Neil Thomas 0:00:03.1: 

So, Darrell, why don't you just give us a little bit of background, set the scene for your role at Fox and where you come from?

Darrell Cross 0:00:09.3: 

Yes. So I've been in the entertainment industry for 15, 20 years. Came to Fox through an acquisition. They acquired Mar Vista back at the end of 2021, and as part of that, joined Fox Entertainment Studios as it was being reformed. One of the reasons for that acquisition was they'd had sold off, obviously, 20th Century to Disney, and were building back up the studio capabilities. Since then we've taken Mar Vista and morphed it into Fox Entertainment Studios, where we've taken on some of the distribution, created a new entity called Fox Entertainment Global, built up the studio capabilities where we're now handling not only the Mar Vista movies of the week that we've done for many years, but also a lot of series, taking over Animal Control, going Dutch and a number of other productions as the studio continues to grow.

Neil Thomas 0:01:00.4: 

Yes, so busy times. 

Darrell Cross 0:01:00.2: 

Very busy.

Neil Thomas 0:01:01.6: 

So favorite movie?

Darrell Cross 0:01:02.1: 

Probably GoodFellas. 

Neil Thomas 0:01:04.7: 

Nice choice, and we all know you play the drums. 

Darrell Cross 0:01:09.1: 

Yes. That's [unclear words 0:01:10.6].

Neil Thomas 0:01:10.4: 

Thanks. So we had a nice steak last night, which was a bit big, I thought. I was a bit sluggish this morning. One of your claims to fame, tell us about your drumming story, your origin.

Darrell Cross 0:01:22.4: 

Oh, I moved down to Los Angeles from Eugene, Oregon to play drums, and ended up playing on the first album of The Black Eyed Peas with my friends who were in the band as well as Rolan Bolan with Marc Bolan from T-Rex, so.

Neil Thomas 0:01:35.9: 

Yes, it's too cool. Anyway, but thank you for sharing. Geoff, over to you. tell us about yourself. 

Geoff Lyn 0:01:43.5: 

Hard to follow. Hi, everyone. I'm Geoff Lyn, SVP of finance here at the studio and been with Darrell for about six years now. Previously, I was in public accounting. So I was doing a lot of public audits in the entertainment and tech space as well. Yes, we've been part of this journey of integrating all our systems, mostly going from a small to a public company. So it's been quite the experience, but we've done it side by side. Darrell's been a huge supporter of it. When I first interviewed for Mar Vista, I was shocked. I was looking at some of the bigger studios too, and I was just taken aback of how much they were using systems. I was like, why do you need so much of this? It was huge volume. We were doing 60 movies a year, and that was expected to go higher, which it did. So being a part of the build and all that was pretty exciting.

Neil Thomas 0:02:43.1: 

Cool. Excellent. So I am forced to refer to you as the mac and cheese of Fox Entertainment. Told you I'd get that in somewhere. All right. Geoff's also a big fan of bananas, so I hit another one of our code words during yesterday's dinner. All right, guys, so tell us about Fox, so 80 plus movies, you're building things up, territories. Give us a feel of how long have you been with Anaplan on the journey, and just a little bit about the implementation. I know you use one of our great partners heavily to support you as well. A little bit about the environment there that would be great. 

Darrell Cross 0:03:15.4: 

Yes, very much so. So we started eight years ago with Anaplan, and it came down to what Geoff was just talking about. Originally, Mar Vista was a distributor. We would go acquire content and then sell it, but we weren't making content. Then we started to make our own movies and tailor them for clients, to the point where, when Jeff joined us, we were about 40 to 50 films a year. We got up to 100 films a year. At that time, when we were choosing Anaplan, we had about a 600-film library, which anyone who's familiar with the accounting of films that the individual film forecast requires these ultimates. So we had this massive spreadsheet in Excel that had 500 tabs, and literally someone would just pray and run the macro to hopefully it worked. We needed to convert that, and the only way we could do that was to use a system that allowed us to manage this. Otherwise, we'd have hundreds of people doing this. So we chose Anaplan, built it out, many years of refining it, but it's got to a point where it's supremely automated for us, but then it's continued to expand. So it was originally just managing ultimates. Then it moved into residuals, participations. Geoff now runs it with production finance. It's become this full circle where we start something in production funding, it ends up in our ultimates, and then we're participations and residuals reporting off of that. It's not only improved our ability to manage everything, but the automation and the visibility and the decision making is just improved dramatically.

Neil Thomas 0:04:46.1: 

Yes, and you integrate with what source systems do you pull actuals in from, etc?

Darrell Cross 0:04:50.0: 

We're using Workday, and then the key for us is really another system called rights line, which is our rights management system. So all of our rev rec and everything is automated because it's literally just looking at rights line and seeing when did the license period start date, has the content been delivered and calculating when we recognize revenue.

Neil Thomas 0:05:09.3:

Got you. Geoff, you're the day-to-day owner of everything, so give us a flavor of your team size and… 

Geoff Lyn 0:05:12.0: 

Oh yes, so within our group, we have the accounting, production finance team, our participation residuals team. It's about 20 people. So when I originally took over the admining [sic] of Anaplan, it was probably three years ago, I came to this same conference, and I was scared because although I'd used Anaplan, I had not really engaged with it and figured out how to… We had no UX pages, for example, and things like that. It was very end-user friendly at the time. So it was the evolution of where we are today. I met one of our great partners, Daanish. I don't know if you all know Daanish? He's amazing, and I had never met someone that had a podcast on Anaplan, so I was like, I'm intrigued. I hope you guys are, too. It's great content there now these days.

Darrell Cross 0:06:01.1:

Yes, that is easily won over, obviously.

Geoff Lyn 0:06:03.3:

Yes, I know. We were looking at a lot of partners, and this is the moment to look for that key partner you're looking for. It was super easy at that point, very casual. I had never heard of the Planual, and I was like, what's that? It's like, you mean we could do things five different ways, but there's three that are the preferred way? So we took something that was really well implemented even before my time, but with Darrell and started to figure out along the way that there's lots of improvements since we started that we had not even tapped into, like the data hub. We looked really outliers when everybody said they had one. Getting a partner like Daanish and DSI to help us make improvements along the way, or dramatic improvements, I should say, and also helping building up our team of model builders. So we ended up, Darrell was like, yes, we should all be model builders, go as high as we can. So, about three or four of us on the team, they're really the workhorse, our Naomis and Lyris and Erics. I'm just calling them out because [?it helps that they exist 0:07:04.0]. They're amazing at what they can do, and we just throw them a laundry list of wishlists, and they make it happen. 

Geoff Lyn 0:07:12.6:

So, where we are, especially giving a good example of like our ultimates process, we have 600 plus titles that are active that are not ten years old, and so we used to have to review those manually, take a lot of time, and so, we worked with Daanish to figure out a way to automate some of that audit. So we're really just looking at the outliers. It really helped cut down our time tremendously. So we've done small things like that, but Darrell keeps giving me the go-ahead and the support to keep pushing along, and so we brought in production finance last year, did a lot of… So we're almost end-to-end through our whole finance process.

Neil Thomas 0:07:51.2: 

All right, all right. Yes, we've got a flavor of starting in 2018 and the journey so far. As you went through the implementation process and obviously refreshing with Daanish, any advice for anybody else, when there was a time to clean things up, was it an ongoing process, or when you explore a new area, just your learnings?

Darrell Cross 0:08:11.1: 

I think it's part of the learnings that come from these conferences, because every time Geoff went to one of these, he'd come back and it would creep into another area, which was very helpful, and so much so that we have a huddle every day and half the people are like, what did they talk about going on that day? Half of them will say the daily Daanish meeting, which is them touching base with Daanish to figure out how to bring Anaplan into what they're doing. It slowly crept in from ultimates into participations, residuals and everywhere else because of the ease of what it enabled for us to do. So Daanish understood Anaplan, and we understood our business and those come together. Now he understands a lot more about entertainment, and we understand a lot more about Anaplan that's fed itself, which has been great to Geoff's point, that certain people on the team are able to go and deploy certain things now on their own and continue to build out the capabilities, because it's an iterative experience. It wasn't perfect when it first implemented it. We'd put out these calculations, and all of a sudden, you'd have something that you didn't imagine, and it would back up, and amortization, which would not be in line with the GAAP accounting or what's going on with this. It took us years to work through some of those things, but once it got there, it's been one of the most incredible systems that we use. We look for it to do whatever we can now at Fox.

Geoff Lyn 0:09:30.4: 

Anaplan have a lot of data from all the different systems that help us do more than we would like, and I don't know, we try to find those spreadsheets people still do and try to snipe them, take them out. I remember that Darrell had one cash funding rack that he was doing, and it was a big file, and I was like, hey, can we figure that out? So with Daanish, we brought it in. I was like, 'Don't you just want to see the changes, things that are of concern rather than try to help piece it together?' He's like, 'I like it.' I don't know if he likes it now, but hopefully it's saving him time. So that's some of the good examples we've been able to achieve, I think, as a team. Darrell has been a huge supporter from the get-go. So I would say without that, it's very difficult, and he's been one to actually appreciate the end benefits and help coordinate that among other departments, especially with Fox. So Darrell's been a huge support, even though I'm spreading out the rumors, he's the one at the top talking to the right people to make sure they're on board.

Neil Thomas 0:10:30.1: 

You're telling me as a Workday customer, every now and again, Adaptive sneaks into the conversation and you fight the good fight. Anything needing on that?

Darrell Cross 0:10:38.5: 

Yes, that's always an ongoing issue for that type of coordination, but I think part of what we've built in Anaplan is hard to replicate, even if another system can do it. Porting it over is not easy. So those are some of the things that we always try and focus on is the capabilities, and what are we getting out of it, regardless of the systems. Anaplan has just been a true asset in that one manner, so.

Neil Thomas 0:11:02.4: 

Got you. Well, to give us a flavor of the applications, it's always fun, because you guys have an amazing business, really interesting, of course, to all of us film watchers, so tell us a little bit about some of the most complicated ones here, or maybe unusual to the normal layman. Which one do you want to start with?

Darrell Cross 0:11:20.3: 

I'm assuming it's left to right up there. When you go left to right, it's really how it starts. Everything from development into production funding and development, buying a script or getting something going, it starts there. We greenlight a film or a series. We then get a production funding schedule, which then goes into Anaplan, and we're basically releasing funds based on that schedule, From there, when we have a complete film or series and moves into our content management system, which is managing the ultimates revenues and expenses over some period of time, typically ten years. From there, we're using it for all budgeting, forecasting, long-range planning, and then it goes into all the ultimates for over that period, and then…

Neil Thomas 0:12:08.1:

So, what's an ultimate?

Darrell Cross 0:12:09.1: 

An ultimate is just a ten-year summary of what the revenues and expenses are going to be of a film or a series, all revenues, all expenses, and so it's basically like a big budget that you manage on an annual basis, and you true it up. So if you think you're going to get $10 million from a film and it doesn't look like it, you have to bring that down, which brings forward a lot of expenses and things, and so it's managing that about how you're going to realize the results of some type of piece of content. With a lot of our content, we're very sure because we've done it so many times, but new pieces of content where we do a new type of film and a new genre released in a different way with somebody else, we don't know. So there's a lot of variations which create a lot of interesting accounting for those type of issues for us. Then last but not least, so the ultimate is that we talk about the multiple books in the entertainment industry, which can be a negative aspect, but in factual, it's a reality of what we have to deal with.

Darrell Cross 0:13:07.0: 

The ultimate is a ten-year estimate of what we think the film is going to do. Then there's the actual revenues and expenses, which in our world is still accrual-based. It's not cash-based. Then there's that third set of books, which is participations and residuals are all cash-based. So I can sell something to Amazon, but if they're not going to pay me for a year or two, I don't have anything to report in my participations and residuals. So those three are always having to be reconciled, and so it's a big challenge to try and report and manage all of that. So that's one of the things that Anaplan does so well for us, in being able to connect those and realign what we see in an ultimate to what we're seeing in the actuals, to what we're seeing on a cash basis, a very quick cause of change, so to speak, in our language.

Geoff Lyn 0:13:51.4: 

All of this is really integrated for us, so what we do in ultimate drives our budget and forecasts. So it can get pretty complicated when we do it, if it was all manual, I should say, but the fact is, once we set these ultimates, it really feeds everything. So one of the great examples of how it really helps us with the integrated across all our processes, you're using the same assumptions that you're using when we're reporting on the participation residual side. Same guilds, all those things that you'd want them all to be in sync. When it's all in Excel, it's all lots of room for version control errors and things like that. So it's made our life excitingly easier in that area, and yes, ultimates or whatever complex estimates, right, that from an accounting perspective can be pretty heavily scrutinized. So we want to make sure we're on top of it and be able to review it and support everything we put into it.

Neil Thomas 0:14:43.4: 

Got you, and the people that you work with in the business that consume this are they are users of the system, or do you issue them reports? How do they interact with Anaplan?

Darrell Cross 0:14:51.2: 

A little bit of both. Some people are users. A lot of people just get reports from us on a regular basis. So I think that's the goal is to try and get more people to access the system in a real-time basis, but right now it's a lot more feeding out.

Neil Thomas 0:15:06.4: 

To feed them when they need feeding? And it's essentially monthly cycles?

Darrell Cross 0:15:11.5: 

Daily, weekly. It all depends on what the reporting is. So we manage two pieces of the Fox Entertainment world. There's the network such as the Fox network when you go and see shows on actual Fox. Then there's the studio and the distribution unit. The distribution unit is a service business for all of Fox. So we sell Fox News content, Fox Sports, Tubi. So reporting with that is much more frequent. We're always reporting out to those business units on a regular basis, whether it's daily, weekly commitments. We track books of business. So as business gets captured, we're tracking the growing business book of business that will be realized in the future, and so we're reporting that out to the businesses on a regular…

Neil Thomas 0:15:54.4: 

The amazing thing about you guys, just the list gets longer of titles, right, so it just gets bigger?

Darrell Cross 0:15:59.3: 

It never goes away. It only gets bigger.

Neil Thomas 0:16:01.1: 

Yes, yes. So what's next? So you guys, never ends, you can never have enough planning, obviously. So, what are you working on with the next round of applications that you're looking at building?

Geoff Lyn 0:16:15.0:

I think being part of Fox, we're trying to expand what we're doing with other divisions that are doing almost the same thing. So we've already started off some of those processes, getting the Fox participations or the residuals team into Anaplan as well, but mirroring what we already established some of those things, but also new stuff there. I would love for us to access more dashboards or utilize the app a little more. If Darrell can approve things to the app, that's a win for me, but we'll see. I just want to make the user experience pretty good for not just our teams, but the end users, the exec teams, to be able to see some really cool KPIs and dashboarding because as part of the whole us becoming the new studio. There's going to be new things we're anticipating of tracking. So that's one of the exciting things about Anaplan being able to track non-financial data too in there with the financial data, especially when it comes to volume for us or runtimes, things like that that we're excited about, but those are immediate ones.

Darrell Cross 0:17:18.1: 

That just happened in participations. So we do quarterly reporting on participations to all the back end participants who have an ownership stake or a profit stake in one of our pieces of content, and we every quarter probably release 200 to 300 statements for all the content that we produce. So it used to be, you'd sit down with the participation team and go report by report, review it and make sure that it was accurate. Now basically we log into Anaplan, it comes up on a screen, as we go through them, you see on the left it starts all red, 193 red, and as you go through them, they start to become green, and when you're done it's 193 green and it's all done. You can log in and see the last quarter, you get access to all this information. It was a change for me because I was used to sitting there and going through it. That first time, I was like, wait a second, what about the last quarter? What he'd do, he could pull it up immediately, and so it was hard to not have anything to touch or feel, but it was great to be able to go through it in that process, and that was just something that the participations team built out with Daanish, to make it easier for them to track and be able to - because I'm always asking for metrics. No one appreciates how much volume we're doing, and I always want them to be able to report on it, and so this was one of the ways that we were able to capture that data and then use it in the future.

Neil Thomas 0:18:35.3: 

Got you.

Geoff Lyn 0:18:36.3: 

Expand workflow is the goal because it worked well.

Neil Thomas 0:18:38.4: 

More workflows?

Geoff Lyn 0:18:39.2: 

Yes, yes.

Neil Thomas 0:18:39.2 

Got you. Right. We've got one more. We seem to have doubled up our slides here. So let's talk a little bit about the longer, longer term. I can't even read that. I think might need glasses.

Darrell Cross 0:18:53.2: 

Commissioners and sales, by the way, captures it, so.=

Neil Thomas 0:18:55.2: 

That really is really hard to read.

Darrell Cross 0:18:57.4: 

That's a lot of the stuff we were talking about with our distribution team, where we support them managing, because our distribution business unit is really almost like a third-party business unit. It's been structured in that way to manage all the content for all the different businesses inside Fox. So to be able to report on that and to be able to give insight into what's happening in the marketplace, it also has to touch to Salesforce and a few other systems to pull everything in because there's what we call secured business, which has been not only realized but then contractually signed. Then there's in negotiations, and then there's the pipeline. So to pull that in, to do all the forecasting on a weekly and monthly basis for us is key, and so that's some of the things that we're building out, and again, leveraging Anaplan for a lot of those type of things, yes.

Neil Thomas 0:19:44.3: 

All right. So you guys are still going to be busy. It never ends. 

Darrell Cross 0:19:47.2:

[Unclear words] busy.

Neil Thomas 0:19:49.6:

So now we're today, and obviously, we appreciate you fighting the good fight for Anaplan on a daily basis. Can you talk about the outcomes, the benefits? Darrell, when you stand in front of the boss, how do you justify spending the license fee? 

Darrell Cross 0:20:08.5: 

So I should give credit where credit's due. Geoff always gives it to me, but actually, our boss at the time, the CEO of Mar Vista, who now runs Fox Studios, was a huge proponent of SystemC. He knew the scale that he was shooting for, and he knew that it was going to be very hard without systems. So as a small company of Mar Vista, which was sub $100 million in revenue we over-indexed in systems. He was a huge proponent of Anaplan, not necessarily because he knew Anaplan, but he saw the outcomes and what we were able to do, and so he invested in that quite heavily, and so we were very lucky with that. So by the time we actually came to the Fox world, we had built out a whole world in Anaplan, which was hard to replicate. So that's been one of the things that we've benefited. From the volume that we had, we built out so many capabilities that it's hard for us to replace it. From that, we see the benefits downstream where we don't have to have as many people, but at the same time, the things we have to work on are how do we get people up to speed when they come in to be able to be functional in Anaplan. I'm probably the most functional person… It's the opposite. I'm the worst in Anaplan. I go in and just access information, but Geoff and team get people up to speed pretty quickly. 

Darrell Cross 0:21:29.6:

That's one of our biggest challenges of when someone's new and they haven't used Anaplan, and we have a whole new team that we're trying to bring on, there's a ramp-up, but once they get in there, it's good. That's always one of the challenges for us, but overall, the long term it's been a huge benefit. We've seen not only the decision-making and the information we get, but also the cost. Total cost of ownership against the employees has been incredible, so. 

Neil Thomas 0:21:56.0: 

We've timed [?the moving 0:21:56.9] and cost savings?

Geoff Lyn 0:21:58.2: 

Oh sorry. Yes, I was going to add that the team members that used to do a lot of these things manually are still there, so they're able to survey the benefits. So the learning curve is totally worth it I think, and we've saved countless weeks, times, hours, individual things, and if you add them all up, it's pretty significant sometimes, but no, it's never enough. So it's like craving it.

Darrell Cross 0:22:21.4: 

The person who runs our participations team has been an employee with Fox for a very long time. Fantastic individual but had her processes, and Geoff had dragged her into the Anaplan world kicking and screaming, and now she's one of the biggest proponents. She has two staff, one of them who's very much in the Anaplan world and continues to push the envelope, and now she gains all the benefits of that, but for the longest time, she needed her process, and now this has become her process. It took a little while, but she's one of the biggest proponents.

Geoff Lyn 0:22:54.5: She's always talking about AI in her updates. Out of all the people in our group chat, she's now the one talking about where they are with utilizing ChatGPT and things like that to help streamline some of the manual stuff, too, as well, so yes.

Neil Thomas 0:23:08.5: 

So you guys will be picking up the console in about three months when Adam makes it available? 

Darrell Cross 0:23:13.3: 

Yes, yes.

Geoff Lyn 0:23:12.0:

Definitely.

Neil Thomas 0:23:13.4 

You don't use [?Plarex 0:23:15.3], right? You haven't adopted the change yet? Any plans to do any structural stuff behind the scenes or too busy still?

Darrell Cross 0:23:23.3: 

We'll see. I think we're looking at it and evaluating. It's a challenging world to be able to use certain things because in the AI world, for us, especially if it touches content ,that has a lot of issues. So, we have to be very cognizant of that, and then secondarily, a lot of proprietary information and how that gets managed, so there's a whole team at the Fox that we work with to do that and to look at the opportunities. There's a lot of things that we're looking at right now. There's a few things we've implemented which have allowed us to, instead of what I call dumpster diving into agreements because we have thousands of agreements, we now can set things to go and grab information and put it into our systems, as opposed to someone manually entering it. So we have some quick wins with that, but there's a lot to do, but it's a big world and we've got to figure it out before we get there, yes.

Neil Thomas 0:24:12.3: 

That sounds good. All right, we're almost at Q&A, but anything else we missed and forgot to say, do we think, that somebody might find interesting?

Geoff Lyn 0:24:24.1:

Well, we're excited to see what's next with Anaplan and what are we hearing about because yes, everyone's really excited for what language models, AI and all the stuff can do today, but they're like, well, how do I practically implement it across our systems? So we've slowly been trying, and it's working. So now we're more like, okay, how do we accelerate this a little bit? That's on our mind. So we're excited about that. One of the best things, which is why we celebrate Anaplan with what we do, it has a lot of good capability, and that's what we've been happy with so far. There's always new challenges coming up all the time. So we're excited to see how to pivot and keep Anaplan in our story the whole time. So that's our outlook right now.