What is an Entity?
Overview
An entity is the foundational unit of analysis inside Demand Reports, anything you want to measure attention for: a brand, a celebrity, a piece of IP, an organization, and so on.
What is an Entity?
Inside Demand Reports, an entity is the thing you're measuring, the object whose attention, popularity and demand signals are being analyzed across channels and markets.
When you build a Demand Report you're really building a basket of entities to compare side by side. Each row in the report is one entity, and the scores, demographics, interests and search trends you see in the report are the signals Demand has aggregated for those entities.
Entity vs. account. Inside Demand Reports the input is always an entity, the conceptual umbrella over the names, handles, search terms and URL that describe one object of analysis. The other report types (Influencer, Overlap, Creator Discovery) take social accounts as input, not entities.
What Can be an Entity?
Entities are deliberately broad. They can represent anything that has a measurable presence across digital channels. Common examples include:
- Brands — e.g., Nike, McDonald's, Netflix.
- Celebrities and public figures — e.g., Cristiano Ronaldo, Adele.
- Entertainment IPs and franchises — e.g., Marvel, The Last of Us, FIFA.
- Media properties — e.g., The New York Times, BBC News.
- Organizations — e.g., NGOs, sports leagues, government bodies.
- Products and product lines — e.g., iPhone, PlayStation.
If it has a name and a digital footprint, it can be tracked as an entity.
How an Entity is Identified
Each entity in Demand Intelligence is built from a set of identifiers that connect the entity to its presence across the supported channels. These identifiers include:
- Name. The canonical name of the entity (e.g., "Nike"). This is also what's tracked on search: Demand measures how often the entity's own name has been searched on Google and YouTube, without any additional keyword next to it.
- Handles per channel. The entity's official accounts on each supported channel — @nike on Instagram, @nike on TikTok, the Nike YouTube channel, @nike on X.
- Website URL. The entity's main web property (e.g., nike.com), used to track web-based demand signals.
By combining all of these into a single profile, Demand can aggregate cross-channel signals into one entity row in a Demand Report. That's what makes side-by-side comparisons across very different entities possible.
Found vs. Not Found
When you create a Demand Report, each entity in your basket is checked against the Demand Intelligence database. Entities can be Found (ready to analyse), Not Found (the entity isn't in the database yet and needs to be requested), or have partial data.
The full breakdown of entity statuses and how to request a missing entity is covered in Understanding entity status and 'Not Found', inside the Demand Reports section.
Entities as the Billing Unit
Demand Intelligence was originally built around Demand Reports, so its credit system is denominated in entities. As other report types joined the product, the same unit was extended to them for billing consistency. Today:
- A Demand Report consumes one entity per entity in the basket (the conceptual entity, in the sense of this article).
- An Influencer Report consumes one "entity" per report — even though the input is a social account, the cost is denominated in entities.
- An Overlap Report consumes one "entity" per account analysed.
- A Creator Discovery search does not consume entities — it's free.