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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.
How entities connect to everything else
Read it as sentences: a company can own another company; a company sells products; a company runs campaigns; campaigns gather content; entities also appear directly in content, and content can show a product; and both entities and content get classified against our shared vocabulary.
The kinds
There are four kinds of entity.
| Kind | What it is |
|---|---|
| Company | A brand, an agency, a studio, or a business we track |
| Person | An individual — a director, a designer, a creator |
| Song | A track used in creative work |
| Artist | 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.
| Type | What it means |
|---|---|
| Brand owner | A top-level brand that owns others |
| Sub-brand | A brand that sits under a parent brand |
| Product line | A named line inside a parent company |
| Agency | An advertising or creative agency |
| Studio | A creative or production studio |
A company may also carry no type yet, which is the common case: we know it is a company but have not said what kind. Sorting those out — especially the agencies and studios that make the work — is one of the biggest gaps to close.
Ownership and brand architecture
Two different facts both look like "this sits under that", and the model holds them separately.
Corporate ownership says who owns a company — one business acquiring another. Brand architecture says how a family of brands presents itself — a parent brand over its sub-brands and product tiers, the way a flagship phone line sits over this year's premium model. Collapsing the two into one kind of link destroys exactly the distinction people ask about: which tier is the premium one, what sits under what, and who actually owns whom.
Both chains can run several levels deep, and a search for a parent also finds everything beneath it — ask for the parent brand's work and the sub-brands' work comes with it.
These links are dated. Ownership changes hands, names change, types change. Each is recorded as a fact with a time span, not a single current value, so the model can say what was true when a piece of work shipped — not only what is true today.
Products
A product is an entity. That is the ruling, and it settles the question people keep asking — "when does a product become a brand?" It never has to. A product line sits inside its company as an entity of its own, and it can carry its own brand identity — its own positioning, its own look — while still belonging to that company.
Products carry enough of their own structure — detail records, features, direct links from content and campaigns — that they get a chapter of their own.
Standing relationships
Companies also relate without owning each other: who competes with whom, who is whose agency of record, who partners with whom. These are durable facts, recorded directly on the entities, across many kinds of relationship — the product is, at heart, a relationship map.
One entity, one name
An entity is its kind plus its canonical name. Variant spellings, former names, and shorthand live as aliases that point at the one record, so a search under any of them lands in the same place. When two records turn out to be the same thing, they are merged by re-pointing everything at the survivor — never by deleting history. And new entities are not minted silently: a newly discovered name goes through review before it becomes a record of its own.
A real example, straight from our data
OpenAI is a company we track, labelled a brand owner. Below it sit 141 other entities — its products and sub-brands — and it is linked to 12,807 pieces of content across 23 campaigns.
Follow one campaign the whole way down:
| Step | What this is | The real value |
|---|---|---|
| The company | An entity | OpenAI |
| One of its campaigns | A container that gathers related work together | "OpenAI DevDay 2025" |
| The content inside it | The individual posts, pages, and videos | 19 items |
| The people credited | Who actually made the work, and in what role | 19 credits — content writer, graphic designer, illustrator, installation designer, motion designer |
That chain — a company, something it ran, the work that came out of it, and the people who made that work — is the spine of the whole model. When you can follow it end to end, every question we want to answer becomes answerable.
Where to look next
- Every value you can actually choose — the full vocabulary, including the services tree down to every craft, and what each credit means.
- How many entities we hold, and how they break down — the state of the data.
- Where the live system disagrees with this page — the conformance report.
- What is still undecided about entities — the open questions.
- The exact tables and columns — the data reference.