Halal Expo Vancouver - Salaam Events Inc.

From gold sponsor to media infrastructure partner. In two years.

In 2025, Aflak backed Western Canada's first halal B2B expo with its own money and a stage. By 2026, Salaam Events had hired Aflak to run the event's entire media operation.

CLIENT

Salaam Events Inc.

Gold Sponsorship & Keynote (2025) → Official Media Infrastructure Partner (2026) — Live Event Photography · Social Reels · Recap Film · On-Camera MC · Editorial Direction

SCOPE

YEAR

2025 / 2026

DIVISION

Aflak Media

What we built, and why it mattered.

01 - OVERVIEW

Salaam Events Inc., one of Metro Vancouver's leading Muslim community event operators, running Halal Expo Vancouver — a ticketed, two-day B2B trade show for the halal industry — at Cloverdale Agriplex in Surrey, BC.

CLIENT

2025 — in-kind gold sponsorship, February 7–8. 2026 — contracted media partnership, April, with a multi-week pre-production and creative-planning cycle ahead of the two-day show.

TIMELINE

2025: Gold Sponsorship (in-kind) · Keynote Panel · 10x20 Activation Booth
2026: Official Media Infrastructure Partner — Live Event Photography · Social Reels · Recap Film · On-Camera MC & Interviews · Sponsor Content · Editorial Direction

SERVICES APPLIED

A 9-person crew for the 2026 activation, spanning production, post, and stage: Asad Ilyas (Founding CEO) · Aaqib Zaidi (Project Manager) · Avi Ratnani (Creative Director) · Mujtaba Tariq (Camera MC) · Daniya Hussain (Social Media / Documentary BTS) · Mucahit Mert Alagoz (Cinematographer) · Hamza Kamdar (Stills Photographer) · Harkaran Singh (Post-Production Head) · Mustafa Muhammad (Stage Assist).

TEAM ON GROUND

Halal Expo Vancouver launched in February 2025 as the first business-to-business halal trade show in Western Canada — a two-day ticketed event at Cloverdale Agriplex built by Salaam Events Inc. to give the region's halal food, franchise, finance, and lifestyle businesses a dedicated place to trade, network, and be seen. Aflak's founders were early believers in Salaam Events' mission before there was a media budget to hire anyone for it.

That belief was structured as an investment, not a transaction. Aflak entered Halal Expo Vancouver's first year as gold sponsor, in-kind, covering the cost from its own pocket rather than adding to the financial load of a first-year event. It showed up on the stage with a keynote panel and on the floor with a 10x20 activation booth, and it left behind a media foundation Salaam Events could use to promote the expo's second year harder than its first. That bet paid off: in the second half of 2025, on the strength of that work, Salaam Events signed Aflak as Halal Expo Vancouver's official media infrastructure partner for 2026 — this time, a paid, contracted role.

THE CHALLENGE

The real challenge was never "produce content at an expo" — it was producing two different registers of content for two different audiences without either one reading as compromised. Halal Expo Vancouver sits inside a $1.2B+ Canadian halal industry that most Canadians still associate narrowly with dietary restriction, when the actual scope runs through honesty in sourcing, environmental responsibility, ethical supply chains, and certification integrity. The expo needed media that could carry that fuller definition to a mainstream audience, hold up the credibility of institutional voices like ISNA Canada, and still deliver the fast, native-feeling social content a growing B2B trade show needs to prove its own momentum — across a floor of 100+ exhibitors, inside a 24-to-48-hour turnaround, with no second take.

How we moved from brief to delivery.

02 - THE APPROACH

Aflak entered as gold sponsor for Halal Expo Vancouver's first-ever run, paying its own way rather than adding cost to a launch-year budget. The role had two parts: a keynote panel and a 10x20 activation booth split into a partnerships lounge — where attendees could sit with the Aflak team and learn about the company's work — and a boxed-off screening room running Aflak's reel live on a big screen. The panel, staged as "Digital Media: The New Store-Front with AFLAK Media," ran 40 minutes (20 of them open Q&A) to roughly 400 attendees, with Asad Ilyas (Founding CEO, Aflak), Saabir Daya (Marketing Executive, Jumpfactor), Rashid Qawasmeh (former CTO, Aflak), and Kabir Qurban (mass-media influencer) arguing a single thesis: pre-production, not the shoot day, is the real director of the work. The booth recorded 1,200 site visits over the two days.

2025 · THE INVESTMENT PHASE

Asad and Project Manager Aaqib Zaidi, alongside Creative Director Avi Ratnani, ran a formal creative-planning session with Salaam Events (Yosof, Head of Marketing & Creative, and Zubair, Executive/Co-Organizer) weeks ahead of the show. The brief called for a deliberate reset from the community-warmth register of Salaam Events' other festivals: Halal Expo is B2B, networking-first, and commercially polished. Shooting schedules and role assignments were locked before day one, a sponsor-tier content hierarchy was mapped, and a dual-track editorial structure was built to run consumer education and B2B credibility content side by side — with ISNA Canada brought on as an institutional endorser to anchor the credibility track.

2026 · PRE-PRODUCTION

On the floor, the crew ran as fixed lanes, not overlapping roles — photography, cinematography, social capture, and on-camera hosting each owned their function with zero handoff friction. Camera MC Mujtaba Tariq conducted 22+ on-camera interviews with exhibitors, sponsors, and executives, hosted as live conversations streamed to the expo's media walls. Redundant infrastructure — backup routers, dual ethernet, two gigabit connections, parallel upload paths — meant no single point of failure across two days of high-volume shooting. Sixteen reels were cut and published on-site, in step with the event itself rather than after it.

2026 · LIVE-PRODUCTION

2026 · DISTRIBUTION & CREDIBILITY

Post-production, led by Harkaran Singh, ran a two-speed delivery model: a first batch of 462+ photos within 24 hours of close, and the complete gallery, both master recap films, and the full reel set within 48 — a turnaround the client hadn't seen from a vendor before. Three pre-event promotional reels had already gone out in the two weeks leading into the show, seeding attendance before day one opened. The editorial layer held throughout: mainstream media crossover, ISNA Canada's endorsement, and Aflak-hosted CEO conversations gave the 2026 expo a credibility register it hadn't carried in its first year.