Glossary

The Audience Intent Score (AIS) is Sentia's ad-intelligence score, ranking observed ads by how likely they are to be working: spend signals, run length, creative iteration count, and audience-overlap with the brand's organic followers. Sentia computes AIS across Meta and TikTok ad inventory in 2026 with adapters for both observed_ads and brand_activity_ads tables. The score matters because most ad libraries dump every active creative in a flat list; AIS surfaces the ones competitors are quietly pouring budget into.

A Brand Impact Score is a single composite metric that fuses reach, engagement, sentiment, and creator authority into one number, calibrated against a brand category cohort. Sentia ships its own version as the Calibrated Impact Score (CIS) in 2026, computed across IG, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook. The score matters because raw engagement rates lie when read in isolation and a calibrated composite shows whether a brand is actually moving relative to peers.

Brand monitoring tracks named-entity mentions of one brand across digital surfaces. Social listening adds topic and conversation tracking on top, capturing discussions that never name the brand. Media intelligence adds traditional press, TV, and ecommerce reviews. The three are nested, not synonyms · social listening is a superset of brand monitoring, and media intelligence is a superset of social listening. Sentia spans all three in one workspace, which is why teams in 2026 stop paying for two separate tools.

Calibration is the process of grading a metric against a peer group instead of an absolute scale. In marketing analytics, a 4.2% Instagram engagement rate is meaningless without context; calibration says whether 4.2% is top-decile or bottom-quartile for brands that match yours by category, size, and geography. Sentia rebuilds cohorts on every quarterly refresh so calibration tracks the live market in 2026, not a frozen snapshot from two years ago.

Cohort benchmarking compares a brand against a peer group selected for category, size, and geography rather than against a global average. A European mid-cap beauty brand benchmarks against other European mid-cap beauty brands, not against a global average that includes Procter and Gamble and a single-storefront indie skincare brand. Sentia rebuilds cohorts every quarter in 2026 so the benchmark tracks live market shape, not last year's shape.

Creator affinity is a creator's organic mention history with a brand or its competitive set, separated from any paid relationship. A creator who tagged a brand 14 times across IG and TikTok in 2026 without ever being paid scores higher affinity than one who posted twice as part of a contracted partnership. The metric matters because creators with prior organic affinity convert from outreach at roughly 2 to 3 times the rate of cold creators sourced by lookalike modelling.

CPM is cost per thousand impressions, CPC is cost per click, and CPE is cost per engagement. CPE is the most defensible of the three for blending paid and organic performance because engagement is the one signal both surfaces produce in comparable units. In 2026, marketing teams that report blended CPE alongside calibrated EMV get cleaner conversations with finance than teams that defend CPM in isolation, because CPE survives the question "what did this actually do".

The Calibrated Impact Score (CIS) is Sentia's competitor-leaderboard score, fusing reach, engagement, sentiment, and growth into one number calibrated against the brand's cohort. It powers the headline ranking on the Sentia competitor view and replaced share-of-voice as the default sort in 2026. The score matters because raw competitor leaderboards reward whoever spends the most; a calibrated score rewards whoever moves the most relative to peers.

The Campaign Performance Score (CPS) ranks Sentia's AI-clustered campaigns by composite reach, engagement, creative variance, and cross-channel coverage. It replaces ranking-by-cluster-size with ranking-by-impact, surfacing the campaign that moved the brand even when it shipped fewer posts. CPS matters in 2026 because campaign clustering naturally produces fat-tail noise; the score separates the campaign that worked from the campaign that just generated volume.

The Creator Value Score (CVS) is Sentia's per-creator score, fusing reach, engagement, brand affinity, and partnership cost into one geography-aware number. The Italy-aware variant adjusts for the Italian creator market's tighter follower-to-engagement ratio and lower CPM bands. CVS matters because raw follower-count creator lists confuse popularity with effectiveness; a 200k-follower creator with 8% engagement and prior brand affinity often outperforms a 2M-follower creator with no affinity.

Earned Media Value (EMV) is a dollar estimate of what organic social mentions, press coverage, and creator posts would have cost if bought as paid media. Sentia computes EMV per post in 2026 by multiplying impressions by a category-specific CPM benchmark, never by a single global rate. The number matters because it lets marketing teams compare earned reach against paid spend on the same axis without conflating the two.

Engagement rate is the share of a brand's audience that interacted with a post, calculated as (likes + comments + shares + saves) divided by followers or impressions, then expressed as a percentage. The unqualified number is meaningless because a 9% rate on 800 followers and a 0.4% rate on 8 million followers describe completely different brands. Sentia recomputes engagement rate manually in 2026 because the value stored on Instagram posts is unreliable.

A false positive in mention monitoring is a post that matched a brand term but does not actually refer to the brand. Generic names like Apple, Mango, Shell, and Coach generate thousands of false positives daily because the words also mean fruit, fruit, gas station, and sports professional. Sentia uses a single-pass classifier on every ingested mention in 2026 and holds the false-positive rate under 5% on the worst-case generic-name brands.

The Meta Ad Library is the public archive of every active and recently active ad on Facebook and Instagram, run by Meta since 2018 for transparency. It exposes the creative, the page running it, the run dates, and for political ads the spend bands and audience targeting. Sentia pulls from the Ad Library every day in 2026 to fuse paid creative against organic posts on the same competitor view, with detection latency typically under 48 hours from first creative.

An organic mention is a post about a brand that the brand did not pay to produce; a paid mention is one the brand sponsored, boosted, or ran as an ad. The split matters because the two surfaces obey different physics: organic mentions move comments, paid mentions move likes. Sentia separates organic from paid at ingest in 2026 by cross-referencing post IDs against the Meta Ad Library, the TikTok Commercial Content Research API, and creator partnership disclosures.

The Paid Performance Score (PPS) is Sentia's per-post score, weighting reactions, comments, shares, and video views against a 90-day account average to surface the post that broke the brand's pattern. Per-platform weights differ: TikTok weights views, Instagram weights comments, YouTube weights watch time. PPS matters in 2026 because it answers the only useful per-post question, which is whether this post out-performed the brand's own baseline, not whether it beat an arbitrary global benchmark.

The Paid Amplification Score (PAS) classifies a brand's paid-ad pattern into one of four shapes: always-on, test-and-scale, burst, and minimal. The pattern matters because the same total spend produces wildly different outcomes depending on cadence; a burst pattern signals product launches while always-on signals brand-building. Sentia computes PAS from observed ad-run lengths and spend distributions in 2026 and renders it on every competitor detail page so analysts can read the strategy in one glance.

Share of voice (SOV) is a brand's percentage of the total conversation in a defined competitive set during a defined period. If five brands in the European beauty mid-cap segment generated 100,000 mentions in Q1 2026 and one brand drove 35,000 of them, that brand has 35% SOV. The metric matters because it is the simplest way to see whether a marketing push expanded the brand's share of attention or just its absolute volume.

Sentiment analysis is the automated classification of a piece of text as positive, negative, or neutral toward a named entity. In 2026, modern systems use a single LLM pass instead of the lexicon-and-regex stacks that dominated until 2022, lifting accuracy on sarcasm and contextual statements from roughly 70% to the high 80s. The number matters because every downstream alert, share-of-voice cut, and crisis trigger inherits its error rate from the sentiment layer beneath it.

The TikTok Commercial Content Research API is TikTok's official endpoint for accessing branded and sponsored content, launched in 2023 to comply with the EU Digital Services Act. It exposes paid partnership disclosures, branded content metadata, and creator-brand attribution for ads served in the EU. Sentia uses this API as the canonical source for TikTok sponsored content in 2026, paired with paid scrapers to fill the organic-content gap the API does not cover.