At the height of the 2014 Fifa World Cup fever, an advertisement for Coca-Cola featuring a bunch of teens chasing their football around the world aired in more than 60 countries.

The ad, which served to highlight how people of different cultures, nationalities and socio-economic status are brought together by their passion for football and Coca-Cola, was praised for being unifying and inclusive in its message.

What most viewers do not know is that the advertisement is not the brainchild of some Goliath multinational advertising agency operating out of New York, London or Tokyo.

The creative work came from Phibious Vietnam, a 250-people independent advertising agency started by a Singaporean. It now has a presence in Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Myanmar.

Shot on location in Brazil, Thailand and Malaysia, the advertisement was a coup for the small, South-east Asian regional agency - not only due to the scale of the outreach, but also given the confidence that a superbrand such as Coca-Cola had in it.

Last year, Phibious proved once again that it was a David among Goliaths, by bagging the South-east Asia Independent Agency of the Year nod at the Campaign Asia-Pacific Agency of the Year Awards, the region's most prestigious industry awards.

Having won a variety of industry awards since 2012, the group is now Campaign Asia-Pacific's most awarded independent agency.

But for its chief executive Mervyn Cheo, the awards are not accolades he strives for.

"I don't believe we're even halfway to where we could potentially go," says the 40-year-old Singaporean. "I'm the sort who is always looking to plug gaps, to find the next best thing, to get the next challenge to chase. The awards are important, but I don't look to them for validation."

And indeed, as it says boldly on Phibious' website: Our best work is our next piece.

Mr Cheo quips that he somewhat fell into this career by chance.

A graduate of New York University's (NYU) Tisch School of the Arts, he had always imagined going into a creative field such as theatre or film.

"I was one of those chatty, talkative children curious about crafts and music," he recalls. "When I was growing up, I used to dabble in experimental theatre and was on the debate team in school. In a way, thinking creatively came quite naturally to me."

The younger son of two entrepreneurs - his father ran a multinational insurance company before setting up his own insurance practice in Cambodia, and his mother operated a trading company and ran cafeterias in factories here - was lucky to have had a comfortable childhood spent in Catholic schools such as St Joseph's Institution and Catholic Junior College. His parents are now retired and live in Singapore.

After graduating from junior college, he initially thought of studying business, knowing that he wanted to follow in the footsteps of his parents and start his own venture.

But a year into his education at the NYU Stern School of Business, the lure of the arts proved too strong and he transferred to the Tisch School of the Arts. In 2000, he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.

But his desire to start his own business remained. It saw him dabbling in a variety of ventures during university - including creating and coding the user interface for a set-top box.

It was during this time that his interest in interactive programming, such as coding and Flash, also sparked.

With his interest firmly locked in place, he decided to start an interactive company in 2001 with three partners. They named it Phibious.

"The name is always a talking point," says Mr Cheo with a laugh. "What we wanted was something that is unique and inventive and feels dynamic and young. Phibious came about from the word 'amphibious' and when we saw that the domain was available, we bought it immediately."

Then aged 25, he and his partners started out by doing website and interactive content projects for companies.

One of his partners, who had strong relationships with the hip-hop community, helped them get their foot in the door with music recording companies such as American label Roc-A-Fella Records, which roped them in to do marketing and advertising work, alongside interactive content.

Things were chugging along quite nicely when a suggestion came from Mr Cheo's brother to consider expanding into the Cambodian market.

His brother - who is three years older and was at the time helping to run their father's insurance business in Cambodia - was based there and noticed the lack of strong advertising agencies in the country.

"I thought, why not just go and suss out the market?" Mr Cheo says. "There was potential and given that Phibious was based in New York at the time, it helped us get the time of day from some bigger companies."

He had not managed to get a meeting with beer brewery and distributor Asia Pacific Breweries (APB) when he tried reaching out to the company in Singapore, but ended up securing a meeting with the team in Cambodia.

"We ended up signing APB as our first big client in Cambodia within our first year," he says. "Starting up in Cambodia also gave us the chance to do a lot more advertising and branding work, which helped us branch out our offerings."

The move from coding to running advertising campaigns might seem baffling to most, but when quizzed about the transition, Mr Cheo says that he feels the skill sets required are quite similar.

He says of Phibious Group's growth from an interactive company to an ad agency: "Whether it's an ad campaign or creating a website, you are always looking for the root of the problem and finding tangible and creative ways to solve it. I think that's why I enjoy it."

Eventually, the travelling between Cambodia and New York every three months proved too exhausting and the 9/11 attacks became the push factor for him to leave the United States.

Knowing he wanted to be closer to his family, he spoke to his partners and decided to amicably part ways with two of them - taking the Phibious brand and his last founding partner Nicole, who is now his wife, with him to Asia. She is the chief client officer at Phibious Vietnam and the two have been married for 16 years.

Mr Cheo says they have managed to keep their personal and professional lives well balanced, in large part thanks to their distinctly different areas of responsibilities.

Scaling up while staying nimble

"She's more operational and people are her strength, while I'm more macro and look more at the growth of the business from a strategic front," he says of their strengths.

For her, their relationship has worked so well also because they click so well on a personal level.

"We have a similar sense of humour and don't bring work home with us, which is important so we don't harp on things," Nicole, 41, says. "But also, he's a tenacious guy and, given the markets we operate in, he manages to keep his cool and not buckle, even when we're dealing with challenging circumstances. It's very inspiring."

With his move to Cambodia complete, Phibious Cambodia was incorporated in November 2002. The team - then numbering just eight people - set up shop in a small room in Phnom Penh.

While the company had some clients, the challenges in the beginning still proved daunting, primarily because there was a lack of experienced talent in the city.

"Advertising was a relatively new and niche area in Cambodia at the time. We were forced to hire for attitude and not experience," recalls Mr Cheo. "It was difficult in the beginning to find the right people who were the right fit. But because people were eager to learn, it meant they did good work and a lot of them are still with us today."

The business grew organically and roped in big clients such as APB and The Coca-Cola Company. In 2008, having grown the team to 30 people, Mr Cheo began scoping the regional market for his next move - choosing to enter a joint venture with a Vietnamese agency and expand into the country.

Ho Chi Minh City is now Phibious Group's largest office, where it has more than 100 staff.

The group expanded into Indonesia in 2012 and last year moved into Myanmar, which now has a team of 15. It manages more than 100 clients and plans to expand into Thailand and the Philippines this year.

The strategic expansion into nascent Asian markets, as opposed to cosmopolitan world capitals, has given the group a niche advantage - allowing the company to position itself as a regional player.

"I don't want to enter markets that are already saturated," Mr Cheo says of how he has scaled his company. "Going into emerging markets has its fair share of challenges - finding and attracting the right talent, for one thing - but these are also places where we can tweak ideas and have the largest impact, which is rewarding."

The next area of growth for the savvy businessman seems to be the creation of the company's own products - such as Hello Health, an online portal that aims to be the WebMD of Asia, and Dep365.com, a new beauty portal that will offer product reviews and tips to users. Last year, Hello Health raised US$1.5 million (S$2.1 million) in seed funding.

Also on Mr Cheo's agenda is creating strategic or equity partnerships with promising Singaporean companies which might be looking to expand into the markets that Phibious operates in.

And though his desire to keep his finger on the pulse of change means he travels to different markets almost every two weeks, he says he is always happy to get home to Ho Chi Minh City, where he is now based, and spend his free time cooking, something he refers to as"therapy".

He admits that running his own business has made him a workaholic, but he says he is disciplined about taking holidays - at least two a year and preferably to countries with lots of good food - his way of decompressing.

The couple recently returned from Italy and have India next on their bucket list.

Long hours aside, it is evident that Mr Cheo is still enjoying the journey.

"Yes, even after 14 years, entrepreneurship is still a tough ride - you have to constantly hustle to meet the right people and make the right connections," he says.

"But I wouldn't have it any other way. You want it easy? Then don't start a business."