I'm not sure why one operator is going off in a silo to do their own marketing, when it's supposed to be ran centrally within the Enhanced Partnership that they've signed up to?

Page 76 of the BSIP document states:
"A North East Bus Partnerships team, housed within Transport North East, has been created, including programme management capacity. This team is in place to deliver the plan, monitor performance of the management of the partnership agreement, and oversee marketing and stakeholder activities designed to drive growth in bus patronage. We have set up a Bus Advisory Board, which is attended by representatives from the Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) and North East Chamber of Commerce. Our assessment is that we can put these strategic relationships to greater use by using them to pave the way to collaboration with businesses to drive buses modal share"

In addition to that, KPIs 1 to 5 (page 38/39 of the BSIP) are all about growing passenger numbers, so it's a bit bizarre to run something like this in silo. It'd be a mess if Stagecoach and Arriva jumped in with their own thing too.