Roundel Planning Tied to the Target Merchant Plan

Most Roundel plans I inherit were sized in a joint business planning conversation and modelled afterwards. This plan separates the two lines and prices them apart: media bought because it sells units at Target, and media bought because your merchant expects a number. Both can be defensible. Only the first belongs in a return calculation, and putting a dollar figure on the second is usually the most useful page in the deck. Across the last four of these, that figure ran between fifteen and forty percent of the annual Roundel commitment. What the plan is built from: Partners Online sales and item data at DPCI level, your last two category resets and the reset calendar ahead, Circle offer history, the store list where you hold real distribution rather than the national count, and both your first-party and Target Plus paths where you run each. Onsite search and category placements are planned against the terms where your item already ranks, because paying to sit above your own listing is the line I delete most often. Reading Roundel's in-store attribution: Target ties a share of store transactions to a Circle identity, and that share skews toward heavier, more loyal guests, who are the same households most likely to buy you with no advertising at all. Read it as a panel with a known bias, not a census, and never set it beside an onsite return as though the two measure the same thing. Where the budget supports it, I design a store-group test using Target's own market structure and read it against POL sales. It is slower and much harder to argue with. Offsite programmatic is never read on view-through, whatever the platform will report. The merchant conversation: You get a negotiating position rather than a wish list: which placements are worth committing to for the year, which to hold until a test reads, which trade dollars should not quietly become media dollars, and the point at which you should decline, with the words to decline in. If the buyer relationship is strained, tell me at the start. It changes what I recommend committing to and what stays out of the room. What I do not do here: Asset production against Roundel specs, item content syndication through Syndigo or Salsify, Target Plus marketplace operations, shipment forecasting, or attending the planning meeting in your place. I prepare the person who owns that relationship; I do not take it from them. No percentage of media, no rebates, no reselling of inventory to you. Not for you if: You are pre-launch at Target, or inside your first two quarters on shelf, where there is no sales history to plan against and the honest answer is to wait. Your item is under review and at risk of being cut, in which case media is not the problem in front of you. Or the plan exists to justify a number already agreed, in which case I will write down what the money is actually doing, and that has not always been welcome. Timing and sequence: The work lands best six to eight weeks ahead of your category's planning window, which for most categories means the quarter before the reset rather than the month before the meeting. Order of work: data pull and reconciliation, a working session with sales and finance, the plan with the two lines split, then the merchant position and a rehearsal of it if that is useful. English or Hebrew.