Okay. Good morning, every. Please note that important disclosures, including personal holdings disclosures and Morgan Stanley disclosures, all appear as a handout available in the registration area and on the Morgan Stanley public website. We are really excited to welcome to the conference Bob Iger, the CEO of Walt Disney Company. Bob, so happy to have you here.
Thank you very much. I guess I'm the former and the current CEO of The Walt Disney Company.
Exactly. Before we get started, I'm gonna read a forward-looking statement on behalf of Disney. Certain statements today, including statements about the company's plans, beliefs, expectations, strategy or business prospects and other statements that are not historical in nature, may constitute forward-looking statements under securities laws. The statements are made on the basis of management's current views and assumptions regarding the future, management does not undertake any obligation to update them. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from results expressed or implied in light of a variety of factors, including macroeconomic or industry factors and execution risks and other factors contained in the company's Form 10-K, other filings with the SEC, as well as the legend you see here and on the company's IR website. I've never read that before. How did I do?
Is that okay?
You don't have a future necessarily in performance, but that's not bad.
Okay. Thank you. I'm not sure what this is.
Well, different kind.
Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, listen, I wanna start, Bob, with some high level questions for you. You stated on the earnings call a couple weeks and months ago that your top priority is to improve the economics of your streaming business, which is on everybody's minds, you know, to put it mildly. I realize you're only a few months in, so, we have that. What's the playbook to build streaming at Disney to not just profitability, but hopefully a scale that's big enough to really drive earnings and growth for the whole corporation?
First of all, I'm generally bullish on streaming as a great consumer proposition, as a really robust platform to deliver high-quality content under easily used circumstances. I am extremely bullish on some of our streaming prospects, notably Disney+, which, you know, grew to just such a meteoric rate. I think the reason it grew is the strength of the content, those brands that occupy that space. We know in terms of delivering profitability and growth to that platform that we have to better rationalize our costs. Obviously, we have to attract more subs. I think one of the key things that we have to figure out is a pricing strategy that makes sense.
I think in our zeal to grow global subs, I think we were off in terms of that pricing strategy, and we're now starting to learn more about it and to adjust accordingly. When you think about streaming in general, it's a consumer's delight in the sense that we used to talk often when it came to linear programming about à la carte. This is the ultimate à la carte proposition for the consumer. While I'm pro-consumer generally, I think we have to take a look at how easy it is for the consumer to not just sign on, but sign on sometimes under promotional circumstances where it's not only less expensive, in some cases it's free. You know, sign and you get for 3 months, you get 1 month free.
Watch all you want in a month, sign off that and go to another one that's doing the same thing. I think we have a lot of rationalization to do from a pricing perspective. That's one path to profitability. Another is we do have to grow subs. A third is basically coming to grips with rising costs of production and also figuring out just how much volume we need for that platform. I don't know whether you're gonna get specific about Hulu, but that's a different set of circumstances.
Yeah, of course. We'll get to Hulu in a minute. Just on Disney Plus, are you optimistic that there is opportunity to grow subscribers from here? You've talked about how that is important to getting the business to where you wanna go.
Yes, I am optimistic. Obviously, as I mentioned, we grew at such a meteoric rate. We're not gonna see that kind of...
Yeah
... growth trajectory going forward. In many of the markets outside the United States that we've launched in, it's still very, very new.
Yeah.
I think that the, you know, the sub-growth ahead, particularly as we get more consistent in terms of our content delivery. One of the things that also happened, obviously, was COVID interrupted production, so the flow of production onto the platform has not been that even. It was very low to start, then it was interrupted by the pandemic, we're now just hitting our stride in that regard. The other thing I didn't mention in terms of path to profitability is advertising-
Sure
... which is also still very new on that platform. When you think about a relatively reduced ad load, the purity of those brands and the specificity of that audience, and an audience that's not only very engaged but loyal, it's an advertiser's delight, and that's very new for us.
Sure. 11 of the other things you talked about on the call, you've spoken quite passionately about, Bob, is reestablishing a direct link between content decisions being made at Disney and financial performance. For those of us, you know, outside of The Walt Disney Company, why is that so important?
Well, the company had been restructured after I stepped down as CEO to create essentially a giant revenue-generating division, which was in charge of distribution, advertising, sales, subscription, et cetera. It separated, it was completely separated from the content side, which is where all the money was being spent.
Yeah.
I happen to believe that there needs to be a direct connection between what's being spent and what's being earned.
Right
... from a revenue perspective. It's all about accountability. It's about understanding how deep the marketplace is, so when you make decisions on spending, it's tied directly to revenue generation as a for instance, and revenue generation needs to be tied back to what's being spent. The other thing that was disconnected was marketing, where there were people which responsible for marketing platforms and other people responsible for marketing programs, and that needed to be put back together, not just because for sanity purposes but also because there are opportunities to reduce expenses. I don't think it was as efficient as it could have been or as targeted as it should have been, and that's again, 1 of the learnings coming back, was discovering that we were spending too much marketing platforms and not enough marketing the programming that was on the platforms.
I think that may have had a negative impact on our sub growth.
For those of us who are analyzing the company and trying to value Disney, did severing those connections, do you think, impact financial results? How quickly can you benefit from reestablishing those?
You know, it's hard to tell how much it impacted financial results because it happened during the pandemic and everything was changed.
Yeah
at that time. I don't wanna be, I can't be stat specific. Frankly, if you were to ask me what the number was, I wouldn't, I don't know. What I do know is that this new structure gives us an opportunity to reduce expenses. We announced we're reducing expenses by five and a half billion dollars. That's partially the result of this reorganization. It also gives us an opportunity to be just I think not just efficient, but effective. You know, another side to the reorganization that was that we've just done that I think will prove valuable is that there was a disconnect between what we were making in international markets and what we were making in the United States for global distribution.
I think that we might have created an imbalance of sorts because territory managers of the Disney+ platform were leaning more into what they were producing locally, which has some value, but perhaps not relying as much on what was being produced for global consumption, and that's another opportunity for us in terms of reducing expenses.
Okay. Great. Maybe last sort of bigger picture question? You know, particularly since earnings, I've had a lot of conversations with investors about your stock, and it often sort of looks at streaming between just basically two paths for the company. It's sort of a branded, you know, Disney+ focusing on franchise IP, you know, sort of, I would not call it niche, but more targeted service or all the way to the other extreme, broad general entertainment, you know, maybe biggest TAM, but less differentiated. What's the right path for Disney, or is that even the right way to think about it? Is there a lot of paths ahead of you?
Well, one path that we know is right because of the success that we've had already, although as we've talked, we have to turn it into a profitable business, is Disney+ and that branded play, which is highly differentiated.
Yeah.
Highly. It gives us an ability to both price more aggressively, sell more aggressively in terms of advertising and market more effectively too because those brands have such built-in.
Yeah
You know, marketing equity already. When you think about, I'll call it non-branded or undifferentiated, obviously then you immediately lead to Hulu. Alexia Quadrani, who's our head of investor relations, gave me a synopsis yesterday, I think, of what all the different companies that are in streaming have been saying lately. Every 1 of them is going to be highly profitable in a couple of years and grow subs by the tens of millions.
Good news.
It can't possibly happen. There are 6 or 7, you know, basically well-funded, aggressive streaming businesses out there, all seeking the same subscribers and in many cases competing for the same content. Not everybody's going to win. What we're doing right now, because we own 2/3 of Hulu, and we have an agreement with Comcast that may result in us owning 100%, is that we're really studying the business very, very carefully, all those competitive dynamics with an understanding that we have a good platform in Hulu. We have very strong original programming, actually highly awarded original programming, some delivered by FX, which is a great not only producer, but brand, and we also have a good library. It's a solid platform and it's also a very attractive platform for advertisers.
It's already proven to be valuable for them, advertising has proven to be valuable for us. The environment is very, very tricky right now. Before we make any big decisions about our level of investment, our commitment to that business, we want to understand where it could go. The whole streaming business, other than Netflix, which is, you know, relatively mature, it's a nascent business for most of us.
Sure.
We're also at an interesting point in the world from a media perspective where a lot of people are still getting linear programming or consuming media on traditional platforms. While I think, and I've said publicly that the future of linear I don't believe is very bright, and eventually I think everything will migrate to streaming, we're not quite there yet. You have a, you know, erosion of a traditional platform and its economics and some growth in the new platform, but not the kind of compelling growth that we'll all need to be profitable. I think it's a, it's just a tricky period of time.
Yeah, sure. When you talk about general entertainment, you use the word curated a lot. What does that mean from a financial point of view?
Well, what we've talked about, and I think we're gonna get there regardless of what happens with Hulu, is that I think we have to get much more judicious in terms of not just how much we're spending, but what we're spending it on. You know, there is so much consumer choice right now, and it comes back to what is differentiated? 1 thing obviously we talked about are those brands, Star Wars and.
Yeah
Marvel and Disney and Pixar, for instance. Quality is also a differentiator. I think HBO proved that well, you know, in their halcyon days when high quality programming made a big difference to them.
Mm-hmm
... and not volume. Because the streaming platforms require so much volume, one has to question whether that's the right direction to go or can you be more curated, more basically, I see you use the word judicious a few times, you know, I guess more picky about what you're making.
Yeah
Concentrate on quality and not volume. That's what I talk about.
Okay. Makes sense. Let's talk a little bit about the DMED organization, sort of the whole media company within Disney, and we'll get to parks later. You announced plans to reduce headcount by 7,000 jobs, cut $2.5 billion of non-content spending, $3 billion of lower content spending. These announcements were all made concurrently with the reorg that you've announced. That's a lot at once. What's been the reaction inside the organization to those changes?
There's huge buy-in, certainly across the entire senior team, on the need to reduce costs. On the SG&A front, the two and a half billion, the reorg obviously is a contributing factor, but it's more than that. It's just getting more disciplined about how much we spend on almost everything. On the content side, I'm really pleased that the support that I'm getting from the content creators of the company is significant and real, and it comes in the form of, one, reducing the expense per content, whether it's a TV series or a film, where costs have just skyrocketed in a huge way.
Yeah
... and not a supportable way, in my opinion. They all agree to that. Also, which is I think is a result of we, whether you call it more aggressive curation or whatever, or understanding how much volume we need, reducing how much we make. It's how much we spend on what we make and how much we make. The $3 billion is achievable. It will not come right away because we have full commitments certainly through this year and somewhat into 2024. The support that we've gotten from the content side of our business is real, and we will deliver it.
Great. One of the other areas that came up a lot this week among the media executives I wanted to ask about is also the opportunity around licensing. I mean, Disney's always had a massive licensing business, and as you moved into streaming aggressively, some of that obviously has come under pressure. Is there an opportunity to sort of grow that again, and are you thinking differently about things like windowing and exclusivity now that you're back?
We're definitely thinking about windowing and exclusivity among our own platforms.
Yeah.
Meaning between the traditional platforms, the channels mostly, but to some extent the movie channel too, meaning exhibition and the streaming business. I think it's already clear to us that the exclusivity that we thought would be so valuable in growing subs, while it has some value, wasn't as valuable as we thought, and content can actually exist on the traditional platform and on the streaming platform quite well without doing damage to either one because it's actually very, very different audiences consuming those platforms. Significant in terms of an age difference, by the way, is by as much as 30 some odd years. Abbott Elementary airs on ABC, where the median age of ABC is substantially higher than the median age of the Abbott Elementary viewer on Hulu by about 30 years. It's an actually an incredible number. Why not have them live on both?
You advertise your cost better. You could argue there's some marketing, impact positively on that as well. We're looking at that. We're also looking at movie windowing because we were so aggressive at supporting the streaming business. In some cases, we made a lot of films just for streaming.
Yeah.
In some cases, we made films with shorter exhibition windows. In almost all cases, we made films that no longer had the sell through window in it, which home video at one point, as we called it, was extremely lucrative for our company. We're looking at all of that. The reorg is helping us do that too because the same people that are responsible for making the content are responsible for monetizing it, and if the best way to monetize it is to make use of all platforms, streaming and traditional, then they have the ability to do that. The goal being monetization-
Right
... or profitability. On the licensing side to third parties, and we have one of the largest TV production and actually film production businesses in the country, I think probably the largest. As we look to reduce the content that we're creating for our own platforms, there probably are opportunities to license to third parties. It was for a while that was considered, you know, verboten or something we couldn't possibly do because we were so favoring our own streaming platforms. If we get to a point where we need less content for those platforms and we still have the capability of producing that content, why not use it to grow revenue?
Yeah.
That's what we will likely do.
Presumably the core franchise branded stuff would stay in-house.
Correct
to the others. Yeah.
Yes. Now, there are other things to look at too, which is windowing. If you look, for instance, you know, when we bought Fox, we bought a lot of what's called adult animation. A lot of it aired on the Fox network.
Mm-hmm
... in primetime. We're talking about not just The Simpsons, but Bob's Burgers and Family Guy, all of those. By the way, I saw something recently about the number of billions of hours that that content is consumed on Hulu. It's extraordinary.
Hmm.
Over 3.5 billion hours of that content consumed on Hulu as a for instance. That suggests that there are opportunities to license the content to others first-As The Simpsons has done. The Simpsons, there are over 33 episodes of The Simpsons on Disney+, and it's one of the more popular programs on Disney+, yet they've all been on the Fox network.
Right.
That's, I think, an interesting learning for us that you can still put product on that does extremely well in streaming, but we're driving more revenue with a balanced model of licensing to third parties and streaming to ourselves.
Yeah. Got it. We spent this conversation on monetization and distribution which of course is important. I've always felt like the Disney investment case, kind of the foundational piece was the strength of the IP, right? The content and storytelling of the company. You guys made acquisitions under your prior tenure with Marvel, Lucasfilm, Pixar, and had what seemed to be almost a never-ending content cycle. I want to ask you what you think the health of those core franchising studios and brands are today.
Well, I think a lot of all of them, of course, but they're all my babies in a way. Disney's very strong. It's the most powerful brand in certainly family entertainment. You know, we have a film coming up, Little Mermaid, in live action. I think when you see that, it'll remind you just how strong the brand is. It's also pretty interesting. Disney's a 100-year-old brand.
Yeah.
It was created in 1923. When you think about brands in the world that have survived 10 decades of existence in a world that doesn't look anything like the world looked like when they were created, there aren't many you could name. There's actually only one. I think it's Coca-Cola when you think about it. None of the other brands that existed when we were created still exist as certainly as significant brands. I think that says a lot. As we celebrate the 100th anniversary, we're still very vibrant. Marvel, there are 7,000 characters. There are a lot more stories to tell. I think what we have to look at at Marvel is not necessarily the volume of Marvel storytelling, but how many times we go back to the well on certain characters. you know, do you need...
Sequels typically work well for us. Do you need a third and a fourth, for instance, or is it time to turn to other characters? There's nothing in any way inherently off in terms of the Marvel brand. I think we just have to look at, you know, what characters and stories we're mining. If you look at the trajectory of Marvel over the next five years, you'll see a lot of newness. Now we're gonna turn back to the Avengers franchise.
Yeah
... but with a whole set of different Avengers, as an example. Star Wars, we made 3 what we call saga films, which is obviously the successors to George Lucas's first 6. They did very well at the box office, tremendously well, as a matter of fact. We've made 2 so-called standalones in Rogue One and Solo. Rogue One did quite well. Solo was a little disappointing to us. It gave us pause just to think maybe the cadence was a little too aggressive, so we decided to pull back a bit. We still are developing Star Wars films. We're gonna make sure that when we make one, that it's the right one.
Yeah.
We're being really careful there. In the meantime, we've made a number of Star Wars series led by The Mandalorian that are extremely successful, and that says a lot. Just last night, I got a clip of a Star Wars series that's going to air on Disney+ in 2024 called Acolyte that looks brilliant. They've done Andor, and they've done Obi-Wan, and they have one coming up for young kids, which is called Young Jedi Adventure or something like that. I have a lot in my head on these things. Television series programming is working for them.
Yeah.
I think that's quite healthy too. Pixar has a brilliant movie coming up called Elemental, where the characters are actually elements like water and fire, et cetera, and that's pretty interesting as well.
I was gonna ask you for your recommendations from your slate this year, but you already gave us Elemental.
Indiana Jones we have, coming up, and, I mentioned Little Mermaid and Elemental and Guardians of the Galaxy, and it's a good year.
Yeah, it's a good year ahead. Let's talk about ESPN. You've decided as part, again, this reorg, I think you put all of sports kinda globally under Jimmy Pitaro. And you'll be reporting ESPN separately to all of us.
You're salivating over that.
I can't wait. I guess the question is why make those changes, both the management changes but also the reporting changes?
Well, the new organization of the company is aimed at being very, very simple and streamlined and very clear. Not only clear to the investment community, but clear inside the company as well in terms of span of control and accountability. That's critical, by the way, in this case. Jimmy is accountable specifically for his business, for its costs and its revenue generation. We finally decided that not all sports are global, we know that, sports are becoming more global.
Mm.
If you look at the NBA, that's a great example of that. Even the popularity of what the Europeans call football in the United States, it suggests that there may be an opportunity to look more globally...
Mm
at what we license and how we program and how we manage that business, and maybe also how we brand.
You know, investors, not telling you anything you don't know, are quite cautious on linear TV and ESPN in particular. It's obviously a large business that's got headwinds. I get the sense, and pushback if you want, that you and Jimmy are more optimistic, constructive. You talk a lot about the health of the ESPN brand. You know, that the brand is healthy. What does that mean in terms of financial terms? Or just how should we think about your optimism?
Well, I think one of the reasons we're optimistic is we know the power and the popularity of live sports. We know how attractive it is, not just to consumers, but to advertisers. It's a great play for advertisers. With all the disruption and all of the choice that consumers have, you look at ratings for sports, particularly the NFL, it's extraordinary when you think about it. Then you think about. I'm bullish on, well, sports coverage and media. When you think about brands in sports, and we'll think about it from a United States lens first. Other than the NFL, what would you name, obviously the NBA and Major League Baseball have value, but that is. Certainly in media there isn't another one.
Yeah.
I think brands matter. The more choice people have, the more important brands become because of what they connote or what, you know, what they convey to consumers. If you look at ESPN's ratings, ESPN's ratings have actually held up nicely, particularly when you consider the erosion of the platform that they're on. We have to look at what ESPN+ has done.
Mm-hmm.
Again, 25 million subs is nothing to sneeze at.
Yeah.
It's, at this point, it's what I call a flanker business or brand to the main ESPN brand. Down the road at some point, I think it's inevitable because of what's happening in media in the world and technology, it will become a direct to consumer business. When you combine the strength of live sports and the brand and the value of advertising, so that you can create a business that's not just subscriber dependent, but dependent on advertising and subscriber revenue, I think there's a reason to be bullish. Now there's more competition.
Mm-hmm.
There's always been a lot of competition. It's just now there are new entrants. Interestingly enough, at a time when I think some of the incumbent, sports broadcasters are going to have a tougher time.
Yeah
... because that business model is suffering. I'm not sure that the nature of competition has changed as much-
Yeah
... as people have concluded. I think again, we think we're well-positioned and it doesn't mean that we're not going to be open-minded about its future. Right now we're bullish about it.
Yeah. Anything to do in sports betting, just given again, the power of the brand and the growth of betting in the U.S.?
There are opportunities not for us to go into the betting business, but we've talked about this and something that my predecessor was very interested in to incorporate elements. We're already doing it, betting, Fox is doing it too. I know Lachlan was here earlier, into the sports programming. I think that's important for consumers, particularly young consumers. I mentioned earlier in another meeting, I have two sons who are 24 and 20, it's not just about fantasy sports, but they're interested in it. I'd prefer to wait as long as possible, but when I think about them. I think it's inevitable that there'll be basically a seamlessness between sports programming and sports betting.
Yeah. I know we're both Knicks fans. The Knicks are now favored a lot.
The Knicks have won 9 out of the last 10.
Can't believe it.
They're playing in Los Angeles next Saturday, if you want to come to the game.
Thank you for that.
It's a one o'clock game. Against the Clippers.
I'll ask my wife if I can make it. We have about 7, 8 minutes left. Let's turn to the business that generated all the profits last quarter, which is the parks business and the DPEP segment. That business has been tremendously strong coming out of the pandemic. What are your priorities for the parks? You know, the market's a bit anxious that maybe you're overearning just because the per caps and the consumer demand's been so strong. What's your perspective on that?
Well, it's a great business. It proved how resilient it is. It's proven that before, by the way, whether it was the economic downturn of 2008 and 2009 or the effect of the terrorist attacks of 2001, it bounced back really well post-pandemic. Not just in the United States, but globally. Actually, if you'd listen to our last earnings call, I'm sure you did, Shanghai, Disneyland, Paris, doing extremely well. That's great. On the overearnings front, I've always believed that Disney was a brand that needed to be accessible.
Yeah.
I think that in our zeal to grow profits, we may have been a little bit too aggressive about some of our pricing. I think there's a way to continue to grow that business but be smarter about how we price so that we maintain that brand value of accessibility. We made certain steps. We took certain steps when I came back to do just that, and they resonated extremely well with consumers. We're not only going to continue to listen to consumers, but we're going to continue to adjust. One of the things that we had to do was we had to improve the guest experience by reducing crowding.
Yeah.
You know, it's tempting to let more and more people in, but if the guest satisfaction levels are going down because of crowding, that doesn't work. We had to figure out how we reduce crowding but maintain, obviously, our profitability, and we did that well. We have to be careful about that as well, 'cause in doing that, you know, you're actually, you end up increasing the price or putting features into your pricing that are viewed by some consumers perhaps being a little too aggressive. That's what we're being careful about.
I'm going to be there in a week and a half. I'll let you know how the crowds are.
Well, it's interesting because one of the things that you'll see it when you go, what we can do with those businesses is we certainly in Florida, we have a lot of property and we have a lot of opportunity outside the United States. We actually have more opportunity in California than people are aware. As we continue to invest in those businesses, which is essentially building out new capacity or new attractions, it gives us the ability to, one, service more people. The more attractions you have, obviously the more people have to do. We can also mine our IP more effectively. We announced in the earnings call that we're going to build an Avatar experience at Disneyland.
Yeah.
It's done extremely well in Florida. Those are really important because those franchises that we do well with in film and in television are truly leveragable at the parks level, as we learned with the Star Wars investments that we've made, the Avatar investment we made in Florida, the Toy Story investments that we made. That creates growth for us because it increases capacity and it improves our marketability. That we have opportunity that is almost, I mean, I'd say endless, but we obviously don't have endless amounts of capital, but in terms of IP to mine, we have almost endless opportunity there, and that's growth. If you price all of that right and market it well and manage your costs so that you can maintain pretty decent margins, it's a, it's a business that, you know, obviously we're betting on, I would bet on.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
We also differentiated those brands and the quality of the experience that we offer, pretty special.
There were a lot of investments made at the parks during the pandemic. You guys always invest, you know, continually invest in the business, things like dynamic pricing and yield management. Do you think those would allow the business to sort of navigate a recession better than maybe what we saw in the last couple cycles? I know it's a cyclical business, but.
Look, I, we're not re-recession proof.
Right.
The strength of the experience and the strength of the brands, the quality of the experience, I think, puts us in better stead.
Yeah
...you know, during a downturn. Also, look, the ability for a family to experience one of our parks is something that they don't give up right away. I remember someone telling me once they'll wait. They'll hold on to their car longer, you know, or their refrigerator.
Yeah
... so they could take their kids, to one of our parks. I don't know how much that's true or not. It was one of our parks people that told me that. I think it's just, it's something that families aspire to do. When they do it's typically a good enough experience that they wanna come back.
There's been a lot of cost inflation generally out there, and the team seems to have navigated that well. Are those pressures starting to build here in 2023, or are you starting to see that maybe moderate?
There's nothing in right now from a dynamics perspective that would suggest that cost inflation is going to have, you know, a significantly negative impact on us.
Okay, great.
We've managed that well.
Well, I want to, you know, wrap up with basically succession and really how, you know, you're thinking about the 2 years ahead of you. You know, what are the things that you're focusing on and excited about as you... Obviously very busy.
Is that a succession question?
I don't know if this is a succession question, but it's really about what do you wanna highlight as your area of focus as you think about the sort of 2-year sprint to the finish line?
It's a good question. Succession is pretty much at the top of the list between me and the board. In fact, we have a succession committee at the board. We had a meeting yesterday, as a matter of fact. They're meeting regularly. We all know that not only is it an important decision, but that we don't have endless amount of time to make it. We're mindful of that. Mark Parker, who is our new chairman, is chairing this committee. The conversations have been great. I'm confident that we'll identify the right successor at the right time. You know, for me, coming back was quite actually an interesting experience because it was clear that the company needed to be stabilized.
It was clear that the reorganization was necessary because of the disconnect that we talked about earlier between spending and revenue generation and marketing. It was also clear that we had to come to grips with our cost structure for a variety of reasons, whether they're competitive, disruptive, or global economic. We've done all of that already. We have stability. We have reorganization. We have truly aggressive cost-cutting efforts. Now it's about getting our content pipeline right.
Mm-hmm
... making sure that we're making the right decisions and making sure that we're making the right number of decisions in terms of how much we're making. Then it's, you know, I think really being mindful of a world that is not getting any less complicated and in fact, that technology is only going to disrupt more, and making sure that we're positioning those great brands and this great content generation business in the right way to deliver the kind of value that shareholders need long term. I know it sounds simple. It requires a lot of execution. There's a great team in place, and I have a lot of confidence in our ability to do that.
you know, my goal is essentially to leave here in 2 years with a trajectory, whether it's for my successor or the structure of the company or the creative pipeline or revenue generation or innovation that is very optimistic and positive.
Great, Bob. Well, listen, we really hope you'll come back again next year. Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you very much, Matt.
Thanks, everybody.
Thank you.