Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to iHeartMedia, Inc's 2014 fourth quarter and full-year earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I will turn the conference over to your host, Effie Epstein, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning and thank you for joining our 2014 fourth quarter and full-year earnings call. On the call today are Rich Bressler, President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer and Brian Coleman, Senior Vice President and Treasurer. We will provide an overview of the 2014 fourth quarter and full-year financial and operating performances of iHeartMedia, Inc., iHeartCommunications and Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings. For purposes of this call, when we describe the financial and operating performance of iHeartMedia, Inc., that also describes the performance of its subsidiary, iHeartCommunications. After an introduction and a review of our results, we will open up the line for questions. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that this conference call may include forward-looking statements that involve uncertainties and risks. There can be no assurance that management's expectations, beliefs or projections will be achieved or that actual results will not differ from expectations. Please see our annual reports on Form 10-K and our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a discussion of important factors that could affect our actual results. Pacing data will also be mentioned during the call. For those of you not familiar with pacing data, it reflects revenues booked at a specific date versus the comparable date in the prior period and may or may not reflect the actual revenue growth rate at the end of the period. During today's call, we will provide certain performance measures that do not conform to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. We have provided schedules that reconcile these non-GAAP measures with our reported results on a GAAP basis as part of our earnings press releases and the slide presentation, which can be found on the Investors Section of our websites, iheartmedia.com and clearchanneloutdoor.com. Please note that our two earnings releases and the slide presentation provide a detailed breakdown of foreign exchange and non-cash compensation expense items, as well as segment revenues and OIBDAN. With that, I will now turn the call over to Rich Bressler.

Thanks Effie and good morning everybody. Once again, as Effie mentioned, you can find our presentation slides on our website. I am really proud of what we have accomplished this past year. So let me start with a few thoughts about 2014, a year in which we further strengthened our position as a leading media and entertainment company for the digital age and one that is advantaged by consumer trends moving to out-of-home and mobile. Our growth in the last year underscores our continuing hard work to provide consumers with the content they love anytime and anywhere across all of their devices in and out of the home. Our business model is simple. Create big and deep relationship with consumers and rent the use of those relationships to advertisers. We have done a great job building those relationships. iHeartMedia has the largest reach of any radio or TV outlet in America even more than Google or Facebook in the United States. And outdoor continues to engage with consumers through key locations like our new digital billboard in Times Square that spans a full city block. As you can see, we reach consumers across all platforms, outdoor, broadcast radio, digital, mobile, social and events. We have made and continue to make progress in redefining our relationships with leading advertising agencies and our partnership with Horizon and Omnicom are examples of that. In a nutshell, the key players in advertising are driving towards fewer, bigger and more well-defined relationship that we believe is a beneficial trend for iHeartMedia, considering our diverse set of media assets, our size and our reach. We are working with planning in strategy groups across all agencies, as well as with their radio and outdoor buyers in addition to direct relationship with a number of key CMOs at…

[Operator Instructions]. Our firs question is from the line of Avi Steiner. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking the call, hearing the questions and very good pacing, so a couple of questions on that. I don't want to drill too deep, but outdoor is really much stronger than expected on both the Americas and international. I know it's a point in time. I know you don't like to spend too much time on it. We have had pacing retracing us before. But can you call out some specific things that's going on? I know you had some contract wins or market wins internationally, but what's going on that's turned things around particularly in the U.S.? And I have got a couple more. Thank you.

Thanks, Avi. Also thanks for kindly giving my preamble. You saved me 30 seconds. That's the way I feel about pacing. So appreciate that and good morning everybody. Look, again, to talk about we certainly know where they are at given point in time. I don't think that anybody should be surprised about the CCI pacings. Certainly we saw that last year when we had a very strong year in Clear Channel international. They have a strong management team there. So to me, that's really a continuation of what we have seen last year and we had particularly strength going on in Europe in the first quarter as well as we have seen some nice growth in Mexico. We have seen some nice growth in Australia and some really nice growth over in New Zealand. Again most of those, we have got a team over there that's doing a lot of nonconforming bids or creative contracts and really figuring out a way to take creative in execution to new level outside of the United States. And if you look at our market share, quite frankly, they gained. We continue to do that by bringing in some other sectors but also by taking massive shares if you just look at throughout our companies outside They have had some very good results and the facts speak for themselves. On CCRA, national, local and digital, they are all up. Occupancy is up across all of our traditional products and digital. And again, hopefully this is not a surprise. We have been saying I gave the numbers in my opening remarks. We doubled the second quarter than the first and the third quarter than the second and the fourth quarter we basically got to flat on revenues and got up almost 4% or so, on the bottomline. And I think again these are continuations. So I will just make the point that these are natural outgrowth of what you saw us talk about the entire year and I am pleased that we can deliver on what we talked about and talked about in the fourth quarter results.

Great and a couple more here. Rich, you noted that the lines certainly in traditional radio M&A segment are blurring between digital, local, national, et cetera. I wonder if you can help us out in M&A, maybe breaking that category out, size it out between traditional radio or core radio and everything else or really help us get a size of your non-core business?

Avi, we are not going to break out anything specifically. I have said and I have said in my, if you look at your remarks on that, the lines are getting blurred between local, regional, national spending across all disciplines spot, digital, events. Some things are going quite frankly more to national buys. Clearly more budgets are going to digital, which again I think plays into everything, it plays into our sweet spot. We have got the assets as people start to go there. So in the first three quarters, at least the categories are national and traffic and weather, real growth drivers during the quarter. But look, our focus is to really work with on a local basis, have local direct selling and sell directly with the advertisers. And then you look on the agency side and I commented on that also, just to take a minute, we are building relationships just beyond the buyers. We are working with the planners and strategy teams, ensure the agencies to give them the plan to allocation of ad dollars to the various sectors, that we get our fair share. I also think I quickly pointed out that agencies are very focused on having a few individual larger relationships with companies that can deliver them cost effective and in our case, great ROL, 6:1, return on investment dollars back to their clients. And we are clearly at the sweet spot of being able to do that, both on impact basis and a cost-effective basis and we are cheap compared to the global mediums that are out there, global social mediums. We are cheap compared to television, that's for sure. So we are just encouraged here. The bottomline is, we are interested in getting as many advertise dollars as we can, watching our costs and bringing them down to the bottomline and expanding our margins. And I suspect this might be a little bit frustrating to you guys as those lines are blurring, as I mentioned, because of what's happening in the way people are buying advertising dollars and they are going to continue to blur going forward. But I was in your shoes, because it's the way I watch it from the financial standpoint, in the way the Bob and I watch it, is look at our growth and look at our expansion of margins and look at our growth of the bottomline. And if you see all that, then I think we are doing a pretty good job of whatever lines of blurring.

Great and I am going to let someone else go and to have my very last question here. Well, first of congrats on the new title and then as far as my question goes and maybe Brian wants take this, but you guys have bought back 10% notes. I know you guys have sold those at price given the maturity and I am just curious how you think as the relationship there is inverted and now the 10% are trading much better than the 14%. How you guys may feel about 14% or other pieces of debt in your structure? And thanks for taking the questions, guys.

Thanks, Avi. I will take that. We see that change. I think the challenge with the 14% is further out in our maturity structure. So when we think about excess liquidity and how best to deploy that, the 2016 note buyback and the 2018 note buyback were a pretty simple analysis. Those are our next nearest debt maturity. Market seemed a bit dislocated. There was an attractive return. So we were aggressive and bought back those securities. Not saying that we would never take a look at the 2014 note, but I think we got to feel pretty comfortable about our liquidity position and not just in the near-term. We got some significant debt maturing in 2019 and 2020 to really reach beyond those facts and buyback something that matures beyond that would have to be a pretty compelling argument. So I think our focus will continue to be with excess liquidity, redeploy it at good yields but in the shorter term. But things change over time. But I think that's our position today and that's certainly how we have conducted our previous debt buyback.

Thanks.

Your next question is from the line of Jason Kim. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good morning. Thanks, guys. And again, congrats to Rich for adding the Chief Operating Officer title. So following up on the balance sheet question we ask as every quarter it seems like, but the Term Loan B maturity is just over $900 million left. What's your appetite to address that last bit of that 2016 on maturity wall, now that it's less than a year over? And should we be thinking that logistically secured bond at the parent level is just easier than issuing at the outdoor site, despite the cost of capital being much more expensive at iHeart at this point?

Good question. Didn't know you would ask the first one after all Debtwire published a nice article about it. So I didn't know if there was any question out there. But in reality, I think our playbook hasn't changed. We continue to be opportunistic. I think we have been over the past few years. I think we are disciplined in our approach. We are focused on cost. But we balance that with refinancing best. To take a step back, in September we had $2 billion in maturities. We refinanced a little over half the half of the maturity. That was when we decided to take $931 million over the year and let it go current. But it is current now. So I think we are balancing that refinancing risk profile against where the market is and our sensitivity to pricing. So a lot of words, not a lot of an answer here, but I think we will continue to be opportunistic and you have all seen the high yield markets and they seem to be moving in the right direction. So we will continue to keep our eyes on the market. The second part of that question really is about preference for financing. I think again we have done PGM issuances to refinance bank debt recently. Outdoor did approve some debt raises and clearly it's a lower cost of capital there. I think the one thing I would want to say is raising debt at outdoor, increasing leverage at outdoor, is a decision of the outdoor board. So while we view that as an alternative amongst others, that would be up to them with respect to size and timing and availability. But we look at TGMs as being an obvious and an easier access points to capital. We have got cash on hand. We have got availability under our ABL. We have a significant amount of securities, over $0.5 billion in debt securities and some recently purchased outdoor equity in our unrestricted subsidiary that can be monetized. We have done asset sales over the past year and continue to look at that, as Rich alluded to. So I think when you look at the remaining $931 million of Term Loan B and little bit of a C in there, I think we have a lot of alternatives. PGM's are certainly the ones that's the most obvious, but there are other things we can look to, to refinance some or all of the remaining maturity. So we will continue to watch the market and be opportunistic, which is what we have done over the past few years. Did that answer all your questions, Jason?

Yes, definitely. And then another question and I am not sure how much you can answer this. But a lot of investors have been asking about the potential for M&A involving your outdoor assets in Europe. The latest bit of press report we have seen is that the sale process has been put on hold. Again you have never actually confirmed these reports before. But can you just remind me and remind us how you look at the outdoor business in terms of balancing the need to have access of cash flows from the business versus the fact that valuation of these assets has gone up pretty meaningfully recently? So how you can create value for your debt at the parent level by monetizing these assets? And how does the movement in the foreign exchange rate affect your decision making process, if any.

First, thanks. It's Rich. Thanks to you guys and to Avi for the comments on the title. It's really has been a real team effort here and I think the title is a recognition of how far we have come as a company, quite frankly. It's much more than just about me. On the overall assets, I am not going to comment between the rumors. But I think one of the things that we continue to prove time and time again and really in the last year, year-and-a-half and since I have been in this position, is the fact that we are constantly looking at our balance sheet and whether it's everything that Brian just talked about and the great job that he is done on the finance and refinancing to making sure that we are here for one reason, which is to make money for all of our stakeholders. And we all understand that's our number one job when we walk in everyday and put our heads on the pillow every night which doesn't happen too often lately. But we are always looking at relevant M&A opportunities, non-core asset sales. I am commenting anything specifically. But we have talked again, I think in the earnings release about it or in our remarks that we had over $800 million approximately of asset sales. It started with the APN sale on the stations. We have done some sale leaseback for the office space. We have got the tower deal that we have announced that we think is on track to close. It may be multiple closings, but they start to close in the first quarter. We have looked at those, where it's just straight up across the financing frames. And then we are always looking at non-core asset sales. And then specifically on CCI, somebody asked the question, I think Avi asked earlier about the impressiveness of the pacing. We love the business. We love how the business is performing. We love how the business performed last year. We love how the business is performing this year. We have an outstanding management team, both at the leadership level in the center and we also have outstanding management teams for each of our country managers outside of the United States and our regional managers and we have strong growth both in developed and emerging markets for 2014, where we delivered topline growth and we added a lot of bottomline growth. And again, as we said earlier, we took market share particularly outside the United States from our competitors. So we are in a great, great position to continue to operate these exciting businesses and we are always looking at the lens and saying how we make money and what's the right thing to do for our stakeholders

All right. That makes sense. If I can squeeze in one more. Can you provide an update on the LA digital boards situation? I know it's been some time since those boards have gone dark, but any update you can provide there?

Yes. Look, there's not much news on LA with the digital boards. I will say we are continuing to work vigorously with the city on a legislative solution that will allow us to turn back on as many digital boards as possible. And I have said before, I know I am a broken record on this and believe me, nobody wants the boards or the boards that we are going to get back on, nobody is [indiscernible] with Bob and I and rest of the management team and our Board of Directors who actually wants those boards lot quicker than we do. We all want them back very quickly. But at the same point, it does take time. I think the good news in the interim, we are selectively seeking permits to convert some of the boards back to traditional vinyl static signs. We have converted a total of 15 boards to-date. So again not trying to make a point, but rather than having the digital boards back, but we are standing still. We are keeping our feet moving. It's not meaningful yet from the revenue perspective, but at least it's a parallel step that we can take when we work through the legislative process.

Our next question is from the line of Marci Ryvicker. Please go ahead.

Thanks. I have a couple on the Americas and then one on iHeartMedia. Just for the pace in the Americas, is that just broad-based and there is no one-time items that maybe impacting that plus 4.8%?

Yes. It's really strength across everything. It's strength across national, local, digital. Marci, there is no one-time items. If there was any, clearly we would have called them out.

And then in terms of expenses, you have been able to keep them down year-over-year despite investment spending. Is this something that we can continue to see going forward?

Yes. I mean, look, we are -- I don't know if your question is specifically outdoor, specific to the company, but on outdoor, there is no one thing that driving these expenses down at CCLA. It's a combination of variable expenses as well as efficiencies on the past initiatives. Overall, not just on this call, but we have been saying and I have been saying, since the beginning of this year that we are going to continue to maximize the efficiency of the cost basis of this company. And I think you are going to see us, I don't think, I know, you are going to continue to see us do that. We are vigorous about that, starting with Bob and myself and whether that's outdoor, whether that's international side, whether that's the iHeartMedia side of the equation, that phrase, less is more on the operating expense side and our job is to continue to grow the topline and get more dollars to the bottomline.

Okay and then one on the radio side. You talked about local direct business being strong. How meaningful is that as a percent of revenue? And is that -- are you able to grow that over time?

Well, we don't comment and we don't break that out. I don't think we have ever broken that out and I am not going to start now. But like I said, it is a focus of ours, in terms of the deals being done directly with local advertisers. They were up. As I said, they are up on a year-over-year basis. We have got a great management team in terms of our market presidents and our EVPOs, there are some people that are market reporters, who report them to Bob and myself. I think one of the things that doesn't hit you guys laid out on the screen but that leads to these results is from an operational standpoint, we are incredibly focused in giving our local sellers more and more tools so they can go out and compete in obviously a very competitive marketplace. And I think the fact that we have done that and we have made sure that everybody sings to the same hymnbook and are given all the right tools is the results you are seeing here on local direct selling and part of the roles that we play, Bob and I and EVPOs, is to continue to arm our markets with the right tools to grow that revenue.

And our next question is from the line of Lance Vitanza. Please go ahead.

Hi guys. Thanks for taking the question. I had a couple on the media side and then a couple of specifically on iHeartRadio. First on the Nielsen study, if I heard you right, it sounds like you are getting traction with the study when you talk to your existing advertisers, but what about packaged good companies that haven't yet made a real commitment to the medium? Are you getting any traction there?

Yes, look, I think I said this in my remarks, look, overall retail was down on year-over-year basis. But with the Nielsen study and again, this is Nielsen study, it is not our study. Nielsen announced this study. One of the great things when you listen to what Arbitron and Dave Calhoun, who is CEO of Nielson said one of the reasons he was buying Arbitron was that radio is the most misunderstood medium in America as an advertising media. And we all thought that intuitively all of those in the industry in form or another for a long period of time and now when he did the Nielsen and the Nielsen Catalina study, the results which were a direct match was people listening to the medium naturally obviously on a blind test with credit card purchases and saying that this was a 6:1. So advertisers spends a $1 gets $6 back, which is three times more effective than television, three times more effective than Facebook. And if you think about it, it all makes sense, which we are about a third the price of the CPM. So I think if you look at it between that study, that study that we had, the real life case study where we have had great success with a number of advertisers. I think we mentioned some in my opening remarks with companies like Taco Bell. We talked about Discovery Communications and they are opening a Shark Week. So we are going to all the advertisers with as this data that we have. And as we are fond of saying and as I am fond of saying right now, if we had all these stats and we ran it from the noon today and you looked at it, this is the greatest social medium in the Americas. We are a social medium. As a reminder, two-thirds of our listeners are outside of home. So this is the greatest social medium out there today in terms of its effectiveness. It happens to be core. It happens to be under the belt of radio and has been around a long period of time. So our jobs and the name change the company is to change that perception, lead that effort and we are starting to see that we are making those strides in our financial results. But I can assure you, there is no advertiser with stone left unturned and we are not going to, when talk about this. Okay. I think with that, we are out of time. Thank you all very, very much for listening and obviously Effie and Brian will be available for any follow-up questions. So thank you all very much.

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