Its real old school thats for sure, used to be that everyone wanted to have a crappy flash on their site, talking 10 years ago, i'd walk into a contract and they would say we have this great idea, let me guess flash? Ok are you an intereactive games site or offering some kind of design service, no, then no flash! It's bad for usability and also for website promotion.
If the flash on the aa site maybe had stories from the BB or stories from individuals on how AA helped them when you rolled over the shadows of the various people that might make some sense, but that's easy enough to do with a stand alone image and some simple javascript script...
No idea why i wrote that...hmmm, welcome to SR:-)