(25 Aug 2022, 12:00 am)stagecoachbusdepot wrote Surely the point isn't whether 85k views is good or bad (personally I'd go with meaningless) the irrefutable proof that these self indulgent vanity project videos don't work is that half of the X-lines routes which that particular video was promoting have been binned off or stripped right back.  In less than a year.  With more to either go or get slashed further. 

It's kind of the same as the endless branding debate.  You can paint a turd and pretend it is posh and desirable but people aren't stupid...if they even pay any attention to what I personally find pretty dull videos, then they see this marketing bullshit compared to the reality of their journeys, and the million "service cancelled" posts that it features amongst, and recognise it as the irrelevant twaddle that it is.  It must come across as GNE towers being in a parallel universe when you are stranded for an hour and see this nonsense pop up.

Does the GNE marketing approach and the likes of these videos fundamentally cause services to fail?  Obviously not.  Do they drive growth, or even sustain a steady state - seems not.  So what do they achieve?  Can't help but think the time that goes into producing this drivel could be better spent by those staff covering even a handful of the missed journeys people endure every day...or the money wasted on developing them (again like the money that gets burned through with the branding agencies and paint suppliers) spent on better pay for the frontline so they dont have a chronic driver shortage - i.e. on stuff that directly impacts passengers every day.  Yet this is where the powers that be at GNE focus their energy.