Before we begin, let me remind everyone that this call will include certain statements that constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. This includes remarks about future expectations, beliefs, estimates, plans, and prospects. In particular, the company's statements about projected results for 2024 are forward-looking statements. Such statements are subject to a variety of risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated or implied by such statements. For a discussion of these risks, uncertainties and other factors, please refer to the company's SEC filings, including its most recently filed periodic reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q as well as the company's earnings release, all of which can be found on the company's Investor Relations website. The company does not undertake any duty to update such forward-looking statements. Additionally, during today's call, management will discuss non-GAAP measures, which it believes can be useful in evaluating the company's performance. The presentation of this additional information should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for results prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. The reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures can be found in the company's earnings release, which is available on the company's Investor Relations website. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded, and the replay of this call will be available on the Investors section of the company's website. Hervé Sedky: Thank you, Eric and good morning, everyone. This is Hervé Sedky. It's good to be with you and to discuss our third quarter results. I'll start with a brief review of our performance and then give an overview of our strategy. David Doft, our CFO, will then provide more detail on our financials. We've spoken often…

Thank you Hervé, and good morning. I will start with a financial overview of the most recent quarter and then discuss capital allocation as well as our guidance. For the third quarter, total revenue was $72.6 million compared to $72.5 million in the prior year quarter. This was primarily driven by $4.2 million in revenue from acquisitions as well as scheduling adjustments of $4.2 million. These gains were offset by $5 million in discontinued event revenue that was not contributing to profitability as part of our portfolio optimization strategy and organic decline of $3.3 million. Organic revenue, which takes into account the impact of acquisitions, scheduling adjustments, and discontinued events, declined 5.3% in the third quarter to $58.7 million as compared to $62 million in the prior year quarter. Besides the items Hervé reviewed, growth in the quarter was also impacted by construction at one of the venues [Technical Difficulty] where we hold large events, which has temporarily caused disruption for a small number of events in the short-term. Year-to-date, organic revenue was up 4.8% as compared to the same period last year. Third quarter adjusted EBITDA, excluding insurance proceeds, grew 56.3% or $4.5 million to $12.5 million versus the prior quarter. This equates to an adjusted EBITDA margin of approximately 17.2%. As Hervé discussed, we conducted a thorough review of our entire event catalog as part of a proactive review of our nearly 150 show portfolio. As a result, we removed 20 unprofitable events this year. For the events that were discontinued, there was some positive contribution at the event level, which means we're in the process of reducing overhead related to those changes and we expect the full benefits should be seen in 2025. Turning to expenses, third quarter SG&A was $40.8 million versus $41.6 million in the…

[Operator Instructions]. Your first question comes from the line of Barton Crockett with Rosenblatt. Please go ahead.

Okay, thanks for taking the question. I guess, a couple of things. One, I was wondering if you could explain a little bit more about why your outlook for EBITDA is reduced if so much of this is really tied to canceling unprofitable shows and I think you were kind of getting at it with the event level and other expenses but if you could kind of elaborate on that a little bit more, just would help me kind of understand the guidance? Hervé Sedky: So there's really three components here, Barton and so one of them is the cancellation of events. And ultimately, many of these decisions, given we're sitting here in October, were made later in the year, but a lot of the SG&A related to those events was already spent this year. And so by not having the events and the related contribution margin as modest as many of these were, we're not generating the money to fund SG&A we've already burned. And so as we adjust the SG&A, which is ongoing and will be done prior to entering next year, we'll be able to realize the full benefit on a bottom-line basis in 2025. So it's really a timing difference around when events were canceled and when money has been spent. But on an ongoing basis, this we expect to be beneficial to us in absolute dollars and surely margin because of that. The second is, there was real softness in the Content business. That is a business that has become volatile over the last two to three years in a difficult ad market with shorter term decision-making by advertisers that has made it a little more difficult for us to forecast admittedly. And so there is some bottom-line impact from that, as we mentioned in the call, a low-to-mid single-digit $1 million impact versus our prior expectations. We took down our expectations on a percent basis fairly meaningfully for that business. The third, and it is a much smaller one. Admittedly, we didn't emphasize it a lot in the financial discussion, but the hurricane did cause -- in Florida did cause a small event to be canceled. It's hitting us about $1 million. Ultimately, we'll recover that in insurance, we believe. And there's nothing we've seen at this point to make us believe we won't. But it's unclear when that money is going to come as we've learned in the past around insurance recoveries and so we've just stripped that out of our expectation entirely.

Okay. And in terms of the Content, is that revenue largely come out of EBITDA, those low-to-mid single-digit millions? Hervé Sedky: It does at this point. Digital media is a high contribution margin business. Again, given the timing, it's late in the year. And so it's a bit hard to get the cost basis adjusted in time to benefit this year. And so there is a high flow-through in the short-term of that shortfall versus what we thought.

Okay. So second question I'm wondering about is the commentary you've offered that the pacings look good for 2025. Is there anything different that you see now or that you know now that should give us any different level of confidence in what you see for 2025 relative to what you saw when you were starting 2024, I know you said pacings are better, but things -- but is there anything in terms of forward reservations, the fact that this is driven by some event cancellations or is that just the nature of the beast, I mean, it can look good and it can still change a few months later? Hervé Sedky: So pacings are -- they build over time. And so when we're looking into the first half and that -- our comment is around the first half of 2025 because that's where we have all events in market and have been in market for some time and have high visibility, where in the back half, we have a little less visibility right now. As we move through the next few months and when we give our next update on the year-end results, we'll have more visibility on the back half of the year than we do today. So we're not making a comment on the back half of the year. And as a reminder, we have talked extensively in the past about our mix quarter-to-quarter of our business. And it is true that our poorer performers are more concentrated in the second and third quarter. And so we do have some time before we can make a call in the back half next year. However, in the first half next year, what's different is that the pacing strength, it's not only higher as a percent of growth versus where we sat at this point last year, on this day last year, right, because we track this every day. It's also more broad-based. There are more events outperforming in their pacing for next year than there were at this point last year. And for us, when we talked about portfolio optimization and portfolio mix and the number of events we run across a number of sectors, that's a really good sign. And you're right, we are also eliminating underperformers. We are eliminating events that we don't believe have a path to be growth assets, to be profitable assets that were part of the long tail of Emerald and will better allow us to focus our resources on the strong brands to drive better financial performance.

Okay. And then switching gears a little bit. I was just wanting to make sure I understand, there's been some press releases around Blockchain Futurist where suggesting an acquisition, which I'm just not clear that that's exactly what's happened. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you're doing with that event, which is obviously popular in Canada and I think expanding to Miami, what is your engagement there?

I'll start and then I'll turn it to Hervé. There's a nuance that I think is also important as we think about portfolio optimization is, we've talked a lot about investing in new launches in our Xcelerator unit. There's been a slight shift in thinking where if we can identify emerging assets that are a couple of years in and kind of do more of an acquihire type and bring them into the portfolio, we can accelerate launch activity in a way where it doesn't burn as much on the bottom-line because we recognize that we've invested quite a bit in EBITDA losses the last couple of years in launches. And so if we can minimize launches and accelerate path to market by finding the right emerging brands, we would do that. And so we had a launch in the blockchain area. This supplements what we were already doing and accelerates it in a way where we expect to eliminate the burn of that launch and have it be a contributor faster with a more favorable growth trajectory. Hervé Sedky: And the only thing I'll add is managed by the Xcelerator team and we continued to invest and push the team to grow. And to your point, there will be a launch in Miami that has been announced. And again, the Xcelerator team, which is our launch team, is investing and pushing that launch. So it is part of our -- to David's point, our launch strategy. This just fuels and accelerates our launches.

Okay, alright, thank you guys. Hervé Sedky: Sure.

Your next question comes from the line of Derek Greenberg with Maxim Group. Please go ahead.

Hey guys, thanks for taking my questions. To start, could you just give a little bit more color in terms of the profile of the events that were discontinued and why you think they were underperforming? Hervé Sedky: I'll cover that. We are not going to get into the detail of the launches that were discontinued because largely the -- they are adjacency to existing brands. So just to give you a little bit of color, largely -- not all, but largely the brands that were discontinued were added brands that were either geo extensions, so brands that were extended in other cities or brands that were just extended from existing brands. And they just were not -- they didn't have the uptake or didn't serve the customers in the way that the brands initially thought they were. And as such, we -- they weren't really driving the returns to the customers or to us that we were expecting. The large one that I will call out that didn't meet -- that doesn't fit this profile is NBA Con. One, it's more -- it's the largest one in the group and it doesn't meet the profile that I just described. But other than that, we're not going to go through the detail of the list of the brands that we've discontinued. Hopefully, that gives you the color that you're looking for.

Yes, that's definitely helpful, thank you. And then can you just comment on how the business is tracking relative to pre-pandemic and some of the steps that could make it get back to full performance there? Hervé Sedky: So pre-pandemic is, at this point, a very long time ago, and our business looks very different. So it's not really that relevant for many of our parts of our portfolio, especially as we shift the mix of what we're executing on. Per the discontinued events comments, there's clearly some events that were -- frankly, they were underperformers before the pandemic. And after the pandemic, they're still underperformers. And while stronger brands have bounced back and many, many, many of our brands across the portfolio are exceeding pre-pandemic levels, this group is a big part of the group that hasn't been. There are still a small number that still have not gotten back and each industry has its own issue. Each industry that we have our events have their own dynamics of what's going on and we continue to work to drive growth and more growth out of those assets.

Got it. And then in terms of getting international to return and driving that side of the business, I was just wondering, how you're progressing there? Hervé Sedky: How we're progressing in terms of international? So as we've shared in the past, we've invested in an international sales team. So we've invested in that because we said that we were underweight in terms of Emerald's international penetration. That takes a bit of time in terms of really building the international network, but the network is built. We have over 50 sales agents now around the world. I forget the exact number, but it's north of 50 sales agents that are representing Emerald brands around the world. And we are starting to see some activity from -- and diverse activity from more countries around the world. But it will take some time for us to see the full impact of that investments, but we expect to see that over the coming few years. Now we do see -- we have a team that just came back from China and we do expect some headwinds from China. I think some of it will depend on the outcome of the election next week, but we're watching that closely. But we are hearing from China that they're watching that closely and it's -- while it's a small part of total Emerald revenues, it's a large part of the international revenue. And so we are taking active steps to diversify our international revenues from China as we speak.

Okay, got it. And then in terms of the hosted buyer event that was impacted by the hurricane, is that something you plan on still trying to host this year or is it just canceled until next year? Hervé Sedky: No. We are -- we've canceled it. We've canceled the event altogether for this year.

Okay. Got it. And then my last question would just be how you're progressing with integrating and using AI across the business? Hervé Sedky: So that's a good question. That's -- it's work in progress. AI for us is a hot topic and we have a number of tests around the company. They're largely around internal use. For instance, our marketing teams are using it for e-mail copy and for headlines and landing page copy and some of those types of things. But AI can really help scale our personalization efforts in marketing and more quickly and effectively and efficiently help improve some of the conversion rates that we see from our marketing team. So we really think that, from an internal use, it will help on the marketing side and we're testing a number of initiatives and we'll continue to test use of AI internally and we plan to scale that as we monitor the outcome of these tests.

Okay, great. Thanks for taking my questions.

I will now turn the call back over to Hervé Sedky for closing remarks. Please go ahead. Hervé Sedky: Thank you very much. Well, I wanted to thank you all for joining the call. Over the course of the last few years, we've talked a lot about our three pillars of growth, which are portfolio optimization, customer centricity, and 365-day engagement. And the reality is this quarter we've really focused more on portfolio optimization. And portfolio optimization in the last few years' discussion has really centered largely around M&A. Today, we've talked more about discontinuing events and we've made difficult decisions. But these difficult decisions were important to optimize the mix of our portfolio to really position us well for sustained growth for the foreseeable future. So while they were difficult decisions, they were important. And we look forward to updating you as we continue to make progress on our growth strategy in the upcoming quarters. So thank you again for joining the call, and I look forward to speaking to you next quarter.