"I've been looking for something like this for the past 4 years. It’s been a godsend to quickly access past projects and build a single source of truth."
Chris Stack
Creative Director @ Ralph Tokyo
ralphandco.com
London, UK
Global, Hybrid
Creative Agency
Hard Drives
About Ralph
Culture-shaping brand experiences for the world’s largest entertainment platforms
Ralph is an entertainment-first creative agency with offices in London, Tokyo, Los Angeles, and New York City. They forge emotional, culturally resonant brand experiences—across campaigns, activations, and immersive touchpoints—that people love to share. Clients include major streaming and entertainment platforms, such as Apple TV+, Netflix, Spotify, Peacock, Tubi, FX, and Sony—bringing stories fans care about to life.
The Challenge
Scattered files and unreliable tools hindered creative workflows
As a creative agency, Ralph has built an extensive catalog of projects, assets, and files that need to be archived in the cloud while remaining easily accessible and accurately tagged. However, the team struggled to find reliable software to manage these tasks, frequently encountering issues with video uploads and inconsistent metadata.
Ralph Tokyo, in particular, lacked a central place to search for and reuse content. Data was scattered across various hard drives and team members, leaving no single source of truth. Whenever someone needed a file, it became a major headache, costing significant time—especially for Chris Stack, Creative Director, who often had to track down assets personally. The team’s ultimate goal was to parallelize workflows and establish one unified system that could serve as a single source of truth for all creative assets.
Learn why top agencies, global brands, and high-growth enterprises use Shade.
Introduction to Shade
Centralized AI-powered search, tagging, and reliable bulk storage
Shade has provided Ralph with advanced search capabilities within a cost-effective bulk storage solution, enabling efficient content retrieval and flexible workflows among editors. With powerful AI tagging, Ralph can now find any asset whenever it’s needed, and the team has seen a complete elimination of failed uploads since switching to Shade.
Ralph engaged Shade to build a single, centralized cloud for all their files, making everything easily searchable. They were particularly excited about Shade’s natural language AI and semantic search capabilities, which allow editors to quickly locate clips and tag files based on clients or projects. Shade’s AI proved capable of accurately labeling even the most specific client sets and shows, transforming how Ralph organizes and accesses their vast creative library.
The New Workflow
Every project now lives in a single, searchable hub
Once a project wraps, all data from hard drives is uploaded directly into Shade for indexing and organization. Active projects are also sometimes uploaded to Shade, allowing clients and editors to quickly review content, search for specific assets, and create new reels or repurpose existing material.
This workflow ensures that every file—past or present—is easily accessible, searchable, and ready for reuse, eliminating the inefficiencies of scattered storage and manual organization. Ralph now has a centralized hub that keeps their creative library organized, streamlined, and always at their fingertips.
Present Outcome
Ralph saves hours per project, boosts reuse by 33%, and finishes campaigns 35% faster
Since adopting Shade, Ralph has experienced significant improvements in efficiency and workflow management. Editors now save an average of 10 hours per project previously spent searching for files and increase content reuse by 33%. Resulting in projects being completed 35% faster.
By centralizing all content and leveraging AI-powered metadata, Ralph has transformed their creative process, ensuring that every file is accessible, organized, and ready for reuse, allowing their editors to spend 23% more time editing than searching files, meaning more time on high-value creative work.
