comScore, Inc. Stock

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Comscore second quarter 2026 financial results conference call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised, today's conference is being recorded.

I would like to turn the conference over to your speaker today, Kevin Burns, Chief of Staff. Please go ahead.

Before we begin our prepared remarks, I'd like to remind all of you that the following discussion contains forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include comments about our plans, expectations, and prospects, and are based on our view as of today, August 12, 2026. Our actual results in future periods may differ materially from those currently expected because of a number of risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties include those outlined in our 10-K, 10-Q, other filings with the SEC, which you can find on our website or at www.sec.gov.

We disclaim any duty or obligation to update our forward-looking statements to reflect new information after today's call. Please note that we will be referring to slides on this call which are available on our website, www.comscore.com, under Investor Relations, Events and Presentations. I'll now turn the call over to Comscore's Chief Executive Officer, Matt McLaughlin. Matt?

Thank you, Kevin, and thank you, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. We closed the quarter in a far better structural position than we began, highlighted by the elimination of $40 million in long-term debt, which freed up roughly $7 million in related annual interest and principal payments. These critical actions were made possible through the sale of our Movies business in late May, and in turn provide us with improved financial flexibility that allows us to refocus on our core strengths to drive growth. Since joining as CEO in June, I've spent significant time evaluating our business, our product portfolio, and our organizational structure.

Our Q2 performance, with revenue of $79 million and adjusted EBITDA of $1.3 million, made clear that we need to make change with urgency. Comscore has tremendous assets, long-standing client relationships, and real value in the market. But, but we are not yet organized or operating in the way required to fully leverage that value. Simply put, we must do better. That is why yesterday we announced our new ROI strategy and operating model, a plan to realign the business, optimize how we operate, and invest in future growth.

Before we can move forward, we need to be clear about where Comscore is strong, where we're underperforming, and where we have the greatest opportunity to create value. Our strengths are real, unique data assets and intelligence algorithms, client relationships built over decades, and a trusted position as an independent measurement partner across channels. The opportunity is also concrete. Expanding our activation footprint across enterprise buying platforms, strengthening our publisher and advertiser digital intelligence products with AI and creator metrics, and capitalizing on the strength of our local TV product to win market share are all clear dimensions where we can grow.

At the same time, we need to acknowledge the issues that have held us back. Our cost structure does not match the realities of the business today. Established business lines face secular pressure as consumer media consumption changes. Newer products have not yet achieved the scale we need, and our organizational alignment has eliminated our ability to capitalize on the many strengths we already have. The issue is not effort. The issue is focus, accountability, scalability and investment capacity. Those internal challenges are being compounded by a media market that is changing quickly.

linear TV remains a critical foundation while consumer behavior evolves across streaming, digital, and other environments. AI is lowering barriers to entry and changing how intent is expressed and how content is consumed. Client consolidation and platform-owned measurement are increasing the pressure on the way we've historically operated. Collectively, these dynamics make urgency important, but they also increase the value of an independent company that can help customers understand audiences, content, and advertising exposure across a complex ecosystem.

In my first 2 months as CEO, I spent significant time with leaders across the company to understand how we were operating. As we looked across the business, a clear pattern emerged, one that was less about any single decision and had more to do with the cumulative of how business challenges were being addressed. The operating model was built for a bigger -- for a business larger than the one we currently operate. And the market backdrop adds to it. Our largest fixed data expense supports a linear TV business facing well-understood secular pressure. So our biggest non-personnel cost sits against our most challenged revenue.

The operating pattern that emerged to address these challenges in the current period was to trim expenses or prioritize near-term revenue opportunities. Both worked in the moment, but neither mechanism produced positive compounding impact. Pursuing revenue broadly rather than strategically spread our capacity across many complex opportunities, markets, and products with limited opportunity to scale. Trimming expenses to protect the current operating cycle reduced investments that would improve our long-term outlook.

Each cycle closed the immediate gap, but it left Comscore with more complexity and less capacity to grow, which brought the gap back around in a future cycle. The most encouraging part is that this pattern doesn't impact our core strengths. Our data assets, our client relationships, and our position in the measurement market remains genuinely strong. This is an operating model issue, and that's something we can address and is exactly what the strategic realignment is built around.

As we move through the second half of 2026, we need to change the definition of success at Comscore. We are not going to try to capture every opportunity simply because it is available to us. Even good opportunities will compete for resources. We need a lower, more flexible cost base, clearer accountability, simpler internal and external operations, a stronger product development mindset, and a disciplined approach to reallocating investment toward the areas that can create durable, long-term value. As you saw in our press release yesterday, we are unveiling our ROI strategy to address the issues of the past, capitalize on our strengths, and rebuild Comscore for long-term growth.

Our strategy moving forward is centered on 3 principles. realign the business around a more flexible cost base, clear accountability, and a culture focused on delivering commercial success. Optimize how we operate by streamlining legacy activities, improving economics, and shifting towards scalable product development. And invest in future growth by directing capacity toward the largest opportunities that can drive long-term success. These changes are not only about organizational structure. They are about how we make decisions, how we prioritize opportunities and how we allocate scarce resources.

Going forward, good ideas will still need to compete for those resources. Our mindset has to change from can we do this to generate revenue to should we do this as part of a strategy to create long-term success. This will be our new operating model. First, we must realign the business around a lower and more flexible cost base, clear accountability, and a culture focused on execution. Our cost structure is not aligned with the business we are today or the business we need to become.

We have taken difficult but necessary steps, including recent headcount reductions and are pursuing additional initiatives to reduce complexity, improve efficiency, and rationalize our international commercial footprint. As we look forward, we need to strengthen our operating culture around efficiency, urgency, accountability, and ownership. We need teams to move together rather than optimizing only within their individual functions. This is not about asking fewer people to do the same work. It's about changing what work earns resources and how the organization works together to create value.

That requires clearer organizational focus and accountability. We need better portfolio discipline, a stronger product-led strategy, and clearer commercial accountability in order to deliver customer value and operational sustainability. Revenue matters, but revenue alone is not enough. The most successful opportunities will create long-term value for customers and for Comscore and our investors over time.

The next phase of our plan is to optimize the organization by simplifying how we operate internally and externally and by adopting a more strategic product development mindset. We've spent many years building our reputation in technology and linear TV measurement, and it remains an important channel for customers. Every day we gain more insights about its intersection with digital exposure. We continue to strongly believe in our local TV opportunity, but the market is under pressure and we must bring our costs to deliver TV services in line with that reality. That means streamlining legacy business costs, aligning data costs with current business value and strategic opportunity and sunsetting expensive and underused features.

It also means enhancing our profitability profile in those legacy businesses by improving pricing and packaging so the economics of what we deliver are sustainable. As we move forward, we will set new value standards for contracting, customization, and servicing and scale through improved enablement efficiencies.

Beyond enhancing our traditional activities, we also need to reset how we develop products. Historically, we have too often built bespoke or difficult to replicate solutions that solved a specific problem for an individual use case, but did not scale across customers. Going forward, the standard is disciplined excellence, high-quality work delivered in a way the business can sustain, reuse, and build upon over time.

Finally, as we expand the capacity created by realignment and optimization, we will invest in future growth. That includes our people, custom systems, and technology. And it also includes the largest product and market opportunities where Comscore's data foundation and independence can create meaningful value. To execute, we need compensation, incentives, culture, and talent aligned with the skills required by that strategy.

And we need infrastructure and systems that reduce cost, complexity and operational friction. Beyond investment in our teams and systems, it is critical that our organization takes a long-term, growth-focused mindset in everything we do. AI is a major example. Consumer usage of AI tools is becoming a new expression of interest and intent. Comscore has a unique opportunity to understand that behavior through our opt-in digital panel. By observing real usage, prompts and responses, and sources, we can help publishers and advertisers understand how intent is forming and how discovery is changing.

Creator media is another significant opportunity. Creator content is commanding audiences that increasingly rival the largest distribution channels. And advertisers need to understand how those audiences fit alongside linear, CTV, and other channels. Comscore can help make creator media more plannable by demonstrating the unique value of creator audiences and enabling advertisers to evaluate their media plan with a creator-focused lens.

Third, expanding activation through Proximic is critical to our future growth. We have an opportunity to broaden where Comscore data is available across buying workflows and to connect planning, activation, and measurement more effectively. When combined with digital intelligence, this can support a more closed-loop approach to these activities in the largest digital buying platforms. Taken together, these opportunities show why our transformation matters. We are not changing for the sake of change. We are changing so that Comscore can focus its resources on opportunities with the potential to create meaningful long-term value for customers, employees, and shareholders.

Okay. I would now like to turn the call over to Comscore's Chief Financial Officer, Mary Margaret Curry, to discuss our second quarter financial results and the expected financial impact of our ROI strategy.

Thank you, Matt. Total revenue for the second quarter was $79.2 million, down 11.3% from the second quarter of 2025. On a pro forma basis, excluding revenue from our recently divested Movies business in both periods. Total revenue for the second quarter was $73 million, down $6.8 million, or 8.5%, from $79.8 million in the second quarter of last year. At a more granular level, Content & Ad Measurement revenue of $67.8 million was down 11.7% from the prior year quarter, driven by declines in both our Syndicated Audience and Cross-Platform offerings.

Syndicated Audience revenue of $55.2 million was down 13.6% from the year-ago quarter, driven largely by the divestiture of our Movies business, along with lower renewals in our national TV and syndicated digital offerings. Local TV also contributed to the decline, primarily due to a large one-time deliverable recognized in the second quarter of last year. Cross-Platform revenue of $12.5 million was down 2.1% compared to the year-ago quarter, driven by lower usage of our Proximic products, partially offset by growth from new business and our Comscore content measurement offering.

Research & Insight Solutions revenue of $11.5 million was down 9.2% from the second quarter of 2025, primarily due to lower renewals and the timing of certain deliveries. Adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter was $1.3 million, down 85% from $8.9 million in the prior year quarter, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 1.7% versus 10% last year. Our core operating expenses for the second quarter were $87.9 million, down 2.8% compared to the prior year quarter, primarily driven by lower employee compensation costs, which were partially offset by an increase in professional fees related to the Movies divestiture.

The Movies business, while non-core to Comscore's go-forward strategy, operated at a healthy margin and contributed to our adjusted EBITDA and cash flow results. In addition, the largest costs on our P&L are our data costs and employee compensation costs, both of which are somewhat fixed in nature. As a result, any underperformance on the top line has a disproportionate impact on the bottom line. The mismatch between revenue and costs, along with the Movies divestiture, have put additional pressure on our adjusted EBITDA margin and cash flow generation, which are currently challenged.

This is one of the many reasons why we've moved with speed to implement the ROI strategy, including the actions that were taken yesterday. As Matt said earlier, these results are not where we want them to be and are not a reflection of what this organization is capable of. So, for the balance of the year, we will be keenly focused on executing our transformational ROI strategy and will work to build a lasting foundation for value creation. The first step in the transformation was yesterday's implementation of the realignment plan, which we expect to generate between $20 million and $25 million in annual run rate cost savings upon completion.

The one-time costs associated with the plan, primarily related to severance and other employee-related costs are estimated to range between $7 million and $9 million, with the bulk of the costs expected to be paid by year-end. We plan to use a portion of these savings to hire key leaders that are critical to the ROI strategy, invest more meaningfully in our continuing employees, and fund other transformational initiatives. Given the divestiture of our Movies business and the significant transformation we are undertaking, we do not anticipate near-term growth.

Our outlook for the full year, 2026, now calls for revenue to be between $315 million and $325 million, with an adjusted EBITDA margin in the low to mid-single digits. We expect to enter 2027 with a leaner, more flexible cost model that will allow us to stabilize our business and plan for future growth. We look forward to sharing our progress on these initiatives later this fall during our third quarter earnings call.

With that, I'll turn the call back over to Matt.

Thank you, Mary Margaret. I'd like to quickly summarize and reiterate why we are taking such aggressive action now. Comscore is at a critical juncture. We need to make significant changes to how we operate in order to drive sustainable long-term growth. We are acting quickly, but not hastily. The ROI strategy is designed to give us a simple operating framework, a lower and more flexible cost base, improved organizational focus and execution culture, simplified operations, a more balanced portfolio approach to our stage-diverse opportunities, strategic product development mindset that guides our daily work, and a collective approach that drives long-term enterprise contribution.

We are well positioned to connect linear and digital content audiences and ad exposures through cross-channel intelligence that drives channel-level utility. The value of Comscore is not in measuring individual media channels. It is in combining all channels so we can derive intelligence from modern media consumption and then deliver the data and utility that customer workflows require. I'm pleased to see that some of the initial steps taken to focus the organization prior to establishing the ROI strategy are showing early but meaningful signs of progress.

New technical leadership and team alignment has delivered meaningful progress on our next generation audience measurement solution, which is long desired by the largest broadcast and buying enterprises. The solution is a large-scale data-driven platform. It combines real viewing behavior from millions of televisions with enhanced U.S. population modeling to provide more consistent national and local measurement across today's fragmented TV ecosystem. With our renewed focus and leadership, we are on track to begin testing this solution with some of our largest strategic TV opportunities this year.

Shifting to AI, new senior product management has organized disparate initiatives and validated them to identify the best strategies for Comscore's rich AI data. One of the clearest opportunities identified by this alignment exercise is in the emerging market of AEO, answer engine optimization, and generative engine optimization. AEO and GEO solutions help brands understand the visibility, citations and sentiment included in large language model responses. Today's platforms leverage synthetic prompts and the associated responses in order to derive these insights.

Comscore can enhance their intelligence by licensing the real-world consumer prompt and response information collected from our opt-in digital panel. Our data often has meaningful differences from computer-generated LLM activity because it accounts for actual consumer prompt behavior. The LLM response is crafted with respect to the cumulative totality of the user's interactions. We have validated the utility of our AI data for this use case with some of the leading AEO and GEO firms. We developed a commercial strategy for this value and have initiated negotiations with several of the leading AEO and GEO firms.

These early actions and seeds of progress as a result of focus, alignment, and strategic product thinking are demonstrative of the broader success we expect to deliver as a result of implementing the ROI strategy across all of Comscore. Despite the breadth of the changes we announced yesterday and today, our mission remains unchanged. We will set the standard for modern measurement. We can derive incredible intelligence from our comprehensive cross-channel media measurement and deliver substantial value to customers across the ecosystem by making it available to them within their existing and emerging workflows.

A more focused, more disciplined, and more scalable Comscore is how we will create durable value from applying our existing assets to our modern measurement mission. I'm excited to lead Comscore through this next phase. We will continue to share progress against our transformation plan in the coming quarters, and we appreciate your support as we execute against the opportunity ahead.

I would now like to turn the call over to the operator to open the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Jason Kreyer with Craig-Hallum.

This is Thomas on for Jason. Maybe first, can you talk about what's changing the trajectory of the top line performance? I know you touched on it a little bit, but specifically with Cross-Platform, where results changed pretty dramatically from last quarter. I'm kind of just trying to understand if there's a way any customer attrition occurred in the quarter, something like that.

Yes, I think it's -- thanks for joining the call. I think there is no one thing that we've identified related to this. I think we've all seen in the market sort of some of the noise around the activation space. Some of our biggest, the platforms that we're in have had similar results, which again, refocuses our attention on ensuring that we have our solutions in a diverse set of enterprise platforms so that the impact of any one platform doesn't dramatically impact our results. But I think it's really a combination of a variety of things that has led to the results that you're seeing. Okay.

Thank you. That makes sense. Maybe a follow-up on that. On the new product you mentioned, could you just walk us through what the new measurement solution will do differently for customers versus what's currently in the portfolio, both in its underlying methodology and maybe some insights it delivers, and maybe as testing with the larger TV opportunity called out, kind of progress through the year, what customer feedback or validation would support a broader commercial rollout of that?

Yes, so when we're talking about local TV ratings, or the new more flexible system, I think the benefit to customers is in the comprehensiveness of the solution, how many local markets it covers, and the alignment of a common methodology that uses our broad TV data measurement to produce local results that then roll up to accurate national results as well. So it's that combination of local measurement coverage in the number of markets and also the direct alignment with our national ratings that our customers are most excited about.

Sure. Maybe last one for me. What are the key milestones you think investors should be expecting to see over the next 2 or 3 quarters to demonstrate the strategic investments and portfolio changes that are hoping to translate into durable revenue growth and profitability?

Yes, I think over the next 2 to 3 quarters we're looking to execute this strategy and to see and to see just greater number of success around some of our initiatives, like we mentioned with local TV and AI. And I think we'll begin to see -- we will have a narrow focus on those opportunities that we are talking about between local TV, activation, expansion, creator, and AI.

We will continue to see progress and enhance commercial activity in those areas. I think as Mary Margaret talked about, as we enter 2027, we will see the full impact of the reduced expense -- operating expenses and that will create additional flexibility in how and where we invest.

And I'm not showing any further questions at this time. And as such, this does conclude today's presentation. We thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect and have a wonderful day.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the comScore Investor Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Kevin Burns, EVP Business Operations.

Thank you. Before we begin our prepared remarks, I'd like to remind all of you that the following discussion contains forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include comments about our plans, expectations and prospects and are based on our view as of today, June 10, 2026. Our actual results in future periods may differ materially from those currently expected because of a number of risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties include those outlined in our 10-K, 10-Q and other filings with the SEC, which you can find on our website or at www.sec.gov. We disclaim any duty or obligation to forward to update our forward-looking statements to reflect new information after today's call.

Please note that we will be referring to slides on this call, which are also available on our website. www.comscore.com under Investor Relations, Events and Presentations.

I'll now turn the call over to comScore's Chief Executive Officer, Matt McLaughlin. Matt?

Thank you, Kevin. Thanks, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. I'm excited to speak with you all about where comScore is going. So let's dive right in. My 20-year career in the digital ecosystem has been built around capturing and deriving utility from data, and that's what got me first interested in comScore. It's always been my impression as a partner, investor and Board member that comScore had one of the most robust data sets in the industry. As I get my first peek under the hood, I find myself more convinced than ever of the robustness of our data assets. Over the past 20 years, comScore has built a foundation, measuring hundreds of millions of desktop and mobile devices, nearly 200 million connected TV screens, more than 68 million linear TV screens and a digital panel of more than 1.5 million people. Collectively, that breadth of information gives us tremendous insight into real media consumption. That foundation is only as good as what you build on it.

ComScore has a proprietary intelligence layer, enabling the delivery of insights and value to our clients. That layer includes our device graph, local market definitions and the methodologies needed to turn raw data into meaningful and actionable insights. Over the past year, the company has focused on our financial foundation as well, and we've made substantial progress on that front. Here, I'd like to recognize my predecessor, John Carpenter, who oversaw the restructuring of our preferred capital and successfully executed the movies transaction at the end of May. His work was critical to this financial improvement.

The recapitalization transaction closed in late December. It eliminated more than $18 million in annual dividend obligations. Removing this ongoing annual obligation ends the balance sheet and dilution overhang that came from paying it, either in cash or shares. Beyond that, the recap created much stronger alignment between our common and preferred shareholders. More recently, we divested the comScore Movie business. Movies was a strong business, but ultimately not one that was central to our mission. Exiting that business allowed us to retire our senior debt and eliminate approximately $7 million a year in principal and interest payments. Retiring the debt also removed covenants that limited our financial flexibility opening up the opportunity to strategically realign and invest in the business.

We now enter a phase where the most critical task for the company is execution. We will leverage the foundation of improved financial flexibility and robust data assets to deliver the most value we can for our clients and shareholders. We will take concrete steps to address the challenges that face our business and leverage our assets to capture the largest of those opportunities. And with the recent changes, we now have a management team and board with the experience and focus to deliver.

Two weeks into my role as CEO, there's been a lot of learning. I've learned that we have some outstanding employees, who work relentlessly every day to deliver for our clients. I've seen firsthand the strong partnerships we have with our clients, who rely on our services to operate their businesses. I've also confirmed that the data foundation I saw from the outside is real and filled with potential. What's also clear to me is that we're not fully aligned around capitalizing on the largest opportunities in front of us. We have some real work to do to realign the company across our lines of business based on the market opportunities, growth forecasts and competitive sets. This realignment is strategically necessary to maximize the long-term value of our business. That much is clear to me.

What is less clear is exactly how this realignment will impact our 2026 financials. As a result, today, we're withdrawing our 2026 financial guidance until we're able to provide more details. You can expect to hear more from us about this plan on our Q2 earnings call this summer. I'd like to spend the remainder of this call talking about the opportunity in front of us, where we're going, and how we plan to operate.

comScore's mission is a clear one to be the standard for modern measurement. Doing that requires the channel level precision and cross-channel intelligence that are required for holistic media strategies. The media measurement market is being reinvented in real time. Streaming is overtaking traditional TV as the main mode of consumption for viewers. Creator content is commanding audiences that rival traditional media. AI is creating entirely new content and advertising formats. These aren't futures, these are emerging realities. I believe the company that defines measurement standards for these channels and integrates them into cross-channel intelligence will enjoy durable competitive advantages. comScore is well positioned for this opportunity with data assets, intelligent algorithms and client relationships built over decades. That foundation, combined with the organizational focus now in place, will allow us to execute with urgency as we work to set the standard for modern measurement.

One of the realities of our business is that we operate in media segments at very different life cycle stages. Given that it's going to be critical for us to effectively manage how we execute across these diverse parts of our portfolio. Internally, we're framing how we operate by identifying them as established and emerging channels. Established media channels are mature markets that are critical to the broader ecosystem today. Their operational practices and competitive environment are well known. We believe that there is opportunity for us here, both in enhancing the value of our data and to deliver financial results for shareholders. We will operate in these established channels with discipline, leveraging our product and market advantages to deliver those results. Emerging media channels are markets that have a combination of size and future growth that make them exceptionally important to the long-term media ecosystem. These segments have a mix of less mature measurement, new competitors, emerging opportunities and market vitality.

Many of these areas leverage data assets we build from our established media channels to deliver on this opportunity. In these segments, we plan to operate more aggressively to ensure that comScore is utilized as a standard for modern media measurement. In the process, we believe, we will create increased long-term value for customers and shareholders. While this is a simple framework, the reality is that things exist on a continuum. If you're looking at the slides, you'll see how we attribute the media segments we operate in today, with linear TV and open web digital falling into the established category, while connected TV programmatic and social slot into the emerging category.

Now I'd like to anchor this operational model around our current revenue lines. Syndicated audience is made up of linear TV and digital measurement. These are two key components of our business, both of which fall into the established media channels that I just spoke about. For our linear TV offering, the growth opportunity can be realized from gaining further adoption across broadcast owners and media buyers. We will prioritize with focus on our superior local TV product. I have confidence that there is continued opportunity to gain market share here. We will pursue those opportunities with discipline to ensure that the value of the data, financial results and future growth are fully balanced. Digital remains the doorway to understanding audience behavior and intent signals. We will continue to work on stabilizing our syndicated digital performance within the established channel of open web advertising.

It's important to note that the strategic value of our syndicated digital product must be considered both from the financial results it produces and the data intelligence, as many of our emerging channel opportunities are enabled in part by this data. Our cross-platform line primarily consists of emerging opportunities for comScore. The three core components of this business today are Proximic, CCR and CCM. Proximic is our audience activation business. I like to think of this as real-time impression-level media planning. comScore's data is embedded at the point of purchase, allowing advertisers to select those impressions most aligned with their desired outcomes. I have direct experience in scaling activation businesses, and I'm incredibly bullish on this part of our offering. Growth for Proximic is across multiple coordinated efforts. We will work to expand the roster of media platforms, where comScore services are available. We will capitalize on the emerging collection of audience and intent signals that we have access to. And finally, we'll focus on the daily operational practices that are critical to ensuring comScore's usage is consistently maximized in a dynamic buying environment.

CCR is our cross-channel campaign measurement product. Clients use it to optimize their campaigns in flight and evaluate the efficacy of their buys upon completion. In this way, CCR is closely tied to Proximic. Brands want closed-loop planning, analysis and optimization and the combination of Proximic activation and CCR measurement enables them to achieve that. CCM is our cross-channel content measurement product, measuring the consumption of content across media platforms. Said plainly, CCM provides a de-duplicated measurement of how many people watch to show regardless of whether they watched it via a linear TV or their favorite streaming service. It delivers holistic views of audiences across channels and facilitates planning action for both the buy and the sell side. Doing this allows clients to understand the broad impact that each channel has on their total audience. It's especially valued for its ability to determine where clients are reaching new audiences, and where they're reaching the same audience multiple times. This understanding is foundational to planning and executing more effective media buys and maximizing monetization for content owners.

Research & Insight Solutions is what we often refer to as our custom business. Here, our offering is based on leveraging our large-scale data set and advanced methodologies to deliver bespoke solutions. These include tailored data feeds for platform intelligence, industry-specific insights into consumer behavior and intent and brand lift studies that quantify the impact of an ad campaign. Going forward, we plan to focus our Research & Insight Solutions on becoming the best partners we can be to the largest media platforms. Consumer behavior and the media ecosystem continue to shift toward large platforms like streaming providers, retail media networks and other owned and operated media platforms. Our objective is to be a long-term intelligence provider that helps them operate. Custom solutions provide bespoke intelligence designed specifically for each platform's content and audience. This enables their understanding of how they fit into the context of the broader media environment, which further enables them to price, package and position their content, media and audiences more effectively.

Looking ahead to the remainder of 2026, we're going to be focused on three things: Driving performance in key segments of the business, optimizing the portfolio and investing in what's next. The previous description of how we'll operate across our three current revenue lines is exactly what I mean by driving performance. We will execute against the largest near-term opportunities of our current solutions to deliver as much value for clients and shareholders as we can this year. Portfolio optimization is the process of evaluating the segments, markets and customer sets where we operate. Optimization is intended to produce alignment of our resources to ensure we're operating with the right financial results within the emerging and established segments of our portfolio. Portfolio optimization can also enable us to accelerate our investment in the largest opportunities. Those that sit at the intersection of our unique data footprint and the changing media market. To help you frame this, the balance of this presentation will talk about two of the most important opportunities for our long-term value.

First, I want to talk about the creator market. The creator market is large and growing quickly, projected to account for nearly $15 billion in ad spending by 2028. It is expected to grow faster than CTV and programmatic over that same time. Now when I say creators, I'm talking about the people and artists producing content that is typically long form in nature, often developed outside of a traditional studio environment. This content is distributed on YouTube and similar platforms, and it's increasingly watched on TVs in addition to mobile devices. If we look at the top 3 creators in March, you can see that their scale is beginning to rival studio-produced content. Just these three creators accounted for more than 1 billion minutes of viewing time that month, slightly more than a widely distributed show like Law and Order. These audiences are increasingly large and are also multigenerational. While the stereo type for creators is that their audience is mostly Gen Z and Gen Alpha, these three creators in March reached an audience where nearly half was over the age of 35. The core opportunity here is integrating these creators and others like them with the broader media ecosystem.

Integrating creator media means connecting these creators and their audiences to the measurement and planning infrastructure that powers primary media planning workflows. This process exposes these creator audiences to new advertisers and their budgets. It also helps those advertisers evaluate the relationship of their creator spend with that in other channels. This is why comScore is focused on turning creator media into plantable media. This means aligning measurement with premium video standards for the benefit of the participants. For creators, it helps them demonstrate the unique value of their audiences and access new brands and budgets. For advertisers, this ship helps them plan media buys that reach more of the audiences they care about as part of their primary media budgets. It also helps them evaluate creator media, and how it complements their activity in other channels.

The easiest way for me to demonstrate what I mean here is with some real data. This is comScore data that our partner, UPROXX use during upfronts. It allowed them to help advertisers understand the unique incremental audience they deliver when combined with linear and CTV buying. If you're not familiar, UPROXX is a full-service creative solutions agency. They also are the exclusive U.S. sales representative for Warner Music Group's, YouTube music video inventory. What this data shows is that when advertisers added up box media to their linear and CTV campaigns, they're reaching more of the consumers they desire, not paying to reach the same people in two places. Even when added to another leading music service with similar content, UPROXX was able to deliver more than 50% incremental audience, ultimately being able to evaluate creator content alongside the rest of the media ecosystem helps advertisers reach the right audiences more efficiently, while also helping creators articulate the value of their audiences to those advertisers. This opportunity, making creator media plannable, is a massive one that's growing quickly. By making creator audiences a coequal part of the ecosystem, comScore is putting these emerging audiences in the context needed for advertisers to include them in their media plans.

comScore's data foundation is what makes this possible. Census data provides scale, panel data provides precision, and it comes together to help creators deliver more efficient outcomes for advertisers. Second emerging area I want to spend some time talking about is AI. Consumer usage of AI tools is the next frontier for unlocking intent signals. And this is a space where comScore has tremendous data. Our opt-in digital panel allows us to see real users and their actual AI prompts and responses. Leveraging that comprehensive data, we're able to surface the intent embedded within this activity. As I just mentioned, comScore has a unique data advantage in this space and our 1.5 million person digital panel. It allows us to observe real usage of AI rather than the synthetically generated data used by many others. This is the difference between data that says I think, and data that says, I know how consumers are using AI, and how content is being consumed by it.

With our panel, we're capturing what you see on the left side of this slide. the prompt the user entered response given by the AI tool and the cited data sources within that response. After capturing those signals, we can produce the intelligent outputs most useful for our clients. That can include AI intent audiences for programmatic advertisers, enabling them to reach consumers based on these signals. For publishers, it means providing audience insights and citation impact analysis, allowing them to optimize their strategy for a world where AI is fundamentally changing discovery. This unique data, intelligence and utility advantage positions comScore ideally to enable our clients to improve revenue from AI. We can help them achieve things like higher CPMs for publishers, incremental reach through audience extension and improved advertiser outcomes and efficiency via AI-informed media audiences.

Now it's hard to talk about the AI opportunity for comScore without appearing like we're trying to ride the massive hype wave that comes along with this transformative technology. Despite that risk, our belief is that this is a fundamental shift in how intent is expressed by consumers and one that has massive implications for the media world. More exciting for comScore, we are well positioned to deliver on this opportunity with the truly unique data assets needed to understand user intent and use it to inform our solutions.

Creator and AI Media are at the very core of what it means for comScore to set the standard for modern measurement. We're integrating creator content and audiences across the media ecosystem. This matures advertising activity within these channels from transactional buying in an interesting but isolated channel into a coordinated future where cross-channel strategy informs coordinated outcomes. We're leveraging our robust data foundation to surface audience intent signals from AI activity. While AI Media is nascent, I believe that this is the beginning of the most significant transformation in intent signaling since the development of the search engine. Combining these emerging spaces with our established business is precisely what we mean by setting the standard for modern measurement. The past year for comScore has been focused on financial flexibility, and we've made tremendous progress. Now our responsibility is to ensure that we're building on that foundation based on a clear mission and a focused portfolio. That means optimizing our execution in established segments and investing in the emerging spaces to deliver long-term growth and value.

The largest opportunities ahead lie at an intersection, one where the priorities of our brand and content owner clients overlaps with the advantages of our robust data foundation and intelligence insights. I'm excited to have the opportunity to lead the team at comScore that will work to capture those opportunities. Thank you for attending this presentation and your interest in comScore.

With that, let's open it up for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Jason Kreyer with Craig-Hallum.

Welcome, Matt. I look forward to working with you going forward.

Thanks, Jason. Likewise.

I wanted to ask about just the comScore structure. Obviously, we've gone through several years without change. And then now we just completed probably the last 6 months with a lot of change. So curious your perspective on the crude structure of comps for today, should we kind of go forward with an understanding that this is the optimal structure? Or should we continue to anticipate more changes on the horizon?

Jason, I think I'm focused on ensuring we deliver the most value. And being two weeks in, I think we've identified change. And given some insight into how we're going to realign our organization against the opportunities ahead of us, but being only two weeks in, we don't have a full plan that we're ready to share today about exactly the scope. So there's certainly going to be more to come. We are all digging in and focused on this every day. But yes, you can continue to see us refine exactly how we're operating in order to capture the biggest opportunities for the long term.

Fair enough. Appreciate that. you've talked about around $7 million in savings from eliminating the debt, how should we think about priorities as it comes to cash flow? I mean should we expect more investment in the emerging segment? Are you focused on kind of optimizing that for future cash flow? Just curious what the priorities are.

Yes. It's -- I mean, we really view it as a portfolio approach. And we have -- because we have such a tremendous history servicing the media industry. That means we have a wide variety of segments of our business that are in various stages of development. And I think the most important thing for us as an organization is to align our resources and spend the cash appropriately within each of those segments. Where we see large massive growing future opportunity, you can expect to see us to invest in order to ensure we capture it. We don't want to be left behind. In a more mature market, that's more stable, we will be more circumspect in how we operate to ensure we're delivering the appropriate financial results. So it's really going to be a balance of the portfolio to ensure the overall health in both the short term and the long term.

So with that, I think you've got some really interesting solutions, Proximic and CCR and CCM. Growth historically has bounced around a little bit, really good numbers for Q1. As you've refined the focus for comScore, do you expect that we can kind of maintain the rapid level of growth that we saw at the start of the year?

I think that's our objective. We definitely have some work to do in the areas I mentioned, growth in programmatic comes from primarily three things: One, how available are you in the various platforms within the ecosystem. That is a long-term development objective. Those relationships take multiple years to develop, and you're really sort of, to some extent, have to be a partner and understand the partner's objective in order to enable your services there. Number two is what the data and utility of the data that's actually enabled within those platforms. So when I think about things like AI intent signals, those are things that we can use to enhance the data offerings within our existing integrations. So that's another leg of growth. The third leg is really through the daily operational practice. This is a very hands-on market where buyers are making decisions and trafficking activity each and every day and ensuring that we're communicating with buyers at the programmatic agencies and with the platforms themselves is critical to continuing to maximize revenue. So we're going to focus the programmatic organization on all three of those things. I think there's opportunity in all three of those areas, but they come at different times. So of course, our objective is to continue to see growth. We have three clear tasks on how to do that, and we'll continue to work on that this year and in the future.

I appreciate that. One last one for me, just on AI. You talked about data ingestion, can you expand a little bit more on the uniqueness of the data ingestion if you've got relationships with some of these LLM for that ingestion or if that just comes from kind of the historic kind of syndicated capabilities or panel capabilities you have? And then from an outcome perspective, kind of a similar question, but are you engaging with in these LLMs on how to help them improve and create better outcomes?

Sure. Yes, today, look, this is a nascent industry, and what you've seen -- what I've seen in my career for some of the new emerging channels is when they're offering media, they start simple sponsorships and things like that and then enhance their offerings over time. And that's what we're seeing from the AI platforms. And we expect them to continue to migrate towards more outcome-oriented advertising campaigns as time progresses. From our perspective, the data captured is a result of the level of granularity we have within our digital panel. We are going to do some work to ensure that we have full capture of both the query information and the AI responses. And so we're capturing it today. There's other additional work we can do to ensure the robustness of it. But it is a natural result of having a digital panel and capturing real people's web usage with it.

Thank you. This concludes the conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

Good day, everyone, and welcome to comScore Fourth Quarter 2025 Financial Results. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this conference is being recorded. Now I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Kevin Burns, EVP of Business Operations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Before we begin our prepared remarks, I'd like to remind all of you the following discussion contains forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include comments about our plans, expectations and prospects and are based on our view as of today, March 17, 2026.

Our actual results in future periods may differ materially from those currently expected because of a number of risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties include those outlined in our 10-K, 10-Q and other filings with the SEC, which you can find on our website or at www.sec.gov. We disclaim any duty or obligation to update our forward-looking statements to reflect new information after today's call.

We will be discussing non-GAAP measures during this call, for which we've provided reconciliations in today's press release and on our website. Please note that we will be referring to slides on this call, which are also available on our website, www.comscore.com, under Investor Relations, Events and Presentations.

I'll now turn the call over to comScore's Chief Executive Officer, Jon Carpenter. Jon?

Good evening, and thank you for joining us. 2025 was a solid year with meaningful progress as we further developed our leading cross-platform capabilities, all to achieve our objective of becoming the industry standard for modern measurement. Revenue for the full year was just over $357 million and adjusted EBITDA came in at $42 million, both ahead of 2024 performance. This was driven by 24% growth in our cross-platform solutions, along with double-digit growth in our local TV offering.

Throughout the year, we had a number of important wins. One that I want to highlight is the launch of CCM, our cross-platform content measurement capability. CCM gives clients a more complete picture of the audience for any piece of content, whether it was viewed on linear TV, CTV or mobile device, all at the title level. Some of the largest broadcasters and technology companies in the world have already signed on, and we believe we're just scratching the surface.

We've also deepened our relationships with the largest media companies, those that command the vast majority of ad dollars. Our cross-platform measurement solutions helped drive nearly 25% year-over-year growth across key technology clients. Additionally, our local business continued to execute at a high level, anchoring our cross-platform capability while delivering significant value to our broadcast network and agency partners, contributing to double-digit year-over-year growth.

Beyond our commercial execution, we made meaningful progress simplifying our capital structure. At year-end, we closed a pivotal recapitalization with our preferred shareholders. The transaction eliminated $18 million in annual dividends, a $47 million special dividend obligation and our preferred holders also converted roughly $80 million in preferred shares into common shares at an attractive premium. And we were able to reduce the size of our Board, streamlining both costs and governance. This was an important first step, and we remain focused on continuing to simplify our business and strengthen our balance sheet as we move through 2026.

I am proud of how our teams executed in 2025, and I'm excited about building on that momentum. But before I talk about where we're going, it's worth grounding everyone on where we've been. comScore has always led with innovation. We were the first company to make digital audiences measurable at scale. While others are only now figuring out how to combine big data and panels, comScore pioneered that work more than a decade ago.

We also led the industry shift to big data TV audience measurement, giving us over 10 years of experience delivering stable measurement that reflects how people actually watch television. That history matters because it speaks to what comScore does when the industry is at an inflection point, and we're at one right now. The media landscape has fundamentally changed. Attention is fragmenting across AI-driven environments, platforms continue to wall off their data and creators across social platforms now command audience share that rivals traditional media. These shifts create a real challenge for advertisers, and they expose the limits of legacy measurement approaches.

Our response is clear, become the defining standard for modern measurement. That means building a fully integrated flywheel connecting our offerings across planning, activation, buying and measurement with common metrics across the board. When our products work together, our clients can navigate this complexity with confidence rather than confusion.

CCM is a clear example of this action. It allows advertisers to evaluate audiences for social creators alongside ad-supported connected television and linear TV and to plan true cross-platform campaigns from a single unified view. This is the flywheel capability that we're building. I look forward to sharing more -- looking ahead, we're also bringing forward innovation in AI measurement, an area that is only going to grow in importance for our clients. The early work here includes measuring which sources, LLMs and AI search tools are citing, how these tools are changing the way consumers discover brands and products and perhaps most importantly, how they're changing the way consumers make purchase decisions.

What differentiates comScore is how we get this data. Our unique digital panel assets allow us to directly observe millions of AI search and AI chatbot interactions every single month. When we provide clients with single insights into how these tools are reshaping their businesses, it's based on real observed behavior, not just assumptions. CCM, AI measurement, a connected product flywheel. Our work in these areas is evidence that we're delivering all in service of one goal, establishing comScore as the standard for modern measurement. We look forward to sharing more about our progress and strategy with you throughout 2026.

Now I'll turn it over to Mary Margaret to take you through our 2025 results.

Thank you, Jon. Total revenue for the year was $357.5 million, up 0.4% from $356 million in 2024 and in line with the guidance we gave on last quarter's earnings call. Content & Ad Measurement revenue of $304.3 million was up 1% from 2024, driven by growth in our cross-platform and local TV offerings. Cross-platform revenue of $50.3 million was up 24.4% compared to the prior year, driven by higher usage of our Proximic and CCR products, along with the successful rollout of CCM.

Syndicated audience revenue of $253.9 million was down 2.6% from 2024, driven by declines in our national TV and syndicated digital offerings partially offset by growth from our other syndicated offerings, including double-digit growth in local TV from higher renewals and new business. Our movies business also posted solid growth, generating $38.4 million of revenue in 2025, up 3.4% from the prior year.

Research & Insights Solutions revenue of $53.2 million was down 3.1% from 2024, primarily due to lower deliveries of certain custom digital products, partially offset by new business from our consumer brand health products. Adjusted EBITDA for the year was $42 million, up 2.6% from 2024, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 11.8%. These results are largely driven by our intentional decision-making around spend, which we calibrated throughout the year to align with our revenue expectations. Our core operating expenses for 2025 were up 1% year-over-year, primarily driven by an increase in employee incentive compensation, higher revenue share costs and higher panel costs, partially offset by lower data costs, most notably from the amendment we signed at the end of 2024 related to our data license agreement with Charter.

We also made targeted investments in 2025, which contributed to the increase in operating expenses. As we've discussed on prior calls, we're focused on investing in areas that have the greatest potential to either accelerate top line growth or streamline our operations. In 2025, we invested in enhancing our cross-platform product suite and related sales teams, improving our panel footprint and integrating AI across the company, among other things. We believe these investments will continue to provide benefits to our business going forward.

Our fourth quarter results tell a similar story with a couple of distinctions that I'll call out. Total revenue for the fourth quarter was $93.5 million, down 1.5% from $94.9 million the same quarter a year ago. Content & Ad Measurement revenue of $78.8 million was down 2.7% from 2024, primarily driven by lower revenue from our national TV and syndicated digital products, partially offset by growth from our cross-platform offerings.

As Jon mentioned on our last earnings call, we expected cross-platform growth in the fourth quarter to be impacted by a strategy shift of one of our large retail media clients. This turned out to be the case, resulting in cross-platform revenue growth of just under 10% in Q4, lower than the growth we saw in previous quarters. We expect this to pick back up in 2026 with double-digit growth in cross-platform projected for the year. Our movies business generated revenue of $9.9 million in the quarter, resulting in 5.5% growth over Q4 of 2024.

Research & Insights Solutions revenue of $14.6 million increased 5.3% from the prior year quarter, primarily due to new business from our consumer brand health products. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $14.7 million, up 3.3% from the prior year quarter, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 15.7%. Our core operating expenses were down 4.4% compared to the fourth quarter of 2024, primarily due to lower employee compensation and data costs, partially offset by higher rev share costs.

Looking ahead to 2026, we believe our revenue and adjusted EBITDA performance will continue to follow the trends we saw in 2025. We expect our cross-platform offerings, along with continued local TV adoption to play a significant role in shaping our business for 2026. As I mentioned earlier, we expect to see continued double-digit growth from our cross-platform offerings in 2026, which should offset the declines that we anticipate from our national TV and syndicated digital products. As such, we expect revenue in the first quarter of 2026 to be roughly flat compared to the first quarter of 2025.

We also plan to continue making investments in key areas of the business with the goal of driving top line growth and streamlining our operations while remaining disciplined with overall spend as we work to improve our cash flow. We believe the recapitalization transaction was the first step in our strategy to transform comScore, putting us in a better position to evaluate additional strategic actions that have the potential to further streamline our capital structure, enhance our financial profile, unlock growth and simplify our business, all of which can contribute to generating cash flow and driving shareholder value. We plan to provide an update on our progress, along with our financial outlook for the rest of the year on our next earnings call.

With that, I'll turn it back over to the operator for questions.

[Operator Instructions] It comes from the line of Jason Kreyer with Craig-Hallum.

Just wanted to see if you can talk a little bit about the financial flexibility. With the structural changes that have been put in place in the business over the last few months, how does that open up kind of strategic flexibility or changes to how you want to run the business going forward?

Jason, thanks. Yes, as we move forward, I mean, I think one of the key elements here overall is just freeing up, again, $18 million in dividends that the preferred holders were entitled to, not having that obligation on a go-forward basis, better positions the company moving forward. I think some of the actions that the preferred holders took to reduce the size of the Board as part of that transaction that we announced helps us take down costs associated with running the Board. So I think both those things bode well in terms of freeing up the balance sheet to continue investing in the products that are going to drive the most meaningful growth going forward, namely our cross-platform execution.

Good to hear. Maybe staying on the cross-platform topic. Curious if you kind of can talk about the last several months, your ability to increase utilization of existing partners with your cross-platform solutions and then maybe a little bit of context on your ability to add new partners to cross-platform.

Yes. I think it's been a nice combination of both increased usage of our cross-platform audience product, Proximic across the client set. We are continuing to expand partnerships. We did so in the fourth quarter. We'll continue to do so and hope to be able to announce those in short order as we go through the early part of 2026 in terms of how the partnerships on the audience, the cross-platform audience capabilities is expanding.

And then I'd just say on the cross-platform measurement products, CCM, really encouraged by the early adoption across the client set of that product really from launch through the end of the year, and we continue to see usage headed in the right direction on that front. And we still have a number of product features and enhancements that we're going to continue to roll out over the course of 2026.

All right. Good to hear more to come there. One last one for me. Just on the local side of the business, it seems that market is evolving, maybe creating more of a role for comScore. Just wondering what your thoughts are on the local market as we go forward.

Yes. I think certainly, in the traditional sense, the currency conversations continue to go very well for us in terms of those clients that are looking to transact more holistically against the comScore offering. We had some really good success on that over 2025 and the early readout in 2026 on -- as the renewals have come through, we fully anticipate that continuing.

And then I just think as the world evolves to more audience-based buying across the ecosystem, we remain really the only place you can go to buy local audiences, local advanced audiences or specific local advanced targeting at the local market level at any meaningful scale. And as that side of the business continues to accelerate, that plays right into our wheelhouse. And of course, as you know, that product anchors our cross-platform capability, which really helps drive the overall robustness of what we're able to do in terms of attaching audiences, whether it be traditional linear to digital at a hyperlocal level, incredibly impactful. Steve, do you have anything else to add on local at all?

No, I think that's totally in alignment.

As I see no other questions in the queue, I will conclude this session and pass it back to Mr. Jon Carpenter for final remarks.

Great. Thank you. I'd like to just take a minute to thank our employees for their continued work to help us deliver for our clients. And further, I'd just like to thank our investors and clients for their continued trust and partnerships. Thanks, everyone, for joining us this evening, and I'm sure we'll be talking soon. Have a good night.

Thank you. And this concludes our conference. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Comscore Third Quarter 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference call is being recorded.

I would like to hand over the conference call to our first speaker, Kevin Burns, Executive Vice President for Business Operations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Before we begin our prepared remarks, I'd like to remind all of you that the following discussion contains forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include comments about our plans, expectations and prospects, and are based on our view as of today, November 4, 2025.

Our actual results in future periods may differ materially from those currently expected because of a number of risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties include those outlined in our 10-K, 10-Q and other filings with the SEC, which you can find on our website or at www.sec.gov. We disclaim any duty or obligation to update our forward-looking statements to reflect new information after today's call.

We will be discussing non-GAAP measures during this call, for which we have provided reconciliations in today's press release and on our website. Please note that we will be referring to slides on this call, which are also available on our website, www.comscore.com, under Investor Relations, Events and Presentations.

I'll now turn the call over to Comscore's Chief Executive Officer, Jon Carpenter. Jon?

Good evening, and thank you for joining us. For the third quarter, we generated just under $89 million in revenues, slightly up year-over-year and driven by continued solid double-digit growth in key strategic areas of our business.

For starters, we delivered another strong print in local with double-digit growth that continues to highlight our product strength in measuring audiences at a hyperlocal level across platforms.

Second, and despite a shift in strategy from a large retail media client, we delivered 20% year-over-year growth in cross-platform. Absent this shift, which we believe is unrelated to our product, but does have a second half impact on the revenue, our cross-platform business was up 35% in the quarter and demonstrates that clients across the media industry are turning to us for our suite of cross-platform audience, planning and measurement capabilities.

These cross-platform capabilities are fueled by our unmatched data integrations across CTV, social, traditional TV and digital, which, when coupled with our intellectual property, enables us to deliver high-quality, differentiated cross-platform results for our clients.

At our core, our goal is to enable cross-platform performance for our clients. We do that by giving them the measurement data, audience intelligence and privacy forward solutions they need to plan, target and execute effective ad campaigns that deliver the outcomes that their businesses demand. In other cases, our solutions help clients articulate the unique audiences that are engaging with specific pieces of content at the show and episode level and allow for more effective packaging, planning and monetization of content to advertisers.

With our staggering data footprint, Comscore is measuring the audiences that matter most to help our clients get the performance and outcomes that matter to their businesses. And we do this with solutions like Comscore Content Measurement, which gives advertisers and media owners a unified view of audience behavior across screens in a way that they've never had before, letting them understand reach and engagement across content without duplication.

We've built CCM in close collaboration with leading publishers, broadcasters and agencies to directly address the industry's biggest unmet needs in content measurement and planning, delivering the transparency and comparability that the market has been asking for.

Comscore Content Measurement solves one of the industry's most persistent and long-standing problems, fragmented measurement and positions Comscore as the company that can finally bridge linear and digital truthfully and at scale.

CCM launched earlier this year, and we've already seen a number of clients leaning in, signing long-term contracts, which is a strong endorsement of this innovative solution, which we continue to see accelerate.

The next step with this offering is something that we just launched in beta, measuring deduplicated, exclusive and overlapping reach for specific programs and episodes. Program and episode level clarity takes the top-level view of audience behavior that CCM provided at launch down to a granular view of what audiences are actually engaging with. Clients can now see where attention spikes or fades across individual shows, seasons or movies, helping ground decisions for buyers and sellers with trusted independent data measuring real viewer behavior.

For content owners, it provides the evidence base to greenlight new seasons, renew deals and better price and package content for advertisers, distributors and licensing partners, ultimately driving incremental revenue opportunities.

And for advertisers and agencies, it informs smarter media planning by showing exactly which programs and episodes attract their target audiences.

Comscore is uniquely positioned to deliver these granular insights, combining our unparalleled data assets, partner relationships and independence to bring a new level of precision and transparency to content measurement. The quick progress that our team has made in building out impactful features like this in our content measurement product is especially exciting because it's tangible evidence that the transformation we've been undertaking has been successful.

Before I hand it over to Mary Margaret, and as we previously disclosed in September, we announced an agreement that the company had reached with its preferred shareholders that once voted on and approved by our shareholders, has a number of features that we believe are beneficial to our common stockholders.

Among other benefits, the agreement includes the elimination of more than $18 million in annual preferred dividends, the cancellation of a $47 million special dividend obligation, the reduction in our overall Board size and in the number of preferred designees on our Board and the exchange of more than $80 million in preferred stock for common stock at a significant premium to the 90-day trading price as of our signing in September.

These benefits, along with other changes outlined in our proxy filing, bring us a lot closer to a united stockholder base with better alignment of interest between preferred and common stockholders. In addition, this arrangement, if approved, gives us greater financial flexibility to invest in our products and technology to help drive growth. We encourage our shareholders to vote in favor of this transaction and look forward to updating you all on our 2026 outlook when we get back together in the early part of next year.

With that, why don't I hand it to Mary Margaret for further details on Q3 and our end of year outlook.

Thank you, Jon. Total revenue for the third quarter was $88.9 million, up 0.5% from $88.5 million the same quarter a year ago.

Content and ad measurement revenue of $75.5 million was up 0.3% from the prior year quarter, driven by growth in our cross-platform and local TV offerings. Cross-platform revenue of $12.3 million was up 20.2% compared to the prior year, driven by higher usage of our Proximic and Comscore Campaign Ratings solutions as well as the continued adoption of Comscore Content Measurement, which launched earlier this year.

As Jon mentioned, cross-platform growth in the third quarter was impacted by a strategy shift of one of our large retail media clients, which we expect will impact the fourth quarter as well.

Syndicated audience revenue of $63.2 million was down 2.8% compared to the prior year quarter, driven by declines in our national TV and syndicated digital products, partially offset by growth from our other syndicated offerings, including double-digit growth in local TV from higher renewals and new business.

Our movies business also remained strong, generating $9.5 million of revenue in the third quarter, up 1.9% from the prior year.

Research and Insights Solutions revenue of $13.4 million was up 1.4% from Q3 of '24, primarily due to new business in the quarter, including revenue from the launch of a new AI measurement solution, which was partially offset by lower renewals and the timing of certain deliveries.

Adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter was $11 million, down 11.1% from the prior year quarter, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 12.4%.

While we remain disciplined in our cost execution, our core operating expenses increased in the third quarter, primarily driven by higher employee incentive compensation accruals this year, which are based on expected full year performance.

We also continue to transform how we operate and invest in new products and capabilities, which have an impact on our financial results. These investments include enhancements to existing products, upgrades to our tech stack, providing faster data delivery and increasing interoperability as we continue to roll out key integrations.

Based on current trends and expectations, we are revising our full year revenue guidance to be roughly flat with the prior year. Our previous guidance was based on the expectation that growth from our cross-platform solutions would exceed the declines we anticipated from our syndicated digital and national TV products.

As I mentioned, our cross-platform revenue in the third quarter was impacted by the strategy shift of one of our customers. We expect this shift to also have an impact on revenue in the fourth quarter. And while we still expect to see solid double-digit growth in cross-platform revenue, we have tempered our expectations for the quarter and the full year. We remain encouraged by the growth we're seeing in our cross-platform and local TV offerings and believe that momentum from continued adoption will provide additional growth opportunities as we head into 2026. We are maintaining our adjusted EBITDA guidance for the full year with an anticipated margin of 12% to 15%.

With that, let's open it up for any questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Jason Kreyer from Craig-Hallum Capital Group.

This is Cal on for Jason. So maybe just to start, can you just provide some additional color on the large retail media advertiser that shifted away from Proximic and what kind of went into that decision?

Cal, it's Jon. This impacted the Proximic business primarily in one of our largest programmatic platforms. And yes, it was a large retail media client who has access to a tremendous amount of first-party data and access to a platform outside of one of the major platforms that we're operating in and has taken advantage of that shift.

And it's something that was a headwind down the stretch in the third quarter, and we anticipate seeing it again in the fourth quarter. We anticipate it being short term in nature. But given the timing of the year, we had to make a call on the full year number.

Got you. And then just curious what you're seeing in the pipeline there that gives confidence that the cross-platform growth opportunities can more than replace this lost revenue as we look to 2022?

Yes. I mean I think the combination of our suite of offerings here between Proximic's capabilities, coupled with the cross-platform ad measurement half of a product like CCR that throughout this year continued to perform incredibly well. Those 2 things alone complement each other incredibly well.

And now we've layered on our content measurement capability with CCM. And as we talked about on the -- in the prepared remarks, CCM has really taken off. We launched it in January. It wasn't fully featured out, and we immediately saw really strong engagement.

We've signed, as I mentioned in my notes, a number of new long-term deals with major partners and the pipeline for that product is incredibly encouraging. And so I think the combination of our full suite of cross-platform capabilities is really unmatched compared to the rest of the measurement marketplace, and we're going to continue to lean into the investment that we put forward on some of those, and we fully anticipate it to continue to pay off.

Perfect. That makes sense. Maybe next for me, there's been some reports that one of your large competitors will no longer measure local TV stations that are not subscribers. So just curious how this can benefit adoption given your leading capabilities in local and if you've seen any benefit materialize in the market to date?

Yes. Thanks. Look, our prowess in local measurement across channels is certainly one of this company's great strengths. And I think you see that in the result quarter after quarter here with double-digit growth in our local offering.

We continue to invest in that capability to support not just our local broadcast partners, but to support our cross-platform capability. And we're highly confident in the quality of that product and the stability that clients get when they engage with our offering, particularly on the traditional, call it, TV currency side of things. And so I fully expect us to continue to benefit from the strength of that product.

Great. And then maybe last for me. Should it ultimately be approved, can you just kind of discuss how the recapitalization improves your EBITDA to free cash flow conversion? And what some of the points of emphasis might be for investments given the additional resources?

Yes. I think we're excited about what this agreement does for common shareholders. I outlined some of the benefits of this for our common shareholder base. I encourage people to go to our proxy filing for additional details on that and as we get into the '26 discussion. And again, like I said, we're encouraging people to approve this. And once approved, I'd be happy to share more detail on the benefit beyond what I articulated on the call today.

I'm showing no further questions at this time. This concludes our Q&A. I would like to turn it back to Jon Carpenter, CEO of Comscore.

Great. Thanks. I'd just like to recognize and thank our employees for their continued hard work here at Comscore and what they do to deliver every day for our clients. Further, I'd like to thank our investors and our clients for their continued trust and partnership. Thanks, everyone, for joining us this evening, and we'll be talking soon.

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.