Ray Jang, Founder and CEO of Atria – Interview Series

Ray Jang, Founder and CEO of Atria, is a tech entrepreneur and investor deeply immersed in the AI and advertising space. He launched Atria in April 2022 and has led efforts to build a workflow platform that streamlines ad creative and optimization using AI. In addition to his role at Atria, Jang is active as an angel investor and has engaged with Kleiner Perkins as a scout and fellow. Prior to founding Atria, he held senior product roles at ByteDance and TikTok, where he gained experience in scaling consumer-facing, high-impact products.

Atria is an AI-powered ad workflow platform built to help brands and agencies generate, test, and optimize ad creatives more efficiently. The product combines features like AI ad generation, creative inspiration drawn from a library of millions of high-performing ads, analytics that surface performance opportunities, and a smart asset hub to manage creative assets. The goal is to accelerate the ideation-to-launch cycle and boost ad revenue by automating parts of the creative process.

What led you from gaming and product management at companies like ByteDance and Flexport to founding Atria in the adtech space?

After leaving product roles at ByteDance and Flexport, I spent 18 months building a gaming platform and chasing a passion like many first time founders do. But we hit a wall: distribution.

We had a good product, but we couldn’t grow. With just a few months of runway left, I realized, “If this next thing doesn’t work, we fail.”

That experience reframed everything. I didn’t want others to go through the same struggle. I wanted to make growth feel like flipping a switch. But when I looked at the landscape and what was available to me and my team, I saw fragmented tools, siloed data, and other marketing teams drowning. No one was building the central system we actually needed.

That’s when the idea was sparked and Atria was created. The name comes from “atrium” – the central hall in Roman homes that connected everything. We’re building that for marketing: one platform, one destination, built for an AI-first era. 

How did your experience at TikTok influence your understanding of the challenges brands face in standing out with AI-driven campaigns?

At TikTok, AI was mostly behind the scenes powering recommendations and infrastructure. But what really stood out was how fast the content bar was rising. The brands that won weren’t copying trends, they were breaking patterns with bold, creative storytelling.

TikTok encourages brands to build their own systems and views content as a supply-and-demand game: the highest quality at the highest volume wins. But with the swift rise of AI, most content ends up looking the same. What actually performs are campaigns that use AI to do something unexpected.

One of my favorite examples is a dentist in LA who used AI to create talking gorillas with giant teeth sharing their life stories, and ended with a call to book an appointment. It was weird, hilarious, and unforgettable. He’s now booked out for the year.

The key lesson: AI can boost creativity, but brands have to use it to break the mold—not blend in.

Atria’s Radar algorithm is a core part of your platform. How does it work, and how does it transform campaign data into actionable insights?

Most marketers are flying blind. They’re running ads across Meta and TikTok but don’t actually know what’s working or why. Teams can spend weeks testing creatives, manually searching competitors, and uploading campaigns across all platforms, all while results stay flat.

Trained on over $1B in ad spend, our AI tool Radar changes that. It connects directly to your ad accounts, analyzes performance data in real-time, and surfaces precise recommendations to optimize each ad. It doesn’t just stop at insights either – it helps marketing leaders act on them.

You can instantly generate higher-performing versions of your top ads, and clone what’s working for competitors, so you can push updates live in hours instead of weeks.

Unlike other tools in our space, Radar goes beyond dashboards. With specific, creative-level recommendations like, “change the hook,” “add social proof” or  “Use this CTA,” our customers can see the difference: up to 40% better performance and 25% lower acquisition costs.

Many CMOs struggle to understand why some campaigns succeed and others don’t. How does Atria address this gap?

The old playbook doesn’t work anymore. What used to perform (like broad influencer campaigns or cookie-cutter ads) now gets lost in the noise. Today’s CMOs are navigating a faster, more disjointed landscape, where the channels, tactics, and customer expectations change month to month.

Atria helps make sense of that complexity. We give CMOs a real-time view into what’s actually working across paid, organic, influencer, and re-emerging channels like Reddit, and help them connect the dots between messaging, creative, and performance.

Our Radar engine delivers weekly recommendations so teams can course-correct fast and keep up with what’s actually resonating.

Can you explain how Atria automates the creative workflow while still leaving room for human creativity?

We’re not in the business of making everyone create more content faster – that just adds to the noise. Our goal is to help high-performing teams gain strategic insights so they can do less with more impact. We work with companies that want to understand their brand better and differentiate themselves in a commoditized market.

Atria’s platform helps marketing leaders act on insights by instantly generating higher-performing versions of top ads and cloning what’s working for competitors. But the creative strategy, brand voice, and storytelling remain entirely human.

We’re providing the intelligence layer that helps creative teams make smarter decisions about what to create and who to target.

Why do you think so much brand content fails to differentiate today, even with advanced AI tools?

AI has collapsed the cost of content creation, but that’s created the perfect storm. When anyone can generate polished assets at scale, product parity becomes the norm and content floods every channel. Distribution – not creation – is the real differentiating factor, yet distribution is broken. Marketing costs are soaring while effectiveness declines.

The fundamental issue is that most teams fall into a rat race of producing more noise. AI generation tools often put companies in this loop where they’re just creating more content without strategic insights about what actually resonates. The bar has actually risen higher – if you’re status quo or middle of the pack, your creatives vanish quickly because platforms reward truly engaging content and penalize mediocrity.

Companies that deliver the right creative to the right audience at the right time will dominate. Everyone else becomes background noise.

What makes your platform stand out compared to traditional marketing intelligence tools?

Traditional tools give you dashboards and expect you to synthesize insights yourself. We go beyond that. Radar looks at your dashboard for you and translates findings into precise, actionable recommendations. You’re not getting generalized GPT responses; you’re getting algorithmic insights based on fundamentals we know make winning ads inside Meta and TikTok.

We’re also the only platform supporting the whole ad workflow end-to-end. Our customers consistently tell us they can go from “I need a new campaign” to “my campaign is live” and immediately implement learnings into their next campaign. Most competitors are point solutions tackling pieces of the workflow, but we’re building the central system marketers actually need.

What are the biggest challenges you see companies facing when adopting AI-driven marketing tools, and how does Atria help them overcome those hurdles?

The biggest challenge is that many AI tools actually make the problem worse by enabling more content creation without strategic direction. Teams get caught in cycles of producing more without learning what truly works.

Another major hurdle is scattered data across platforms. Marketers advertise on TikTok, Meta, Snap, and other channels, but there’s no centralized view of who the customer actually is. Every new channel means starting from scratch and adding more team members to manage complexity.

We solve this by centralizing insights across platforms and providing strategic intelligence rather than just creation tools. Instead of just helping teams do more, we help them understand their audience better so they can be more thoughtful and do less with greater impact.

Beyond technology, what leadership or cultural changes do you think companies need to embrace to truly unlock AI’s potential in marketing?

The future belongs to teams that can turn customer signals into fast, data-driven decisions while keeping creativity and authenticity at the core.

Leadership needs to embrace customer obsession at the deepest level. I’ve personally done over a thousand customer calls because that’s how we know our product intimately. Every conversation helps us understand how to make the product better. This level of customer-centricity, combined with AI tools that provide unbiased insights, creates a powerful combination.

There’s also a fundamental tension that successful companies need to navigate: we’re building tools for paid media while believing that brand marketing is ultimately how you win long-term. Paid media provides the quickest signaling into what messaging converts, but if you start and end there, you’ll lose. The only way to retain and win is through consistent, strong brand positioning.

Looking five years ahead, how do you envision the role of AI in marketing evolving, and what will success look like for brands using Atria?

In five years, AI won’t just help marketers create content, it will help teams understand what truly resonates with their audience and make every campaign smarter in real time. The era of “spray and pray” marketing will be over; success will come to the brands that can turn signals from customers into fast, data-driven decisions while keeping creativity and authenticity at the core.

For Atria users, growth will feel effortless. Our platform will help teams systematically learn from every campaign, act on insights instantly, and scale campaigns that genuinely connect. Success won’t just be measured in clicks or impressions, it will be measured in engagement, loyalty, and the ability to consistently create work people love.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Atria.