Meredith Corporation (MDP)

UBS 40th Annual Global Media and Communications Conference Transcript

December 4, 2012 2:30 PM ET

Executives

Stephen Lacy - Chairman and CEO

Joe Ceryanec - Chief Financial Officer

Analysts

Chris - UBS

Presentation

Chris - UBS

Okay. Good afternoon everyone to the Meredith Corp. presentation. Today we are lucky to have joined us Stephen Lacy, the Chairman and CEO; and Joe Ceryanec, the CFO of Meredith. We are going to have some time left over after about a half hour presentation for Q&A, so please be ready with your questions. Stephen?

Stephen Lacy

Thank you very much, [Chris], and good afternoon, everyone. We certainly appreciate the opportunity to be here and share some insight about the Meredith Corporation. The video that you just saw is the light show that’s playing on the front of Saks Fifth Avenue for this holiday season. It was produced by an affiliate of Meredith Xcelerated Marketing, a company that did similar work last year for Saks Fifth Avenue as well.

Before getting started I want to take a moment to remind everyone that this presentation does include certain forward-looking statements. This is simply a reminder of the factors that could impact our business and its results over time.

Here is a quick look at our agenda for this afternoon. I’ll begin with a brief overview of Meredith then discuss our top priorities in our National Media Group. Chief Financial Officer, Joe Ceryanec will speak to our Local Media Group growth initiative and detail our financial strategy.

Here are three important points to remember about Meredith through our discussion this afternoon. First of all, we’ve build a strong media and marketing company with trusted national brands and an unrivaled reach to the female consumer, a leading full-service and global digital marketing agency, and a great group of television stations in attractive local market.

Our connection to the end consumer is growing in every one of our media platform. Our management team has demonstrated ability in operational excellence and value creation overtime and we’re executing a series of growth strategies that we believe will deliver total shareholder return of 10% to 15% annually over the next three-year period.

We’re committed to balancing our portfolio growth with returning cash to shareholders overtime. As an example of this commitment, we paid a dividend for 65 straight years and increase it for the past 19. The current yield on our dividend is approximately 5%.

Looking at Meredith as a whole, today we generate approximately $1.5 billion in revenue annually. Our National Media Group is in fact the leading media company serving U.S. women through powerhouse brand like Better Homes and Gardens, Parents and Allrecipes.com.

Meredith Xcelerated Marketing has major relationships with corporate clients including Kraft, Chrysler and Lowe’s, and features expertise in digital, social mobile and database marketing.

Our Local Media Business reaches about 10% of U.S. households and has grown non-political advertising revenues for 12 straight quarters.

In our National Media Group, we’ve very strategically expanded our audience overtime. We serve her from the beginning stages of family formation throughout her adult life, including the time when her children are grown and have left home.

Among our peers our portfolio is the most focused on adult women. We hold the clear leadership position in parenthood, food, home and the Hispanic categories. All told our brand reached 100 million unduplicated women each and every month, including 40 million unique visitors to our digital property.

We are accelerating that digital presence with Allrecipes.com and aggressively extending our brand into tablets and mobile content distribution as well, and I’ll give a little more color around that in just a few moments.

In our Local Media Group we’ve assembled a great mix of network affiliate. Most of our stations are located in faster growing West and South Eastern regions of the country, including Atlanta, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Portland.

Based on our large footprint in the West and the South, and our history of operational excellence, we feel very good about the growth prospects for our Local Media business. We’ve successfully extended both our National and our Local brands across multiple media platforms overtime. This offers our consumer flexibility to access our content however they prefer which of course has led to a growing consumer engagement.

We built scale across these media platforms and these offers advertisers and marketers a variety of opportunities to reach both broad and niche audiences, leading to revenue and cash flow growth overtime.

Let me close this overview with a quick look at some examples of success against our growth initiative. Starting with our National Media Group, we acquired the popular EveryDay with Rachael Ray and FamilyFun brand along with the world’s largest digital food sites Allrecipes.com, adding scale and deepening our leadership position in the food and the parenthood categories.

We’ve launched our brands across a variety of tablet and mobile devices, and created the Meredith sales guarantee to prove that magazine advertising yields results at retail. We’re growing are already profitable circulation model by increasing the numbers of subscription we sell online and have recently extended and expanded our already very successful licensing program at Wal-Mart stores across the country through 2016.

Our Local Media Group just finished a record political advertising season. We also recently renewed our largest network affiliation agreement. We developed a strong new business pipeline at Meredith Xcelerated Marketing with recent wins from Kraft, Hallmark along with Hormel. We’ve created the Meredith-Iris Global Network to generate more revenues overseas and bring foreign programs here to the United States as well.

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