanks, guys.
Larry Fey: Yes, thanks, Cameron. Sorry about the segment. Generally, we have come to the belief that the secular trends are probably the most robust in concerts in particular, and driving that as you’ve got really robust demand dynamics, you don’t have the same capacity constraints that you have in sports. So if you were to pick on the major professional leagues, baseball, football, hockey, basketball, in most years it’s the same teams playing in the same stadiums on the same schedule, with the same playoff opportunity, and growth will typically come from price and then the episodic expansion of a playoff series, insertion of the season tournament, right, and then NFL, they’re talking about week 18 or an 18th game, but those types of abilities that drive the number of events are a bit more limited within the existing major sports.
Whereas in concerts, many venues, especially the largest venues, are well short of 100% capacity utilization in our Chicago example, where I drive by Soldier Field, 65,000-person stadium, and I think it’s full 20 days a year. So the opportunity for artists to trade up, and you can extend that across the United Center and a number of the other large stadiums, is much more robust in concerts, which I think underpins a nice secular growth tailwind. We touched on some of the secondary sports that have really bolstered the existing pillars, that I think helps the sports growth rate, but even with that, I point to the fundamental trends underpinning concerts is probably a bit more robust. The last piece, there’s not dramatic differences in take-rates.
There’s not dramatic differences in repeat rates across the categories, but they’re not identical, right? You can imagine someone who goes to baseball games and there’s just so many games in a year, the proclivity to repeat is probably slightly higher than when you see Taylor Swift and Jeff come back into your city for five years. And so you see that span of the categories, so slightly different take rates, slightly different repeat rates, perhaps an opportunity over time as we continue driving engagement, driving platform comfort, that we can shift concert behavior to look a little bit more like sports, but that’s a very long-term opportunity. Then shifting to the margins, it’s always a little bit of a balance. We’re speaking in aggregate at the P&L and what we’re hoping that some of the series of micro-decisions will roll up too year-after-year, but ultimately underpinning that when you decompose those margin commentaries is a series of risk-reward and ROI evaluations across innumerable opportunities.
And so it’s properly calibrating where you want to draw the line of what you’re saying yes to, what you’re saying no to, with the background music being that we’ve knowingly made some pretty significant investments into some loyalty and brand initiatives and have committed to driving leverage against those. And I think that impacts kind of the marginal decision to make sure that we’re adhering to that overall ROI profile and ensuring that we’re delivering proper returns on the investments we’ve made.
Cameron Mansson-Perrone: Got it. Helpful color. Thanks, Larry.
Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Thomas Forte with Maxim Group. Your line is now open.
Thomas Forte: Great. Thanks for taking my question and congrats in the quarter. I joined late, so I apologize if someone asked something like this earlier in the queue. In the earnings release you indicated you’re confident in your ability to grow top and bottom line by double digits for the long-term. First, are those organic growth rates or reflective of assumptions on future strategic M&A? And then second, while we’re on that topic, can you talk about your current capital allocation priorities between investing in the existing business, strategic M&A, and buyback?
Larry Fey: Yes, thanks, Tom. Starting with the latter on capital allocation, I think you’ve hit on the three things that we’d like to invest in. Certainly everything about investment into the business itself, organic investments, if you will. We generate a lot of profitability. We generate a lot of cash flow. I don’t think we’ve in any way deprived the business of investments. And so somewhat tying into the prior comments I just made. We see a lot of opportunities. We say yes to a number. We say no to more. But we’re always evaluating those through a risk reward and ROI framework and have not ever come to a point where we said no to things that we felt like were the right long-term answer in favor of short-term performance. And so then as we do generate that profitability and cash flow, it begs the question, right?
We’ve got a strong balance sheet as we continue to generate cash. What do we do with it? And the two highest investment pieces that we see have been, if you can find, strategic and accretive acquisitions, we should pursue those. If we can buy ourselves and attract the prices, we should pursue that. Now both of those are somewhat outside of our control, right? The opportunities that come down the pipeline are beyond what we can influence. So we evaluate what is available at any point in time. And then similarly, we don’t control where our shares trade. I think we’ve indicated with our share of purchase initiatives that we think currently it’s a particularly attractive time for us to be reinvesting in ourselves. And that will be and hasn’t and will remain the bar for acquisitions, right?
They need to stand alone on an absolute but also on a relative return basis. So we’ll continue to do that on the double-digit growth profile. I think because of that episodic nature of M&A, we can’t and won’t build that into our base case growth plans. If they do come along, right, they can either fill in or add to those targets. But we wouldn’t build that into a base case.
