Every single day we check our news feeds, another social media fight seems to be cooking up. From people bashing massive billboards to others cyberbullying an innocent soul and so on. Today is no different…
The latest social media incident includes Facebook page “7ad Ye3raf?” (Does Anyone Know?) and shopping center Cairo Festival City Mall. The ladies from 7ad Ye3raf have accused CFCM of stealing the idea for their event. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of Facebook group “7ad Ye3raf?” The page is one of the biggest online ladies-only group in Egypt.
https://www.facebook.com/salma.shalaby.313/posts/10158402219450297
Salma Shalaby, one of the founders of the Facebook page took to Facebook to say the following:
I’ve been trying to let this go, but it has become too much and I have to say something about it. I’m a partner in the group called “7ad Ye3raf,” and it’s the biggest ladies-only Facebook group in Egypt. A part of our job is to organize events for women with a new theme on every occasion.
Two and a half months ago, we decided to create a big event in CFCM for Mother’s Day. We met with person who’s in charge of events and he was very welcoming and loved the idea that we proposed and asked for the official proposal for the event.
I, of course, made the proposal because creative work is my specialty and included all of our ideas.
After we sent the proposal, he started ignoring us and refused to answer any of our phone calls. The process took too long until it was too late to start calling sponsors and we had to cancel the event that we wanted to throw at the mall.
Till now, every thing was okay. What’s not okay is what happened after. After a month an a half we found out that CFCM was throwing the same exact event, the very one I crreated…without us.
I know no one respects copyrights in this country, and I know that the person responsible for this as well as the company won’t do anything about stealing my ideas, but I hope this post reaches Al-Futtaim Group so that they know that the people who represent them in Egypt are thieves.
What Shalaby has said made us as well as everyone else sympathize and feel bad for all her efforts that went to waste, but there was a major part missing in her post, Cairo Festival City Mall didn’t organize the event.
https://www.facebook.com/WasabiXP/posts/1448861048482172
The event was organized by Wasabi, an Experiential Marketing & Events agency, and one thing everyone knows about stories is that there are always two sides of them. We here at Scoop Empire decided to reach out to them to see if they had anything to say. Right after I sent them a message on Facebook to ask them about what had happened, someone called Tarek called me, and explained Wasabi’s side of the story.
“We didn’t want any social media buzz, and we don’t even understand why this happened. Maybe it’s their first time doing an event and they’re upset that they didn’t win the pitch? I’m not sure, but we didn’t even know about them till we saw the post. We didn’t even know that someone pitched an idea for an event before us. “
Then came the major plot twist…this actually wasn’t the first time Wasabi did this event, and it has been going since 2014.
After the phone call, I was sent the link to the 2014 event that lists down all the activities in detail including their Pampering Booth, Trees of Gratitude and Queen of the House, and a video for their Mother’s Day event from three years ago.
The only thing that now that is worth debating about regarding this whole ordeal is the name of the event, which in all honestly has an extremely generic name and could have been created by in thousands of other events worldwide.
WE SAID THIS: We hope that people do their research before accusing anyone of stealing, and maybe try to sort things in private before taking it public.
