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Groupings
A grouping is any real-world container that holds several pieces of creative work — a thing that happened, that you could point at. A campaign that ran. The standing brand-and-identity collection a brand lives inside. A project a studio delivered. An event, or a season, that work showed up at. One piece of creative does not need a container to exist — and the same creative can appear in many places without ever becoming two things.
How groupings connect to everything else
Read it as sentences: an entity runs a campaign, and takes part in an event; a grouping can contain other groupings — an event contains the campaigns that ran at it; a grouping gathers content; one creative appears as several content items; and the people and companies who made a piece are credited on it.
The four kinds of grouping
| Kind | What it is |
|---|---|
| Campaign | A coordinated push of related work, run by a brand toward a goal |
| Brand-and-identity program | The standing identity a brand lives inside — not a push, a home |
| Project | The deliberately flexible one — a delivered body of work that is not a campaign and not identity |
| Event or season | A moment in the world that work shows up at — a conference, a sports season, a cultural occasion |
Three rules govern how they nest and what they may hold:
- An event can contain campaigns, and a season behaves like an event. A campaign can itself contain events and, in time, the news articles written about it.
- The project kind absorbs the honest mess. A retail experience with fifty pieces across in-store displays, or a genuine one-off — studios think in projects, and nothing should be forced into "campaign" just because no other box exists.
- A grouping is never a company. A collection of work can have participants; that does not make it an entity. The largest "company" this system ever held was really a grouping wearing the wrong label.
Membership in a grouping carries a role: a piece can be the hero of its campaign, one of its supporting assets, or a third party's validation of it. Belonging says which container; the role says what the piece is doing there.
Two edges, answered
"An event grouping is probably a campaign of sorts." Often, yes — and the model already allows exactly that. An event is its own kind of container, a campaign can attach to an event, and an event can contain the campaigns that ran at it. When the pile around an event is really a coordinated push, store it as a campaign attached to the event; when it is simply everything that showed up there, the event itself is the container. Nothing new to build.
Content from an app or a website's product is not a grouping. The product — a chat app, a web product — is an entity, and every piece captured from it links to that product. "Everything from this app" is a view over that link, the same way the browse lenses are views. Making the product a container would store the same fact twice.
One creative, many appearances
The same film on the brand's site, on a video platform, and in a press kit is one creative. Each appearance is kept, with its own channel, its own engagement, and its own surrounding information — but the creative's identity sits above all of them.
Aspect-ratio variants are appearances too. The primary ratio leads; the vertical and square cuts are kept and findable; and the same file is never shown twice as if it were two different pieces.
Vendor work is first-class
The case studies and portfolio write-ups that studios, agencies and production companies publish about their own work are as valuable as anything collected from the brand's side. The model holds a vendor's portfolio with the same structure as a brand's library. A studio's case study is its own piece of content — the studio's account of the work it delivered, collected from the studio's site.
What a grouping is not
Audience, market position and channel are concepts — axes you classify a piece against, never boxes you put it inside. The test is short: a grouping is a thing that happened; a concept is an axis. A social platform is not a thing that happened.
A real example, straight from our data
"Customer Stories" is the fullest container we hold: a customer story campaign run by OpenAI, gathering 30 pieces. Each piece sits in it with a role — 19 as validation, 7 as asset, 4 as partnership — so the container records not just that a piece belongs, but what it is doing there.
The chain runs end to end in "OpenAI DevDay 2025", a developer campaign from the same brand: 19 pieces carrying 19 credits — content writer, graphic designer, illustrator, installation designer, motion designer. Brand, container, piece, and the people who made the piece, all on real rows.
And the honest shape of the layer: of the 13,944 pieces in the library, only 312 sit inside any grouping at all (2.2%), across 48 groupings. The container layer is nearly empty — not because containers are the wrong idea, but because the pipeline that would fill them has not been built. A gap can mean the model is wrong, the build is wrong, or the work has not been done yet — this one is the third kind: unbuilt pipeline, not a broken idea.
Where to look next
- Every value you can actually choose — the full vocabulary, including the kinds of campaign.
- How many groupings we hold, and how full they are — the state of the data.
- Where the live system disagrees with this page — the conformance report.
- What is still undecided about groupings — the open questions.
- The exact tables and columns — the data reference.