Audacy Inc (AUD) 2022 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Good morning, and welcome to Audacy's Fourth Quarter 2022 Earnings Release Conference Call. (Operator Instructions)

As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your first speaker for today's call, Mr. Richard Schmaeling, CFO and Executive Vice President. Sir, you may begin.

Thank you, Rob. Good morning, and welcome to Audacy's fourth quarter earnings conference call. A replay will be available shortly after the conclusion of today's call at the replay link or number noted in our release.

During this call, the company make forward-looking statements, which are based upon the current -- the company's current expectations and involve risks and uncertainties. The company's actual results could differ materially from those projected in these forward-looking statements. Additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially are described in the Risk Factors section of the company's annual report on Form 10-K.

As such, risks and uncertainties may be updated from time to time in the company's SEC filings. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as may be required by law. During this call, we may make reference to certain non-GAAP financial measures. We refer you to the Investors page of our website at audacyinc.com for reconciliations of such measures and other pro forma financial information. I'll now turn the call over to David Field. David?

Thanks, Rich. Welcome all to Audacy's fourth quarter earnings call. Well, 2022 was certainly not the year we expected. We exited 2021 with strong revenue acceleration and got off to a great start in '22 with first quarter revenues up 14% and EBITDA up 152%. But as we are all painfully aware, macroeconomic and particularly advertising conditions began to deteriorate due primarily to the impact of the war in Ukraine, inflation and the Fed. And so even though we were still able to grow our revenues by 3% for the year, our expenses were up 6% taking our 2022 EBITDA down to $138 million, a far cry from what we had anticipated.

In the fourth quarter, our revenues were down 0.8%, in line with our flat to down low single-digit guidance. However, our expenses were elevated. Rich will elaborate on our costs, but I want to note that we anticipate that expenses will be up low single digits in first quarter and be below 2022 levels for the remainder of the year.

In my comments this morning, I'd like to start with a brief overview of our position as we work to navigate the storm and drive our recovery. The situation is challenging, but we are addressing it with eyes wide open and vigorously executing our action plan, taking a number of concrete measures and making headway.

Before I share an update on our progress, I think it might be helpful to look beyond the numbers and add some broader context. Over the past few years, we have made 2 strategically key decisions: First, to achieve scale through our acquisition of CBS Radio, tripling our size and establishing a strong differentiated premium content position with leading positions across the country's largest markets and unrivaled leadership in sports and news radio.

And second, to capitalize on our scale and transform into a true multi-platform audio company through a number of acquisitions, investments and initiatives. As a result, today, we are one of the country's leading podcasters with an emerging high-potential audio streaming platform and building competitive ad tech and data capabilities, all essentially from scratch.

At the time of these decisions, of course, we never expected to be hit with 3 hugely adverse extended events, the global pandemic sustained supply chain disruption and now an ad recession, along with difficult macroeconomic conditions enduring all 3 events, while in the midst of a comprehensive strategic transformation has been hard. All of that said, we have made good progress in our work to weather the storm and to position the company for recovery when macro conditions improve. Earlier this month, we completed the sale of a set of towers for $17 million, bringing our total nonstrategic asset sales since the summer to $73 million, providing meaningful added liquidity. And we have a number of other nonstrategic asset sales working their way forward.

In addition, we continue to take significant actions to reduce expenses, and as a result, we expect our 2023 expenses to be flat to down slightly versus 2022 actual. We have made good progress in reducing costs, even though we now have significant expenses in a number of key areas of the business that were essentially nonexistent before such as podcasting, ad tech and our audio streaming platform.

I would note that all of the expense actions we have taken have been carefully managed so that we continue to fund our transformational initiatives and invest selectively in critical areas of the business while ensuring that we are still serving our listeners and customers with excellence. I would also add that we are cautiously encouraged by a number of Green Shoots as we work our way forward. We achieved record-breaking performance with our annual local upfront sales program for 2023. This has helped our local business get off to a relatively good start for the year. Auto, our largest category continues to show positive signs of emergence from hibernation.

In Q4, our auto business was up 8%. We are having constructive conversations with our auto customers across the country that lead us to believe that we will likely see acceleration in auto spend as we work our way through the year. And since relaunching the reinvented Audacy streaming platform in late summer, we have seen some early signs of progress in our organic consumption. During fourth quarter, mobile app installs increased by 23% over the prior year, and our monthly active audio users were up 11% despite adding a registration wall in the app to drive our collection of first-party data. In addition, the fundamental metrics within our podcasting business remains solid with a 9% increase in Q4 downloads and a 15% increase in U.S. listeners.

We reached 43 million unique listeners across our podcast network in fourth quarter, including $29 million in the U.S. We are driving particularly strong growth across our 2400Sports podcast studio, which launched 93 new titles in '22 and is currently generating over 7x the number of downloads versus prior year, albeit from a small base. As we look ahead, the opportunities to capitalize on our key growth drivers, as noted on our prior calls, remain very much intact. Those drivers include our various digital businesses, our national enterprise sales team and accelerated audience growth from our streaming audio platform.

We also are making headway on building our ad tech and ad products to open important pools of demand and accelerate future performance by increasing our sell-through rates and improving yields. In addition, as economic conditions ultimately normalize, we expect to see a meaningful degree of recovery of radio revenues, which remained substantially lower than pre-pandemic levels and note that roughly 90% of those revenues flow through to EBITDA. Some additional color on Q4. Spot radio revenues were down 4%, with local narrowly outperforming national. Network radio was up 4% and Digital was up 2% and or up 5% ex podcasting. Podcasting was down 8%.

Note that our podcasting numbers continue to be impacted by the departure of our largest podcast network publishing partner, which moved off of our platform in May. Excluding that partner, Q4 podcast revenues were up 14%. For the full year, digital revenues were up 9%, podcasting up 1%, 19%, excluding the departed partner. One other note on the quarter is that large markets continue to outperform -- sorry, underperformed smaller market growth. Specifically, according to Miller Kaplan market data, radio revenues in our markets 26 and over, or smaller, I should say, were 6% stronger than in our top 25 markets. Note that this is total market revenue and not just Audacy. Since our company is significantly more concentrated in the largest markets relative to our peers, this continues to cause a meaningful relative performance issue for us.

Turning to pacings as reported by a host of other media companies, ad market conditions remain challenging, particularly with regard to national and network business. We are currently pacing down 5% and expect revenues to decline by mid-single digits for the quarter. A number of national advertisers remain sidelined or have dampened that spending due to market uncertainty. Notwithstanding the challenges we face as we confront ad market headwinds at a time of deep organizational transformation, we believe we are making solid progress in executing our action plans in order to emerge healthy on the other side of the storm.

I want to close by underlining 3 key points. First, Audacy has a strong and differentiated, scaled competitive position in the dynamic and growing audio space. At a time when music is highly competitive, Audacy has unrivaled leadership in sports and news radio plus a deep lineup of compelling local personalities and award-winning podcast, along with many of the country's most popular radio brands. We believe we are the #1 creator of original premium audio content and think that will be a meaningful driver of the growth and development of our Audacy digital platform.

Second, over the past few years through our transformational acquisitions, investments and initiatives, Audacy has been fundamentally enhanced and today is a much stronger multi-platform company with substantially elevated products and capabilities. We are working hard to capitalize on our unique assets and further enhance our offerings with the vision of making Audacy the audio brand of choice for listeners and customers.

And third, in these turbulent times, we recognize it is difficult for many to look beyond the current challenges. While we have much work in front of us and are subject to external factors beyond our control, we believe the earnings potential for today's enhanced Audacy in a normalized economy should exceed where we were in 2019. We have no shortage of growth drivers and opportunities across the business. And as noted earlier, while we expect a significant improvement in radio revenues as the economy recovers and auto and other disruptive categories increased their spending, we can achieve a healthy EBITDA recovery at substantially lower levels of radio ad spend than before.

Finally, before turning it over to Rich, I want to thank the outstanding team at Audacy for their dedication and tenacity and all the great work they are doing to enable us to navigate the storm and capitalize on opportunities. We are very fortunate to have such a talented group of individuals on the team. Rich?

Thanks, David. Our total net revenues for the fourth quarter came in at $342 million, down 1% year-over-year and down close to 4% ex political. Our core spot revenues were down 8%. National spot continued to be somewhat weaker than local. Our political revenues for the fourth quarter came in at $13 million versus $4 million in the prior year. And for the full year, our political revenues came in at $25 million and were up 19% compared to the 2018 election cycle.

Looking at our top spot advertising categories auto dealers, our largest category, was up 9% year-over-year in the fourth quarter and auto in total including dealer associations, was up 8%. Our second largest category hospitals and clinics was down 10% for the quarter, and our 12 get out and go categories were also down 10%.

Banks and mortgage lenders, our third largest category, was down 6%, which was significantly better than the close to 40%. This category was down year-over-year in the third quarter. And our fourth largest category, Sports Betting, was down 4%. Our digital revenues in the fourth quarter were up 2%. Our growth is still weighed down by the loss last year of our largest podcast network client and it will continue to be weighed down by this loss through the second quarter of this year.

We also saw in the fourth quarter a softening of demand for both streaming and podcast advertising. Our network advertising revenues remained resilient and were up 4% year-over-year in the fourth quarter and our sponsorship and event revenues were up 20%.

Turning to the outlook for our first quarter revenue performance. We project that our revenues will be down about mid-single digits for the full quarter. National spot advertising has weakened further relative to local, and our network advertising is now pacing down year-over-year. We also see continued softness in advertising demand for both streaming and podcasting.

Moving to our fourth quarter expense performance. Our cash operating expenses came in at $305 million or up 9% year-over-year. Our expenses were $10 million greater than we expected due to the accelerated recognition of deferred podcast content costs as a result of revenues falling short of our projections for a number of titles. This change in our accounting estimate also takes into consideration projected continued softness in the podcast advertising market versus our prior expectations.

During the course of 2022, the company enacted a series of actions to reduce its operating expenses and is in the process of implementing further actions during the first quarter. For 2023, we expect that these actions will fully offset the impact of inflation and the projected growth in our variable selling expenses and that our total operating expenses for this year will be flat to down slightly. These expense reductions have come across our full P&L, and we continue to work to innovate within our cost structure and to drive higher levels of productivity. This has and will continue to be an ongoing effort. And since we closed the CBS Radio merger 5 years ago, the company has steadily driven higher levels of productivity and these efforts have enabled us to reduce our full-time and our part-time workforce based on full-time equivalents by over 1/3, while investing strongly in building our national sales team, our digital organization and our technology team, among other organizational capabilities.

In the first quarter, we expect that our expenses will be up low single digits and that our expenses will be down year-over-year for the remainder of this year.

Turning to our financial position. As noted by David, in the midst of this difficult economic period, we have continued to make progress in bolstering our capacity to sustain compliance with our financial covenants and we have improved our liquidity, including by monetizing noncore assets and by amending our receivables purchase agreement as announced in January. Our compliance basis first lien net leverage was 3.8x at the end of December compared to our maintenance covenant of 4x.

Our liquidity was $145 million at year-end, up from $115 million at the end of September. And after accounting for the maturity of $22.7 million of our revolver in November. Our fourth quarter cash flow benefited from strong political revenues $40 million of proceeds from the sale of land and property in Las Vegas in November, a significant reduction in our investment in working capital which is the fruit of a collaborative effort by many people across our organization and a 2/3 reduction in our capital expenditures, which came in at $8 million for the fourth quarter versus an average of $24 million per quarter September year-to-date.

For 2023, we expect that our CapEx will come in at around $50 million or about 40% less than what we spent in 2022. And we expect that our cash income tax payments for this year will be less than $10 million. The company is continuing to work a pipeline of additional noncore asset sales, which are being executed via our unrestricted subsidiary, Audacy Atlas. Audacy Atlas closed on the sale of a package of broadcast towers for $17 million earlier this month and we expect to generate another $25 million or so of proceeds from asset sales over the remainder of this year, which will bring the cumulative total of such sales since last summer to close to set $100 million.

On January 27, the company entered into an amendment of its receivable purchase agreement with DZ Bank. This amendment modified the annual financial statements provision regarding a going concern what report to prevent such a qualification for 2022, if solely resulting from a potential breach of our first lien covenant under our revolving credit agreement.

This amendment makes the receivable purchase agreement covenant consistent with the existing similar provision under our credit agreement. In addition, the amendment reduced the minimum liquidity requirement from $75 million to $25 million. As a result of these actions, and the further actions we plan to take. We continue to believe, assuming that the advertising environment does not get significantly worse that over the next 12 months that we should be able to sustain compliance with the requirements of our debt facilities, and we believe that our liquidity ought to be sufficient to support our operations and the normal seasonal fluctuations in our working capital.

None of the company's debt matures in 2023, and our upcoming 2024 maturities are all first lien. The company's second new bonds do not begin to mature until 4 years from now in 2027. Over the last several months, the company has conducted a process working in close consultation with our Board of Directors and our advisers to evaluate options to manage our liabilities.

Before the end of the second quarter, the company plans to approach its lenders to explore refinancing opportunities. Beyond this statement, we will not be providing any further details about our plans at this time.

With that, we'll go to your questions. Operator?

(Operator Instructions)

First question comes from Aaron Watts with Deutsche Bank.

I've got a few questions here. David, maybe I'll start with this. Can you talk a bit more about the cadence of the advertising momentum as you've progressed month-to-month so far this year? And what, if any signs are there currently that give you optimism for a pickup later in the second quarter or in the second half of this year across whether it's digital or your terrestrial station group?

Yes. Thanks, Aaron. So we know anecdotally across a wide swath of our customers that many advertisers remain cautious about the business -- about business uncertainty. And they all read the same headlines and all have the same concerns. And so as reported by others as well, we think advertisers have tightened their purse strings as we get through this quarter and believe that many of them are looking to increase their spending going forward as things improve. Obviously, that's speculative. We do know that this economic cycle doesn't last forever, but we've been dealing with it now and we'll start lapping against comps from it as things slowdown in the second quarter of last year.

Okay. That's helpful. Makes sense. And then, Rich, maybe a question on the margin side as you embark on this New Year and given the current backdrop, combined with the fact I know you've been refining your digital focus and your cost base, how should we think about your digital margins beyond this sort of temporary dampening due to the accelerated podcast expenses?

Look, our -- we look at our digital margins at the contribution margin level. And our digital business is quite profitable. Podcasting is clearly the laggard at the moment. We're making progress in podcasting. It's been tough. We've learned a lot really, frankly, since we acquired Cadence13 and the company's a lot smarter today about how we're going to participate in the podcast space going forward? And where are there more fertile areas for growth and profitability. David talked about 2400Sports, a really natural place for us to grow our podcast presence. We are growing our local podcast portfolio also trying to create a daily habit of podcast consumption from our local podcast studios, very profitable, seeing very significant growth there.

So look, I think we're a lot smarter today than we were several years ago and see a bright future in the growth of podcasting as essentially time-shifted consumption of audio. And we see that time-shifted consumption of audio, people get what they want anytime, anywhere is a proposition that we think there's a lot of headroom for growth.

Okay. Helpful. And then one last one, if I could, really clarify the acceleration of the podcast expenses that you saw in the fourth quarter, and it sounds like you'll see in the first quarter as well. The drivers of those -- of that acceleration, the declining revenues in podcasting, is that something that the environment remains challenged, you could see it happen again this year? Or do you think this is more of a onetime event?

Yes. So let me clarify how you're characterizing it. So first, what we've seen is a deceleration in the rate of growth. So these titles are growing, they're not growing as rapidly as our model has anticipated. So we're a content studio. We're producing content and capitalizing those costs and amortizing those costs over the life of a given title. And so the rate at which we recognize those costs is dependent upon future performance. And we're always updating our estimate of the recognition of those costs.

And clearly, we've seen a slowdown in the growth of podcasting. It's not -- it hasn't turned down. It's still growing. It's just not growing as rapidly as we previously anticipated. And so that's caused us to recognize costs more rapidly than we thought. And I think what we've done is fairly conservative. And I hope, Aaron, that we won't have to penalize P&L going forward because things turn down worse than we expect.

I think we've tried to be conservative in that accounting judgment, but we continue to refine those estimates, of course, and account for any change in our estimates prospectively. So we're focused on it like a laser beam and you're asking about the future and maybe your crystal ball is pretty good, but it's hard to know.

Let me just add one more thing to what Rich has said and that is that we are seeing still great enthusiasm to expand podcast investment on behalf of brands that where we're seeing a little choppiness in the marketplace tends to be more on the DR side and largely driven by some of the performance shops, DTC advertisers because funding for some of those companies has been cut back a little bit. So it's somewhat driven by that. And the overall tone and tenor of longer-term investment in podcasting remains very enthusiastic.

Okay. Appreciate the clarification and the time.

Our next question is from Steve Cahall with Wells Fargo.

This is Dan Osley on for Steve. Maybe just a follow-up on the margin. Can you help us unpack the cost guidance with a little more detail. You've taken a lot of fixed costs out of the business to COVID and announce additional cost actions. Could you just help us think through how those items flow through the base and where fixed versus variable cost splits currently?

Yes. So look, our variable cost in 2023 are expected to be about 27% of our total costs. And when you look at the composition of our revenues, particularly within digital, our digital marketing solutions business continues to grow strongly. I think you mentioned, David, up over 20% in the fourth quarter or -- and we're seeing growth in other product lines like podcasting that has cost of goods sold tied to it.

So those expenses are growing consistent with revenue and they are a driver of expense growth. We have continued to reduce other expenses from our facilities costs across the country to personnel costs, a whole host of items, and there's more to be done, frankly. So we have -- our guidance today of flat to down low single digits or down slightly for the full year is really what's being enacted right now. And we're still at work. There's more work to be done to refine our cost to drive higher levels of productivity over time. It's an ongoing effort.

And so I do think that, again, for the full year, you'll see that our total expenses will be flat to down slightly. And that includes after the impact of our variable expenses and after the impact of inflation.

That's really helpful. And maybe switching over to ad trends. With the divergence between local and national, that you're seeing, how would you frame the potential risk of National being a leading indicator and local eventually seeing similar trends?

I hear the question. I don't think we see any evidence of that. I think that by and large, the sample size of the local advertising base is probably more indicative of the general tone and tenure of the business today. And I also know that from our conversations with our national customers. Again, there doesn't seem to be so much a sense of long-term reduction. It tends to be more one of caution and restraint, again, more than a definitive long-term reduction in budgeting.

Got it. And then maybe last one for us. With your $50 million CapEx guidance, is there a continued digital investment within that? And then how should we think about the maintenance capital needs of the business moving forward?

Yes. The digital investment as the primary driver of our non-maintenance CapEx. Our maintenance CapEx is down to about $20-ish million. And look, there's a lot of -- so we launched our new platform in July of last year. There are new features and benefits that will roll out over the course of the year that, that platform will become increasingly interactive and we're increasing the level of personalization.

There's some really interesting features coming that we think listeners are going to love. And that's an ongoing investment. It's kind of we can think about it as a generational investment, frankly, when you think about our company's over 50 years old and the broadcast technology that served us so well for the last 50 years is still serving us well. But the future is going to be increasingly, we believe, streaming. And we're going to serve listeners anywhere they want to listen and they're increasingly listening via streaming, and we're going to have an offering. We think that people are going to love.

Our next question is from Avi Steiner with JPMorgan.

Just to go back to the podcasting expense acceleration very quickly. I guess what happened timing-wise from the November guide on the expense side. Was it some specific event that triggered it? And then I understand everything you've answered previously. Is that something that could reverse to the positive if growth accelerated on the podcast side? I just want to make sure I understand that and I've got another one.

Yes. Avi, we heard your question, but you could -- your voice is somewhat quiet. So what evolved was the outlook for 2023. So as we really completed our planning process for 2023 and took stock of the trends we were seeing in podcast demand and just commentary from others about the expectations for the overall advertising market. We tempered our view for growth in podcasting in 2023. And that that's what drove the revised estimates in our accounting judgment for the recognition of deferred podcast costs. I hope I got your question, did I miss anything?

I think that's -- I just want to know if it could possibly be reverse, I think, it was the end of my question. Can you touch on that?

Look, if the economy starts to pickup in the second half of this year, that likely means that our podcast margin is better than we were expecting. And so I think that's you mean by reverse. It would -- we recognize costs that based on our current expectations for revenue in 2023 and beyond, then if things turn up and are stronger than our model currently anticipates that will cause our podcast margin to expand.

And Avi, let me just add one more thing, which might be helpful on the whole podcasting front. The terms of most of these agreements tend to be a couple of years. So they tend to be relatively short. And secondly, and you've heard this from others, the market has become more rational. And the early Gold rush or land rush that occurred over -- in prior years, has dampened to some extent. And now I'd say there's more balance in the marketplace. And so the deals that we are cutting, I think, are more friendly for us. And that also, I think, will [newer] to the benefit of our margins going forward.

I add to that, David, because at least when I look at the composition of our podcast revenues, the increasing percentage of our revenues is tied to our own content, and we capitalize those costs and recognize the cost of a title that we produced internally our own proprietary content over the expected life of the title like a film studio. And so it's slow, and we are working to increasingly increase the proportion of our revenue for our own proprietary content and with a good mix of great content from other publishers. But the long-term view of that segment of audio is really quite robust.

Okay. Thank you for the clarification, explanation. Just on that last comment about capitalization, does that mean some of those costs, I guess, are running in CapEx initially? Am I thinking about that correctly? And if not...

No, they're classified elsewhere on our balance sheet. They're not CapEx -- just capitalized content costs.

Okay. Perfect. And then just on the unrestricted subsidiary Atlas. I don't know if you can either tell us what assets are there today or in any way, frame the size, the opportunity of asset sales as you see it going forward?

Yes. So I think we've done that, right? So the company did drop down a package of assets into our unrestricted subsidiary, Audacy Atlas. We've sold over $70 million of property and towers through the end well -- through this month. And we gave guidance, Avi, that we expect by -- through the remainder of this year that we think will have another $25 million or so of added proceeds.

And look, this is a measure to help us weather the storm and work our way out of what's been a difficult time. And that's the goal. That's our objective, as we've said all along.

And just to add one more thing to what Rich has already provided, every sale that we've done to date and every sale that we plan is nonstrategic in nature.

Okay. That is helpful. And then last one for me. So I guess borrowings are up on at least on a principal basis, and particularly about the '24 maturity (inaudible).

Avi, you broke up there. We didn't -- we can't hear your question.

All right. I'll go back in the queue.

Our next question is from Dan Day with B. Riley Securities.

I appreciate you taking the question. So, yes, so it looks like we're past the heaviest piece of the investment on the digital side in this transformation, both CapEx and OpEx. Just any guidance on -- and it might be tough to say just with uncertainty around ad spends and macro and all that, just when you expect that to start resulting in some incremental revenue? And like what buckets that would be, whether it's on ad tech initially or just how you expect initially these digital investments to result in an uplift in revenue and the time line for that?

So you can classify it, I think, into a few different buckets. There's the acceleration that we expect to see in terms of audience size and usage on the audio -- digital audio platform that we have reinvented and are in the process of continuing to roll out. There's increasing demand that we would -- demand pools that we currently can't access, such as programmatic guaranteed revenues, which are becoming increasingly important and to that end, we are building ad tech and ad products. And then in addition to that, there's also just enhanced revenue operations and being more effective in driving multi-platform business across the organization. I think you're going to see those accelerating as we get into the second half of the year and really feeling a much bigger bump in 2024 and beyond.

One more for me. I know like over the last year or 2, you had sort of a concerted effort to bring in some individuals with stronger relationships with national advertisers trying to win some of those dollars back to Audacy. Obviously, the macro is tough. But if we put that to the side, just any update on how those efforts are progressing specifically with kind of stronger ties to the national advertisers?

Yes. It's a great question. We are, I think, objectively making great progress in that regard. We are, at this point, a preferred partner or engaging brands at a much higher level in agencies at a much higher level than in the past. And we are -- and we have expectations of significantly higher revenues from several of those large agencies based upon our dealings. I would say that and you touched on your own answer, Dan, the current significant slowdown in national and network advertising has dampened the pace or, let's say, the curve of which we are capitalizing on that opportunity.

So that's a long way of saying, I think the strategy is sound. The company's scale and differentiated assets and capabilities put us in a position to capitalize on that strategy, but we're running into some pretty stiff national headwinds that have delayed the impact of the rewards from that strategy for the time being. But we do fully expect them as we go forward.

Understood. Okay, just one more for me. Maybe if you could just unpack auto a little bit more. You talked about it a little bit in the prepared remarks. I know it's a larger category for you. So maybe just what you're expecting there. You had said I think it was, I don't know, 40% or 50% down relative to 2019 in the past. Just wondering if you could update us on where those dollar figures are at now?

Sure. So your memory is good, but a little exaggerated. I think we've said it's down 40% from where it was in 2019. The -- as we noted in Q4 the digital radio expense -- digital radio revenues were up -- sorry, our radio revenues from auto were up 8%, and we're continuing to see growth in 2023 both in terms of radio and in terms of digital spending from those customers as well. And as you might imagine, we have a pretty broad set of relationships with the Tier 1, 2 and 3 players in the auto space.

And based on those conversations and the improvement in supply chain and the realities of the car market today as opposed to where it has been over the last couple of years, we remain optimistic that we will see acceleration in auto spend in the second half of 2023 and beyond, again, based upon what we're hearing.

Our final question is from Craig Huber with Huber Research Partners.

I got a few questions. Can you maybe just touch on a little bit further about your ad trends by month or maybe January versus March, is March materially worse? I think you signaled that pacings for the first quarter were tracking down about 5% or so, the first question.

Yes. I would say January was better than February and March is probably likely to fall somewhere in the middle at this point in time.

Okay. And then on the cost front, you guys have obviously done a herculean job taking out costs here the last 3 years given all the macro issues you and others had to deal with here and stuff. And obviously, you're talking about costs this year, flat to slightly down and stuff. Obviously, you have inflation working against you and stuff. Do you feel if the environment gets worse than you're looking for here that you have any room without doing permanent damage to the business, being able to take out more cost than that if things short term get worse on the revenue front?

Let me tackle that at a high level, Craig, and then Rich may have some additional comments. So our P&L, our margins are still saddled with the fact that there's sort of 3 components going on there that I think are hurting us. One is the fact that we are -- we have a number of sports play-by-play agreements that are margin killers. And we, for example, elected not to renew the Chicago Bears play-by-play agreement this year, which will save us bottom line, $2 million, $3 million, which I think you'll see us continue to be really disciplined going forward on some of those contracts.

In addition, as we've discussed on this call and others, we are spending a lot of money to transform the company and navigate the storm, but at the same time invest in where we think it's critical for us to be strategically. And as we are rewarded for those investments, that too will see margin improvement. And to some extent, we have some belt-and-suspenders elements in our operations where we are building our future, but at the same time, funding how we've done things historically. And so that has also obviously impacted costs. And so we do think that as our new technologies take hold, it will alleviate some of those costs.

And lastly, I think we -- I mentioned earlier that our market composition continues to hurt us in the sense that the markets where we're focused on are growing 6% slower than the smaller and middle-sized markets. And that, too, given the operating leverage in this business, absolutely is a margin killer. So I think all of those factors point to stronger margins ahead and the opportunities to reduce expenses as we continue on our product -- our ad product road map and continue to work through some of these opportunities. Rich, I don't know if you want to add to that.

Okay. My next question, ratings of your traditional radio. Can you just update us on the data you have on ratings, [nutritional] radio? And maybe compare that to the digital side of things, if you would, for the latest period.

Our ratings, I would say, have been -- the general trend over the last few months have been good. I think we've picked up slightly vis-a-vis some of our peers. The other thing that is a consideration for us is that we -- and I don't want to go into the rabbit hole here, but we have a number of our radio stations where we are still bifurcating our ratings and digitally -- having digitally addressable as opposed to total line reporting. And that, I think, has also been a factor in our numbers. But all of that said, the general trend has been good vis-a-vis our overall ratings.

And I guess my last question, what is your -- you've touched on this a little bit, but what is your take on why your national advertising is significantly worse than local? And just a little bit further about why you don't think our local advertisers are going to catch up on the downside versus national. We're all working obviously in the same economy here and so forth. What's your take there, please?

Well, I don't think -- I would say that what we're experiencing is consistent with what we've heard from peers in radio and also outside. I think it's a phenomenon that is more global and certainly not unique to Audacy. As to why I think that our local customers are sort of more focused on what's actually going on in their day-to-day businesses, whereas national brands tend to be a little more removed from the day-to-day of the business. And so if anything, I would think that local would -- may be a better barometer of actual business conditions than national.

We have reached the end of the question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the call back to David Field for closing comments.

Thank you, everyone, for attending today's call. We look forward to reporting back to you for our first quarter call this coming May. Appreciate it.

This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and we thank you for your participation.