Monday brief: what competitors are pitching on YouTube

Build me an agent workflow that tells me, every Monday morning, what my competitors published on YouTube in the past week and what it signals about their strategy.

Trigger: a cron that runs every Monday at 8:00am in my local timezone.

Config the workflow should ask me for at setup: the list of competitor YouTube channels to track (accept channel IDs starting with UC, or channel URLs and handles, and resolve them), the Slack channel to post the digest in (default #competitive-intel), the Google Sheets spreadsheet ID and tab name for the running tracker, the lookback window (default 7 days), and the minimum video length to include (default 60 seconds, so Shorts are skipped).

Step 1, resolve each channel. For every competitor channel in the config, call YouTube List Channels with id=<channelId> and part=snippet,contentDetails to get the channel title and its uploads playlist ID from contentDetails.relatedPlaylists.uploads.

Step 2, find last week's uploads. For each uploads playlist, call YouTube List Playlist Items with part=snippet,contentDetails and maxResults=50, and keep only items whose contentDetails.videoPublishedAt falls inside the lookback window. Use videoPublishedAt, not snippet.publishedAt, which is the time the video was added to the playlist. The playlist comes back newest first, so stop paginating as soon as you hit an item older than the window. Do not use Search Videos for this: it costs 100 quota units per call, while playlist item reads cost 1.

Step 3, get the real metadata. Collect the video IDs from step 2, dedupe them, and call YouTube Get Video with part=snippet,statistics,contentDetails, passing up to 50 comma separated IDs per call. That gives you the view count, the full description, and the ISO 8601 duration. Parse the duration and drop any video shorter than the configured minimum length so Shorts do not pad the digest.

Step 4, have Gemini watch each video. For every remaining video, call Google Gemini Generate Content with a model that supports video understanding (gemini-2.5-flash is a good default). Send two parts in the request: a fileData part whose fileUri is the video's watch URL (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<videoId>), which lets Gemini process the video itself with no separate transcription step, and a text part carrying the channel name, title, publish date, view count, and description as context.

Ask Gemini to return strict JSON per video with these fields: positioning_angle (the argument the video is making, one or two sentences), product_or_feature (what is actually being pushed), intended_audience (who it is aimed at), claims (an array of any specific pricing, named customer, or partnership claims worth reacting to, empty if none), signal (either "strategic_shift" or "routine"), and signal_reason (one line on why). Treat a video as a strategic shift when it introduces a new product line, changes the pricing story, names a major customer or partner, targets a new segment, or goes after a competitor directly. Treat tutorials, feature walkthroughs, event recaps, and community content as routine.

Run these calls one at a time or with low concurrency, since video analysis is slower than a plain text call, and retry on 429 with exponential backoff. If Gemini cannot process a particular video because it is private, region locked, or too long, fall back to analyzing the title and description, and mark that video as metadata only rather than dropping it.

Step 5, post one digest to Slack. Use Slack Bot Send a Message (the slackbot integration, which posts as the bot rather than as me) to the configured channel. Post a single message, not one per video. Open with the two or three videos flagged as strategic_shift, each with the channel name, the linked title, the view count, the positioning angle, and any claims Gemini pulled out, so it is obvious why they matter. List the routine videos underneath, grouped by competitor, at one line each. Then, for any tracked channel that published nothing inside the window, add a single line such as "Globex: nothing published this week." Do not pad the digest with filler for quiet channels. If every channel was quiet, still post one short message saying so, so I know the watch ran.

Step 6, append to the tracker. Use Google Sheets Append Values against the configured spreadsheet and tab to add one row per video, with these columns in order: channel name, video title, publish date, view count, positioning summary, video URL. Append in publish date order. If the sheet is empty, write a header row first. The whole point is that history compounds week over week, so never overwrite existing rows.

Other rules: the digest should read like an analyst note, short and specific, not like marketing copy. Where Gemini found a pricing or customer claim, quote it verbatim, because those are the lines my sales team will get asked about. If a channel fails to resolve, note it at the bottom of the digest instead of failing the whole run.