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 can have separately browsable versions; 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.

Content from an app or a website's product is not a grouping. The product — a chat app, a web product — is an entity. When evidence identifies it as the collection source, the captured piece links to it in that role. "Everything collected inside this app" is a view over that relationship. It is separately browsable from "everything showing or discussing this product." Making the product a grouping would confuse a source relationship with campaign or project membership.

The source and subject decision requires evidence for each path. Source, subject, maker and generating tool are different facts. Recording this rule does not establish that current storage and search distinguish them correctly.

One creative, several versions and publications

The same unchanged film on the brand’s site, on a video platform and in a press kit is one creative version. Each publication keeps its channel, engagement and surrounding information. Captures preserve what was collected from those publications.

A different cut, language or layout is a separately browsable version of the work. Versions can be compared without counting each repost as another creative work. Evidence must support the connection. The version decision clarifies the earlier use of appearances for both edited versions and publications.

Campaigns that continue over time

A campaign may continue without a planned ending. Duration describes how long the coordinated effort runs; purpose describes what it is trying to achieve. Neither replaces the other. A blank date does not establish that a campaign is ongoing, and a search collecting similar pieces is not evidence that they form one campaign.

Ongoing work needs monitoring and review as new pieces arrive. Keep the evidence for membership so people can inspect and correct the grouping. The decision establishes this requirement; the monitoring plan covers the workflow whose current implementation still needs verification.

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.

Connecting work that arrives later

Campaign recognition continues after initial onboarding. A newly collected piece may belong to an existing campaign, help establish a new campaign, or remain ungrouped. A studio's case study can arrive weeks after the brand's work. Collection date alone does not decide membership.

Keep the source's account, the original assets and photographs showing their use distinguishable. They may share a campaign, studio project or event, while a direct connection saying that a photograph shows a particular piece needs its own evidence. Shared membership does not prove that every image depicts every collected animation.

A product-launch campaign introduces a product. Other product campaigns may promote something already available. Preserve that distinction without requiring every piece to belong to a campaign or turning campaign purpose into a whole-piece content type.

These are required relationships and workflow outcomes, reinforced in the 5 October decisions. Recognition, confidence, human correction, scheduling and later updates still need a complete implementation audit. No monitoring schedule is activated by this explanation.

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 recorded example, measured on 2026-10-04

"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.

"OpenAI DevDay 2025", recorded as a developer campaign from OpenAI, has 19 linked pieces and 19 credits — content writer, graphic designer, illustrator, installation designer, motion designer.

Across all stored content records, 312 of 13,944 (2.2%) have membership in one of 48 campaign records. These totals include records that may be hidden or deleted; they are not a count of publicly browsable work.

Stored membership and credits do not establish that every connection is correct, that the pipeline created it automatically, or that browsing exposes it completely. These counts alone do not explain why other pieces have no membership.

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.

Last reviewed 5 October 2026.

The generated example records a dated database measurement. The DevDay relationship review separates those stored connections from what the collection and browsing paths have demonstrated.