In 2020, a “top 3 biggest pet peeves” TikTok created by a marketing company without a website can land a former high school football player a record deal. “Psycho!” is just the fifth track

ever released by the 19-year-old Mason Rupper, a Salt Lake City, Utah native who began writing songs only after a broken collar bone took him off the football field. Last summer, “Pyscho!” —

embittered and dead-eyed, but rousing — started to gain popularity in gaming videos, earning around 100,000 streams a day, and labels began messaging MASN. 

As a result, ATG is in high demand — in March alone, it ran around 160 digital marketing campaigns for labels and artists. And by combining management with its digital expertise, ATG can be

“Every manager, including us, thinks well, the label’s doing what they’re doing, but they could always be doing more,” explains Omid Noori, who founded ATG with Ramzi Najdawi. “We’re better

able to help artists if what we’re doing on the exposure side is met with proper management to capitalize on the moments we help create.”

160 campaigns a month is a long way from where ATG started out: When Najdawi left a steady gig in private equity to join Noori in the volatile world of music marketing full time in 2018, the

company ran about 30 campaigns in a good month. The two men had been friends since high school, the only music-heads in their circle. They ran ATG out of Noori’s parent’s guest bedroom. 

“We were dubbing songs over sports clips, hitting up influencers, going from beauty to dance to comedy,” Noori recalls. “That was the most fun time.”

The first ATG campaign to earn notice outside of the music industry was promoting Rich the Kid’s “New Freezer.” Noori found a meme, “these kids whipping their heads back and forth” to the

single, and paid a prominent hip-hop page on Instagram $500 to post it. The meme got picked up by stars like Snoop Dogg; Rich the Kid then labeled it “the New Freezer challenge;” and fans

started imitating the dance. The song eventually went double platinum.  

Noori and co. succeeded in creating more viral moments around Rich the Kid’s next single, “Plug Walk.” This was a more old-fashioned stunt: The rapper crashed unsuspecting classrooms at the

University of Southern California, played his single, and danced on the table. “We were at a studio in Burbank and we just drove to USC without much of a plan,” Noori recalls. “We went with

no permission except one campus rep was like, ‘these are the classrooms that have business-y students.’ Rich came in and was throwing papers in the air. That video went crazy on TMZ; most of

that was filmed on my iPhone.”

ATG expanded into management for the first time in 2018, taking on Neffex, a duo whose amalgamation of pedal-to-the-metal styles — bruising hip-hop, high-octane rock, battering electronics —

makes them tricky to pin down. “We just wanted [Noori] to do marketing for us; that’s what we were really struggling with,” explains Neffex’s Bryce Savage.

At the time, the group was nearly a year into a brutal, exhausting project — recording and releasing a new song every week. “We were plugging away with no end in sight,” Savage says. “Being

a marketing guy, Omid was like, ‘a good pitch would be 100 songs in 100 weeks.'” 

Noori’s role gradually expanded — in addition to running ads he helped Neffex organize their deluge of music into themed albums. “He wore a lot of different hats, so after three or four

months we brought him on full time,” Savage says. Noori now co-manages the group with Ryan Sullivan, and the 100-song data-dump paid dividends: The duo has accumulated over two billion

streams across all platforms and recently earned a deal with 12Tone Music. 

While putting out a song a week for nearly two years seems like an absurd feat of productivity, many modern artists are required to work at a similarly frantic pace. Spotify‘s Daniel Ek

recently made headlines saying that artists can’t “record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough.” “We believe in a song a month every month if you can — no

more than six weeks without a new song coming out,” Noori notes. “The attention span on a song has shortened down so much. Between this New Music Friday and next, I forgot about a song. If

something connects and reacts, double down on it.”

Still, labels and managers keep calling — ATG has recently worked on successful TikTok campaigns for BMW Kenny’s “Wipe It Down,” 88Glam’s “Lil Boat,” Saweetie’s “Tap In,” Dua Lipa’s “Don’t

Start Now,” and Ashnikko’s “Stupid,” among others. Each of those tracks earned more than a million clips on the app; some now have video counts above four million. 

What’s the key to a good TikTok campaign? “If someone’s like, ‘holy shit, that’s great, who did it,'” Noori says, “that’s what we pride ourselves on.”