Aberdeen puts on the pedal cleats for a three year cycle deal
ABERDEEN Asset Management made its first foray into the cycling arena yesterday with a maiden sponsorship of a pro-cycling team.
The funds house will augment its famous sponsorship of Cowes Week – the glitzy week of sailing during August – with a three year deal to sponsor NFTO (Not For The Ordinary), the UK’s number one cycling team.
“This is the first time we’ve worked with a cycling team,” Aberdeen chief executive Martin Gilbert said. “The profile of and participation in the sport has grown massively in recent years and we have a long track record of supporting UK sports people from the grassroots up to professional.”
“We couldn’t have found a more ambitious and forward-thinking company to get onboard and support our aspirations,” NFTO team founder and owner John Wood said.
■ Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings has a simple message to HBO as the cable TV giant steps into the online streaming market: bring it on. The American billionaire also sits on the board of Facebook founded Netflix in 1997 originally as a rental-by-post DVD service before moulding it into the dominant player in the streaming world. Last week the company announced it has surpassed more than 60m subscribers, a figure that pleased investors as shares soared even in spite of a 55 per cent drop in profits.
In a bid to grab its share of the streaming pie, HBO announced its own over-the-top streaming service last year, HBO Now. The cable channel’s high-end productions have made the company millions in DVD sales but have proved to be equally popular on illegal streaming and torrent sites. With both companies now operating in the streaming market and producing some of the most popular and respected TV shows of the day, Hastings predicted the two companies will be slugging it out for dominance like two famous sporting rivals in an interview with The New York Times. “It will be like the Yankees and the Red Sox. I predict HBO will do the best creative work of their lives in the next 10 years because they are on war footing. They haven’t really had a challenge for a long time, and now they do. It’s going to spur us both on to incredible work,” Hastings said. Let’s hope one of them hits a home run.