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An entity is a kind of thing in the world that everything else is ultimately about: a consumer, a campaign, an asset, an event, a place, a measure.

Its entities— 11

• ConsumerA person the brand markets to, at the person grain: known or anonymous, in any state of relationship.
• CampaignA bounded marketing effort with a purpose, a budget line and a run window: the unit spend and outcomes are attributed to.
• Digital AssetA creative file or module that can be placed: an image, a video, a document, a component.
• Engagement EventOne consumer engagement: the fact the measurement chain is built around.
• SurfaceA place an experience is delivered and an engagement can be observed.
• Content TypeA governed template a piece of content is built from: what kind of page, asset or message it is.
• Technology PlatformA system in the marketing stack that delivers, captures or analyses engagement.
• VendorA company the operation buys media, data or services from.
• MeasureA defined quantity read from signals: a metric, a KPI, a goal's number.
• BrandThe name, marks and reputation consumers hold beliefs about and choose between: what awareness, sentiment and a mention are of.
• ProductThe thing the brand offers and a consumer buys or uses: what an offer prices, a fulfilment delivers and a review is about.

Why it matters

What goes wrong without it, as the commitments that license this kind say it, each standing on its sources.

• Separate executable actions, observed events and consumer actor grainWhat a system did and what a person did are different facts, and the two are easily merged — which is why event models separate what was explicitly triggered from what was implicitly observed. A send is not an open; a delivery total is not a set of people. Once an execution record and a behavioural observation are the same kind of thing, every count downstream quietly mixes them, and an audience figure stops being checkable.
  XDM ExperienceEvent Class · Declaring the Grain
• Make outcome quality, calculation method and attribution inspectableAn outcome number is only as good as the inputs, exclusions and window that nobody wrote down. Media measurement standards exist because outcome claims circulate detached from their method, and a figure with no stated method cannot be challenged, reproduced or compared against anyone else's. Keeping what a measure means apart from how it is computed is what makes either one reviewable.
  Outcomes and Data Quality Standards · Declaring the Grain · Measuring Visibility in the AI Era · Data-driven multi-touch attribution models · Causally motivated attribution for online advertising · A Comparison of Approaches to Advertising Measurement: Evidence from Big Field Experiments at Facebook · Why Three Exposures May Be Enough · Digital Audience-Based Measurement Standards
• A journey is a state machine, not a funnel pictureA funnel diagram names stages and says nothing about how anyone moves between them, so it cannot be validated, queried or executed. A state machine names the legal moves and what triggers each, which is the difference between a journey a system can run and a journey a deck can show.
  State Chart XML (SCXML): State Machine Notation for Control Abstraction · Declaring the Grain · Statecharts: a visual formalism for complex systems
• Every term is about something in the worldA term that does not say what it is about cannot be joined to anything: two terms describing the same thing in the world are unrecognisable as such, and a vocabulary of terms floats free of the subject matter it was built to describe. Declaring it as a bare field rather than a relationship costs more than tidiness. A field reads in one direction only, so the thing being described never learns what describes it - the entity a hundred terms are about renders as though nothing points at it, which is the opposite of the truth and the single most misleading thing a knowledge graph can tell a reader. Stated as a relationship with a named inverse, both readings come back for free, and the grain declaration every term already makes becomes traversable rather than merely recorded.
  Declaring the Grain · OWL 2 Web Ontology Language Primer