$1M+ in Paid Media Across Two Theaters

North of a million dollars in paid media, across two theaters with nothing in common. A live-ops football game at Garena, then a crypto gaming platform at Ninety Eight. Roughly five years between them.

First, what “managed” means, because the number is easy to fake. This is spend I ran or reallocated day to day on performance accounts: Garena FO4’s paid social, and Cyborg’s platform acquisition budget. It leaves out KOL and agency fees, production, and company-wide media I never touched. The $1M+ is a conservative floor from how the accounts actually ran, not an invoice export. I would rather under-claim a number I can walk through.

Garena: a stack that moved with the calendar

FO4 is live-ops, so the release calendar was the strategy. ICON launches, Tet, the World Cup. On a normal day I ran five to seven creatives at once, fifty to two hundred dollars each, a few hundred to low four figures total. Every asset was its own bet. The ones that stopped converting died that day. The rest got fed.

Launch weeks broke that rhythm on purpose. An ICON drop or a Tet campaign pushed spend to three or four thousand a day, packed into two-week sprints while the whole base was watching. Efficiency wasn’t the point. Catching a window that wouldn’t come back was.

The part people miss: FO4’s biggest moments often ran on almost no paid. Beckham, Tet La Phai Vui, those were carried by social and community, and paid just topped up the spike. Half the job was knowing when to sit on my hands.

Cyborg: holding twenty-cent CPI at $50K a month

Cyborg was the inverse. A platform that needed fast, provable scale to close studio deals, on fifty thousand a month across ten-plus studios. I ran acquisition for the whole platform.

No single big bet. Every week I recut the budget off CPI and retention, per channel, per game, per geo, and CPI held at twenty cents or below the entire ramp. Then the product changed the math on me. Cyborg’s referral loop ran at 1.2x, so by 1.5M MAUs it was minting more users than my ads were. The $50K stopped being the engine and became a top-up. The discipline was seeing that shift and not spending against a loop that was already winning.

The Numbers

What it taught me

Both theaters paid off the same way: constant reallocation against fresh numbers, not one clever campaign. And the real skill in paid media is knowing when not to be the engine. The community carried Garena’s launches; the referral loop carried Cyborg’s scale. My budget did its best work topping up something that was already pulling. The number I’m proudest of isn’t the million managed. It’s the twenty-cent CPI I held while a viral loop quietly made most of that budget optional.