/digital-marketing-pro:validate-profile — Brand Profile + Credential Health Check

This skill is the canonical "is this brand ready to ship work?" gate. It validates a brand profile is complete enough for production use AND that every credential/connector referenced by the profile is actually reachable — without ever printing credential values.

Use this skill:

• After /digital-marketing-pro:brand-setup (or /digital-marketing-pro:client-onboarding) to confirm the new profile is production-ready.
• After rotating any API key (Slack, HubSpot, Stripe, Ahrefs, GA4 service account, etc.) so connectivity is re-confirmed without exposing the new value in logs.
• After importing brand guidelines (/digital-marketing-pro:import-guidelines) to confirm the merge succeeded.
• As the prerequisite check before /digital-marketing-pro:engagement, /digital-marketing-pro:campaign-plan, or /digital-marketing-pro:launch-campaign.

Why this skill exists

For agencies running 50–200 client brands, brand profiles and credentials drift constantly: a junior changes a Slack channel, an API key rotates, a brand voice gets edited. The cost of running a 60-minute engagement on a broken profile is hours of rework. This skill catches those drift cases in under 60 seconds.

The skill is read-only — it inspects state, never modifies it. It also never prints credential values — connector checks emit pass / fail / error-class without echoing the secret.

Validation dimensions

A BLOCKER means "do not let the user run engagement / campaign-plan / launch-campaign until this is fixed." A WARNING is surfaced but does not gate.

Process

Step 0 — Resolve the brand to validate

If --brand <slug> was passed, use it. Otherwise read the active brand from ~/.claude-marketing/brands/_active-brand.json (set by /digital-marketing-pro:switch-brand). If neither is available, error: "--brand <slug> required, or run /digital-marketing-pro:switch-brand first." Do NOT validate "everything" — validation is per-brand by design.

Step 1 — Load the brand profile

BRAND_DIR="$HOME/.claude-marketing/brands/{brand}"
test -d "$BRAND_DIR" || { echo "Brand directory not found at $BRAND_DIR — run /digital-marketing-pro:brand-setup first."; exit 1; }
PROFILE="$BRAND_DIR/profile.json"
test -f "$PROFILE" || { echo "profile.json missing under $BRAND_DIR — run /digital-marketing-pro:brand-setup."; exit 1; }

Parse the profile JSON and capture: brandname, industry, targetjurisdictions, voice., target_audience., guardrails., tracking.backend, integrations., analytics.*.

Step 2 — Required-field checks

Walk the checklist in the Validation dimensions table above. For each field, record one of: OK / WARN: <reason> / BLOCK: <reason>. Do NOT short-circuit — collect every issue so the user sees the full picture in one pass.

For regulated industries (industry matches any of pharma, pharmaceuticals, bfsi, banking, insurance, healthcare, legal, medical-devices), upgrade guardrails issues from WARNING to BLOCKER.

Step 3 — Compliance-jurisdiction cross-check

For every entry in target_jurisdictions, confirm skills/context-engine/compliance-rules.md contains a matching section header (e.g. ### 1.11 India — DPDPA). If a jurisdiction is declared but not covered, BLOCK with: "Jurisdiction {X} declared in profile but no compliance rules for it — engagement will produce non-compliant deliverables."

Step 4 — Connector reachability (credential-safe)

For each backend referenced in tracking.backend, integrations.crm, integrations.email, integrations.cms, integrations.analytics, integrations.social, run the matching health probe via scripts/connector-status.py:

python "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/connector-status.py" \
    --action status \
    --brand "{brand}" \
    --connectors "{comma-separated list inferred from profile}" \
    --probe-only --no-secrets

connector-status.py --probe-only runs a local readiness check: it verifies that the required environment variables / .mcp.json entry for each connector are present and non-empty. It does NOT open a live network connection or make a whoami call — so it reports a config-level class (CONFIGURED / MISSINGENV / NOTIN_MCP), not a live HTTP status. --no-secrets guarantees it never echoes, logs, or writes a credential value. For an actual liveness check, use the connector's MCP tools/list endpoint or the HTTP curl probe below.

For MCP servers in .mcp.json (if present at the brand or project level), run a tools/list ping against each via mcpconnector* if the connector is loaded, or invoke a 5-second curl HEAD against the configured url for HTTP MCPs:

for url in $(jq -r '.mcpServers[] | select(.type=="http") | .url' .mcp.json); do
    code=$(curl -sS -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" -m 5 "$url" || echo "000")
    echo "$url -> HTTP $code"
done

HTTP 200, 204, 401 (auth required for GET — POST will work), and 405 (method not allowed for GET — POST will work) all count as "reachable". 404, 000 (DNS / timeout), 5xx count as BLOCK.

Step 5 — Output-path writeability

test -w "$HOME/.claude-marketing/brands/{brand}/" || echo "BLOCK: brand directory is not writeable"
# User-visible publish dir (dual-copy pattern)
if [ -n "$DIGITAL_MARKETING_PRO_PUBLISH_DIR" ]; then
    test -w "$DIGITAL_MARKETING_PRO_PUBLISH_DIR" || echo "WARN: DIGITAL_MARKETING_PRO_PUBLISH_DIR ($DIGITAL_MARKETING_PRO_PUBLISH_DIR) is not writeable"
elif [ -d "$HOME/Documents" ]; then
    test -w "$HOME/Documents" || echo "WARN: ~/Documents is not writeable — the user-visible publish copy will fail"
fi

Step 6 — Model-curator currency

python "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/resolve_model.py" --registry-age

If the registry is more than 90 days old, WARN: "modelregistry.json is {N} days old — frontier models change every ~6 weeks. Run scripts/refreshmodels.py to check drift." (Do not block — the curator auto-falls-forward on deprecated ids, so an older registry is degraded, not broken.)

Step 7 — Report

Print a structured report. ALWAYS show every check (don't only print failures — agencies need positive confirmation for the rest):

🔎 Brand profile validation — {brand_name}
   Slug: {brand} · Industry: {industry} · Jurisdictions: {list}

✅ Required identity      brand_name, industry, target_jurisdictions all set
✅ Voice profile          tone={tone} · formality={formality} · energy={energy}
⚠️  Audience profile       primary_persona.role set, reading_level MISSING
✅ Guardrails             {N} prohibited_terms, {M} prohibited_claims (industry={industry})
✅ Compliance jurisdictions  EU-GDPR ✓ · IN-DPDPA ✓ · US-CCPA ✓
🛑 Connector — Slack       MISSING_ENV (SLACK_* env not set — add via /digital-marketing-pro:add-integration slack)
✅ Connector — HubSpot     OK (workspace acme-corp, 1247 contacts)
✅ Connector — Stripe      OK
✅ MCP — gmailmcp.googleapis.com  HTTP 405 (alive)
✅ Output paths            ~/.claude-marketing/brands/{brand}/ writeable; ~/Documents/DigitalMarketingPro/ writeable
⚠️  Model curator           registry is 102 days old — consider scripts/refresh_models.py

Decision: 🛑 BLOCKED — Slack connector not configured. Fix before running:
  • /digital-marketing-pro:engagement
  • /digital-marketing-pro:campaign-plan
  • /digital-marketing-pro:launch-campaign

Re-run /digital-marketing-pro:validate-profile after fixing.

Also emit a machine-readable JSON summary so it can be consumed by /digital-marketing-pro:check, /digital-marketing-pro:status, or downstream automation:

{
  "brand": "{slug}",
  "decision": "blocked | passed | passed_with_warnings",
  "blockers": [{"check": "connector_slack", "reason": "..."}],
  "warnings": [{"check": "audience_persona", "reason": "reading_level missing"}],
  "passed": ["required_identity", "voice_profile", ...]
}

Behaviour rules

1. Never print credential values. Connector probes use --no-secrets; if a probe accidentally returns a credential in its error string, redact before printing. The skill output goes to logs and clipboards — assume it leaks.
2. Read-only. Never modify the brand profile, credentials, MCP config, or any persistent state. This is a checker, not a fixer. Hand back actionable next commands instead.
3. Don't short-circuit. Run every check even after the first BLOCKER — agencies want the full punch list in one pass.
4. Don't validate cross-brand. Per-brand only, by design. Looping across all brands is a separate workflow (/digital-marketing-pro:agency-dashboard --health).
5. Idempotent. Running this skill twice in a row produces identical output (modulo timestamps). No retries inside the skill — retries are the user's call.

Arguments

/digital-marketing-pro:validate-profile [--brand <slug>] [--json] [--connectors <list>] [--quick]

• --brand <slug> — brand to validate (else uses active brand)
• --json — emit only the JSON summary, no human report (useful for chaining)
• --connectors <list> — comma-separated subset to probe instead of every connector in the profile (useful when only Slack rotated)
• --quick — skip the connector reachability probes (run only the field-level checks)

Related skills + commands

• [brand-setup](../brand-setup/SKILL.md) — interactive brand creation
• [import-guidelines](../import-guidelines/SKILL.md) — bulk-load existing brand guidelines into the profile
• [status](../status/SKILL.md) — unified read-only snapshot of the active brand
• [check](../check/SKILL.md) — pre-publish content quality gate
• [switch-brand](../switch-brand/SKILL.md) — set the active brand
• scripts/connector-status.py — the underlying connector health probe
• scripts/resolve_model.py — model curator (used for currency check)