The Missing Middle: 7 Ways Marketers Can Fix the Biggest Gap in Their Martech Stacks
For years, marketers have focused on two parts of the Martech stack: collecting customer data and activating campaigns. For the bottom (or foundational) data layer, we've invested heavily in customer data platforms, cloud data warehouses, and data infrastructure. On the top layer, we've built increasingly sophisticated execution layers like campaign tools and channel specific applications spanning email, mobile, paid media, web, social, and dozens of other channels.
Yet despite all this investment, many organizations still struggle to deliver timely, relevant customer experiences. Why? Because they're missing the middle layer.
The middle layer, the decisioning and orchestration layer, is where customer data should be transformed into analytically based decisions and orchestrated actions. It's the connective tissue between insight and execution. Without it, companies end up with plenty of data and plenty of channels but no reliable way to determine the right message, for the right person, at the right time, across the right channels.
As artificial intelligence adoption accelerates and organizations experiment with agentic systems capable of taking autonomous action, this gap becomes even more problematic. AI is only as effective as the decisioning framework that guides it.
Companies that get this right see measurable results. One global consumer and wholesale bank achieved 25-times ROI over five years on its personalization program while reducing deployment time for 2 billion offers by 78 percent, largely by bringing analytical models, business rules, and decision logic together into a unified decision intelligence layer.
If you're wondering whether your organization has a "missing middle" problem, here are seven areas worth examining:
1. Stop Thinking about Data and Channels as Separate Problems
Many organizations still approach customer data and channel execution as independent initiatives. The result? Data teams focus on building profiles while marketing teams focus on campaign execution. Somewhere in between, everyone assumes personalization will magically happen. It doesn't.
A useful analogy is to think of your marketing ecosystem as a living system with the following characteristics:
- Data is the fuel.
- Decisioning is the brain.
- Channels are the delivery mechanisms.
Without a brain coordinating activity, the rest of the system can't operate effectively. Data alone doesn't create experiences. Channels alone don't create relevance. Decisioning is what connects the two.>
2. Invest in a Customer Profile That Reflects Reality
Every effective orchestration strategy starts with a unified customer view, but many companies still rely on profiles that are incomplete, outdated, or refreshed on a schedule that made sense five years ago. Customers don't behave in batches. They browse, purchase, abandon, complain, and engage continuously. If your profile only updates periodically, your decisions will always be based on yesterday's reality.
The goal isn't simply to collect more customer information. It's to create a living profile that reflects customer behavior as it happens and allows marketers to respond accordingly.
3. Make Decisioning an Explicit Capability
This is where many organizations run into trouble. When marketers talk about orchestration, they often focus on journey maps, campaign flows, or channel execution. What's frequently overlooked is the actual decision engine sitting underneath it all.
Every customer interaction requires the following decisions:
- Is the customer eligible for this offer?
- Which of several competing actions is best?
- Which channel should be used?
- When should the interaction occur?
Too often, those decisions are scattered across disconnected systems, buried in campaign rules, or left to individual teams operating independently. Organizations that excel at personalization treat decisioning as a distinct capability, not a byproduct of campaign management.
4. Build a Two-Way Relationship with Channels
Many marketing systems are excellent at pushing messages out but far fewer are good at listening. Effective orchestration depends on feedback loops. Every customer interaction generates signals that should influence the next decision. Did the customer open the email? Ignore it? Purchase through another channel? Visit the website afterward? Those signals need to return to the decisioning layer immediately.
Without that feedback, orchestration becomes little more than automated broadcasting. You're sending messages, but you're not learning from the outcomes.
5. Replace Scheduled Campaigns with Event-Driven Responses
Traditional campaign management was built around calendars, but modern customer engagement is driven by events like a customer abandoning a cart or a subscription about to renew. These moments create opportunities to engage, but only if the organization can recognize and respond to them quickly. The companies creating the most relevant experiences today aren't simply scheduling messages better. They're building systems that recognize important customer events and react in real time. That's a fundamentally different operating model.
6. Establish a Referee for Competing Priorities
One of the least glamorous yet most important components of orchestration is governance. Every large organization eventually faces the same problem: Different teams, products, campaigns, and journeys all compete for customer attention simultaneously. Without some form of arbitration, the customer pays the price.
We've all experienced it: multiple emails in a single day, overlapping offers, conflicting messages, or communications that clearly don't reflect what just happened in another channel. A strong decisioning layer acts as a referee. It evaluates competing priorities, determines which interaction deserves precedence, and ensures the customer experiences a coherent conversation rather than a collection of disconnected campaigns.
7. Bring AI into the Moment of Decision
Perhaps the biggest misconception about AI in marketing is that having models automatically creates better decisions. It doesn't.
Many organizations are still making decisions based on scores calculated days or even weeks earlier. They use AI outputs, but they're not truly operating in real time. The real opportunity comes when AI is embedded directly within the decision process itself, evaluating current context, customer behavior, business objectives, and constraints at the exact moment a decision must be made.
That's the difference between AI-informed marketing and adaptive marketing. And it's increasingly what separates leaders from laggards.
Most organizations have more customer data than ever. They also have no shortage of channels through which to engage customers. The competitive advantage now comes from what happens in between.
Successful companies will be able to consistently move from data to decisions to delivery in real time. They'll have a strong middle layer capable of coordinating customer needs, business goals, AI-driven recommendations, and channel execution into a single system.In other words, they'll have solved the missing middle.
Jonathan Moran is head of martech solutions marketing at SAS.