TEGNA Inc. (NYSE:TGNA) Q3 2023 Earnings Conference Call November 7, 2023 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Julie Heskett - Senior Vice President Financial Planning & Analysis & Head of Investor Relations

Dave Lougee - President & Chief Executive Officer

Victoria Harker - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Dan Kurnos - The Benchmark Company

Steven Cahall - Wells Fargo

Craig Huber - Huber Research Partners

James Goss - Barrington Research

Operator

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to TEGNA's Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentations, there'll be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Julie Heskett, Senior Vice President Financial Planning and Analysis, and Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Julie Heskett

Thank you. Good morning and welcome to our third quarter conference call and webcast. Today, our President and CEO, Dave Lougee; and our CFO, Victoria Harker will review TEGNA's financial performance and results and discuss TEGNA's quarter-ahead outlook. After that we'll open the call for questions.

Hopefully, you've had the opportunity to review our third quarter earnings results. If you have not yet seen a copy of the release, it's available at tegna.com. Before we get started, I'd like to remind you that this conference call and webcast includes forward-looking statements and our actual results may differ. Factors that may cause them to differ are outlined in our SEC filings. This presentation also includes certain non-GAAP financial measures. We have provided reconciliations of those measures in the most directly comparable GAAP measures in the press release.

With that, let me turn the call over to Dave.

Dave Lougee

Thank you, Julie, and good morning, everyone. TEGNA's third quarter results reflect our business plan, centered on continuing to enhance performance, optimizing operational efficiency and driving long-term value for our shareholders. We achieved a record third quarter for subscription revenue and saw sequential improvement in advertising and marketing services revenue, driven by improving trends in key verticals such as auto and services.

In addition to these strong underlying results, we also completed our initial $300 million of accelerated share repurchases or ASR. We completed that ASR at the end of August earlier than anticipated. Despite a limited trading window, we were able to quickly purchase shares opportunistically in the open market. This increases our capital commitment this year to return nearly $800 million to shareholders. I'll talk more capital return actions and our advantaged positioning in a couple of moments.