Core concepts

Nebula is organized around the way media teams actually work. A workspace holds the operating rules. Projects group related work. Media plans define the budgeted plan. Placements break that plan into line items. Creative, reports, insights, and workflow stages add the context teams need to review and improve the work over time.

Use this page as the vocabulary layer before you move into the task guides.

Workspace

A workspace is the top-level environment for a company, client, or team. It holds the people, permissions, taxonomy, workflow rules, integrations, brand assets, projects, and planning data that everyone works from.

Most setup decisions happen at the workspace level because they affect future work. Channel names, objective names, reporting periods, fee rules, workflow stages, and user roles should be configured before planners begin building a large number of plans and placements.

Project

A project is the stable container for related work. It usually represents a client, brand, campaign family, initiative, or other meaningful planning group.

Projects keep media plans, creative context, reports, insights, and related work together. If you are not sure where a media plan or report belongs, start by asking which project owns the business context.

Media plan

A media plan is the budgeted plan for a defined scope and date range. It organizes placements, allocations, fees, vendors, approvals, notes, and supporting context.

Use a media plan when the team needs one place to review what is planned, how budget is distributed, what needs approval, and what changed over time.

Placement

A placement is a planned media line item inside a media plan. It typically includes channel, objective, format, vendor, flight dates, budget, notes, status, and supporting campaign context.

Placements are where the plan becomes operational. They describe what will run, where it will run, when it will run, and how much budget is attached to it.

Allocation

An allocation is the time-based budget breakdown for a placement. In many workspaces, allocations are monthly. They can also follow the reporting periods configured by the team.

Allocations help teams understand how a placement budget spreads across time. When fees apply, Nebula can calculate net amounts from gross budget so planners do not have to maintain the same math in multiple places.

Creative

Creative is the ad concept, message, asset set, or creative unit that supports the media plan. Nebula’s Creative Library helps teams find, organize, review, and connect creative records to placements.

Creative context matters because a placement is rarely just a budget line. Teams also need to understand what message, format, asset, or variation is expected to run.

Workflow stage

A workflow stage is the current review or approval state for a plan, placement, or creative record. Stages help the team understand whether work is still being drafted, ready for review, approved, locked, or complete.

Workflow stages should be treated as governance, not decoration. They decide who can edit, who needs to review, and when work should stop changing.

Report and insight

Reports show performance in the right context: workspace-wide, project-specific, or media-plan-specific. Insights capture the structured takeaway from that performance.

Use reports to understand what happened. Use insights to record what it means and what the team should remember next time.

How the pieces fit together

A typical path through Nebula looks like this:

1. Set up the workspace foundation: users, taxonomy, fees, workflows, integrations, and reporting periods.
2. Create the project that will hold the related plans, creative context, reports, and insights.
3. Create the media plan for the campaign scope, budget, and date range.
4. Add placements to describe the planned line items.
5. Fill allocations so budget is distributed across the right time periods.
6. Connect creative and platform campaign context where needed.
7. Review changes, versions, comments, and workflow status before approval.
8. Use reports and insights to understand performance and carry useful context forward.

Once these terms are clear, the rest of Nebula becomes much easier to navigate: every object has a level, a purpose, and a relationship to the work around it.