Introduction
When you're a one-person creative team, every second in the creative process matters. Now imagine managing assets in Google Drive — which can be challenging for large teams — while handling everything alone and juggling multiple incoming asset requests.
These are the challenges small creative teams like Block Renovation faced that ultimately led Molly, their Brand Design Lead, to make the switch for her team from Google Drive to Playbook. Playbook’s State of Creative Digital Asset Management 2024 found that 53% of Playbook users switched from Google Drive. Block Renovation is one of them!
Block Renovation is an AI-first platform simplifying home renovations by connecting homeowners and contractors. Acting as a 24/7 AI architect in your pocket, it offers AI-driven design and planning for homeowners exploring ideas before engaging contractors and AI-enabled hiring to streamline contractor selection and project execution. For homeowners looking to improve their homes and renovate confidently, Block is the most trusted place to plan and hire for major renovation projects, powered by proprietary data, personalized guidance, and a vetted contractor network.
With Playbook, Block Renovation achieved:
1. Streamlined organization
2. Improved collaboration between cross-functional teams
3. Time savings and efficiency
Molly has been with the company since its launch in 2018. As a core part of the creative team, she has seen many iterations of the company, from scaling up to scaling down, and currently, she’s the only creative role at Block Renovation, which means that her bandwidth is quite limited. That’s why the company really needed Playbook — to help make creative processes more efficient and help other team members collaborate with the creative department in a more self-sufficient way.
The challenge: Chaos in Google Doc files
Have you ever had that overwhelming feeling that creative assets just keep growing and growing? As Block Renovation’s asset library kept growing at such a fast pace, Google Drive proved to be a significant challenge to manage. Their expanding collection of nested files made navigating to a particular photo or video quite tricky and time-consuming.
The second catalyst for choosing to switch from Google Drive to Playbook was because discoverability became a major issue. The team often resorted to using the same assets over and over again, simply because they were familiar with where exactly those creative assets were stored. It was hard to visually understand the breadth of what they had available. This limitation didn’t just impact the creative team, but also other departments like sales, marketing, product, engineering, and business development.
As an in-house creative, Molly was the go-to person for the wider team’s creative needs.
However, the lack of a scalable solution made collaboration frustrating, as she often had to field requests for something as simple as finding a photo in Google Drive.
This inefficiency affected the overall team’s productivity and created bottlenecks that could’ve easily been avoided by switching to a digital asset management tool like Playbook. With Playbook, everyone can now work self-sufficiently and find what they need on their own, rather than needing to go through a creative request.
The solution: Why Playbook?
The Block Renovation creative team started looking for a digital asset management tool back in 2021 when the team was bigger and they were actively producing a high volume of assets. But it wasn’t until 2024, when Molly and the team discovered Playbook after evaluating a range of DAMs, many of which were large enterprise solutions that were too robust for their needs. After testing a few options, Block Renovation decided to choose Playbook for its user-friendly interface, its customer service team’s deep understanding of their challenges, and its willingness to solve specific problems.
Block Renovation’s transition from Google Drive to Playbook was streamlined, thanks to Playbook’s highly collaborative onboarding process. This made a huge difference in what could have been a stressful transition, given the sheer volume of files at stake. Before the switch, Molly already had a vision for how she wanted to structure her creative assets.
The Playbook support gave Molly structural and technical recommendations for how Block Renovation could most effectively and efficiently store their files.. Playbook helped Molly do an initial migration of the majority of their assets and implemented a preliminary tagging system to meet Block Renovation’s needs.
The Block Renovation team now uses the tags function quite heavily. They tag creative assets depending on the market (New York, New Jersey, Fairfield County, Boston, Philadelphia, DC, Chicago, San Francisco, LA), the type of project (bathroom, kitchen, living space, whole house, etc.), and even the homeowner names for all of the case study shoots. This new system saves time by enabling users to quickly locate specific creative assets without needing to navigate a nested, complex folder structure.
The Playbook team is incredibly receptive to customer feedback and even built a custom tagging feature inspired by Block Renovation’s needs. The custom tags feature will allow teams to create and label their own tags while also organizing filters and tags more efficiently. Now, instead of relying on memory, users will be able to see all available tags when searching — making asset management faster and more intuitive.
For Block Renovation, tagging has been one of the biggest time-savers since adopting Playbook. The team now uses it to store case study photography, contractor photography, and video production assets for social media. By dramatically reducing the time spent searching for specific files, Molly can focus more on production and less on file management.
The impact: Results achieved
Playbook’s interface is exceptionally user-friendly, which is a must-have when it comes to collaborating with cross-functional teams. It’s easy and clear for a non-creative person to understand and navigate effectively. The platform’s intuitive design lets users quickly search for something as simple as “blue tile” and find relevant photos and videos without needing to have in-depth knowledge of the creative asset library.
The DAM platform has also streamlined sharing assets and collections with external agencies like Block Renovation’s PR team and branding agency. Molly emphasized that being able to organize and present the company’s assets professionally using Playbook Publish and Template Gallery has helped them reduce the amount of repetitive folder creation that would normally happen with many external partners.
Block Renovation, like many brands using Playbook, relies heavily on video production and asset creation as key components of its content strategy. But creating stunning videos and scroll-stopping graphics takes time, making an efficient workflow essential. And since Molly frequently produces new assets for social media, quickly finding the right assets each day has been a game-changer, making content production more efficient and less time-consuming.
Molly said, “One thing that it seems like only Playbook does well is hosting brand guidelines and being able to preview the colors, what the color values are, and preview the fonts – and they do it in a very logical, visual way.” Block Renovation has a fairly complex color palette along with several illustration assets, so she is always referencing the guidelines even though she is familiar with them. In Playbook, Molly can preview the color values and preview fonts in a very logical yet visual way.
Other DAMs seem to be more focused on streamlining production, but Playbook draws a unique balance between being a tool for a creative team while also being a robust file organization platform. And don’t forget people on other teams — they can easily create presentations or documents that don’t require design but still need to be consistent with brand guidelines. Molly no longer needs to stop creating because someone in another department is looking for exactly what shade of orange to use in a sales deck.
What’s next with Playbook and Block Renovation
Block Renovation’s transition to Playbook showcases how an effective digital asset management system can completely transform the way a team organizes their creative assets and collaborates with internal and external teams. As Block Renovation continues to grow and evolve, Molly is excited to continue having Playbook as a crucial tool in their digital infrastructure.
We asked Molly for advice she would give to other teams considering a new digital asset management tool like Playbook and she said, “Start sooner rather than later. This is harder when you have a very large library to organize so I think as soon as you’re able to start using a DAM, you’ll be set up for success.”
Creative teams need to collaborate efficiently to be able to hit deadlines for projects while still enjoying the work they do. If your team wants to enable seamless collaboration across functions, like Block Renovation, it might be time for a demo of Playbook’s easy-to-use interface.
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