AAMI sponsors Hamish & Andy
Insurer AAMI is to sponsor comedy duo Hamish & Andy’s content on their own site and on their weekly podcast.
The announcement:
Sydney, Monday 28 March 2011: Switch Digital, headed by Lee Stephens, has brokered a major digital partnership between Hamish & Andy and national insurer, AAMI.
AAMI have signed an exclusive 12 month digital partnership to support Hamish & Andy’s digital content creation and publishing projects across www.hamishandandy.com, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The deal involves significant advertising, custom content creation, podcast coverage and video advertising across all Hamish & Andy digital content.
“It is the largest and first digital partnership of its type in Australia. While US personalities such as Ryan Seacrest, Chelsea Handler and Fox host, Glenn Beck have been controlling their digital content and commercial partnerships for some time, this is the first of its type here,” said Stephens.
The deal is also the first Australian deal of its type where major celebrities are taking control, ownership and distribution of their online content rather than giving content to publishers and third parties.
“It gives Hamish & Andy independence of their digital content from their broadcast content and allows fans to have regular contact with H&A across YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Hamishandandy.com. The partnership allows H&A to form a closer, interactive and more frequent relationship with their fan base than can be achieved through broadcast media,” Stephens added.
Hamish & Andy have Australia’s largest Facebook community with almost 1.3M fans, Australia’s largest subscribed podcast with 650,000+ weekly subscribers and over 85,000 Twitter followers.
AAMI’s contribution allows Hamish & Andy to keep their podcast free for all fans. The insurance brand is featured as a supporter and is also integrated into content within the podcast and across www.hamishandandy.com that reached traffic of up to 7M page views in 2010.
Andy Lee said, “We are stoked to have AAMI as a partner so the podcast can remain free for all subscribers. We are also stoked to have AAMI as a partner because they have helped insure Hamish’s mullet for the $250,000 it is worth.”
“Andy’s family heirloom wooden snake that was valued by Antiques Roadshow at around the $20 mark is yet to be valued by AAMI, but I’m confident they’ll deduce that it is as crap as the rest of us thought it was,” Hamish Blake added.
Richard Riboni, Executive Manager Marketing at AAMI added, “AAMI are very excited to partner with Hamish & Andy and support their podcast. It’s a great brand fit and we hope our support will help the guys create and publish more terrific content. Like Hamish & Andy’s many fans, AAMI can’t get enough of the boys.”
Source: Switch Digital press release
