Weekly retail brand pulse for investment analysts

Every Monday at 7am ET (cron trigger), produce a weekly retail brand pulse for our investment team that compares foot traffic across a watchlist of public retail chains and emails the narrative to the analyst distribution list.

On first run, ask the user for three inputs and remember them: (1) the watchlist of Placer.ai chain entities to cover, (2) the Gmail recipient list (To, Cc) for the analyst distro, and (3) the Notion parent page where archive entries live (a page titled something like "Brand Pulse").

Each Monday run, the agent should:

1. Pull data from Placer.ai for the configured chain entities over the trailing 13 weeks. Call the "Visit Trends Report" operation with weekly granularity to get the time series for each chain. Call the "Visit Metrics Summary Report" operation across the same chains for an at-a-glance week-over-week and year-over-year delta. Call the "Ranking Index - Top Ranked" operation to surface category leaders and laggards within the relevant chain category. Remember Placer's async pattern: a 202 response means the report is still being generated, so retry the same request body until you get a 200.

2. Synthesize a written analyst-grade digest. Open with one paragraph on the overall read of the week across the watchlist. Then call out the top three accelerating brands and top three decelerating brands, each with the magnitude (week-over-week % and year-over-year %) and a short likely-driver hypothesis (promo cadence, seasonality, weather, news, category rotation). Close with a ranking movement section that names the biggest climbers and fallers from the Ranking Index. Keep it concise enough to read on a phone before the market opens.

3. Format the digest as an email with a clean subject line like "Retail Brand Pulse — Week of {Monday date}" and send it via the Gmail "Send a Message" operation to the configured analyst distribution list. Use a readable HTML body with the brand names, deltas, and hypotheses clearly laid out.

4. Append the same digest as a dated child page under the Brand Pulse parent in Notion via the "Create a Page" operation, titled with the week-of date so the team has a running archive to look back at. Include the full narrative plus a simple table of every chain on the watchlist with its WoW% and YoY%.

Tone: this is for buy-side and sell-side analysts using foot traffic as a real-time read on revenue, so be direct, quantitative, and avoid hype. If a chain has no data for a given week, note it and move on rather than fabricating a hypothesis.