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.

Music labels

A music label uses the company model. Music Label describes its company type, so it remains discoverable through Companies without creating a second identity. A label or imprint need not be a separately incorporated business. Preserve its public identity and use evidence for its parent and ownership relationships.

Artists, recordings, distribution, publishing and credits remain distinct. A label credit alone does not establish every business relationship or right. The music-label decision settles the intended meaning; the existing creation paths and registrations still need reconciliation.

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.

The implementation is still being checked. The relationship records derived from collected content do not yet stay fully aligned when that content's company roles change. A check on 4 October found records whose cited piece no longer carries the supporting role. Some have support elsewhere. That calls for evidence review, not an assumption that the relationship is false.

The system needs to keep each supporting source and carry corrections through to the relationship. A publication date alone does not establish when two companies began working together. A partnership label also does not, by itself, establish sponsorship or paid placement. Those distinctions are part of the remaining review.

When a platform also has a company identity

A platform describes where a piece appeared. Its company can also be an entity we track, with its own products and creative work. When that company is tracked, the platform links to it.

The link keeps two questions separate: “What ran on this service?” and “What did this company make?” A company advertising its own product on its own platform answers both, without turning the place where the advertisement ran into its maker.

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.

Last reviewed 5 October 2026.

The generated example retains its earlier snapshot.