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Entities
An entity is a real thing in the world that we track: a company, a person, a song, or an artist. Entities are the actors in everything else — a company runs a campaign, a person directs a film, a song scores an ad. When you follow a brand in BrandTrackers, you're following an entity.
The kinds
There are 2,438 entities today, of four kinds:
| Kind | How many | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Company | 1,639 | A brand, an agency, a studio, or a business we track |
| Person | 552 | An individual — a director, a designer, a creator |
| Song | 125 | A track used in creative work |
| Artist | 122 | A musical act |
Companies are the heart of it. People, songs, and artists mostly show up because they're involved in a company's work — the director of a spot, the song behind it.
What kind of company?
A company can be more than a household brand — it can be the agency that made the ad, the studio that shot it, or a product line inside a bigger brand. We record that with a company's type. Most companies don't have one yet:
| Type | How many | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| (not labelled yet) | 1,209 | We know it's a company, but haven't said what kind |
| Product line | 394 | A named line inside a parent company |
| Brand owner | 27 | A top-level brand that owns others |
| Studio | 5 | A creative or production studio |
| Agency | 3 | An advertising or creative agency |
| Sub-brand | 1 | A brand that sits under a parent brand |
The big number to notice: most companies (1,209 of 1,639) are unlabelled. We've collected them but haven't sorted them into brands, agencies, and studios. Filling that in — especially the agencies and studios that make the work — is one of the biggest gaps to close.
How entities connect
- A company can belong to a parent company. 395 entities are linked to a parent this way, which is how a product line points up to its brand, or a subsidiary to its owner.
- A company can own products. There are 139 products, each tied to the company that makes it. (Products get their own pillar; the short version is that a product is a specific offering — a model, a platform, an app — as distinct from the company itself.)
- An entity makes and appears in content. Every post, page, and video is linked to the entities involved in it — who made it, who's in it, who it's about.
- People connect to work through roles. A person is tied to a piece of work by the role they played on it (director, designer, and so on), rather than just being listed next to it.
What's still open
- Most companies are unlabelled (1,209 of 1,639). Until they're sorted, we can't cleanly answer "show me the agencies" or "which studios worked on this."
- The buy-side is thin. We have only a few agencies and studios recorded so far. The brands we track hire those vendors, so this is a coverage gap, not a flaw in the model.
- A company published to the public site vs. one we've merely collected are different states. Only 156 entities are marked as published, so the tracked set is much larger than the visible one.
Exact data
The precise tables, columns, and live counts behind this page live in the data reference. This page is the plain-language description; that page is the machine-exact detail.