£10,000 - the cost of hubris

A few weeks ago, we put up this post: Plonker/s of the year? 10.11.23. We think we may well have some candidates for the front runners for this award which will be announced on New Year’s Eve. Here's the story about these potential 'plonkers of the year': £10,000 bus picture of metro mayor and his dog was so big it was 'unlawful' - Tristan Cork | Bristol Post | 24.11.23.

Dan Norris is the metro mayor of the West of England Combined Authority (WECA) which is comprised of the following councils - Bath & North East Somerset, South Gloucestershire and Bristol. In a bid to boost the number of people using bus services across the region, a scheme offering people free bus travel in their birthday month has been launched. To run a bus service you need bus drivers. There has been a shortage of bus drivers in the region for some time which has led to service reductions. So, in order to remedy this situation, there's an ongoing campaign to try and attract people to become bus drivers.

Initiatives to promote bus travel and campaigns to recruit badly needed drivers need publicity. One of the options available is to use the sides and back of a bus for large scale promotional decals. All well and good...so far... As you can see from the plans shown above, the promotional decals were promoting both the free bus travel in the birthday month initiative and the campaign to recruit more drivers. However, as is blatantly obvious from the massive image of Dan Norris and his dog, these decals were also seen as promoting the metro mayor. This is when the problems started...

After the bus was plastered with these massive decals at a cost of £10,000, the WECA interim chief executive got wind of what was going to happen with the bus being launched onto the streets and pulled it straight away. The reason being that the decals were seen to be as much, if not more, about promoting Dan Norris than the free travel initiative and the driver recruitment campaign. This is part of what was written in a report to be submitted to members of the authority ahead of an emergency meeting called to discuss the issues arising from blowing £10,000 on decorating a bus with decals that never went out on the road:

“Those images could not reasonably be described as incidental to any other scheme-focused information, promotion, or messaging. The bus wrap is reminiscent of political campaign buses which exist to serve the explicit purpose of seeking to influence voters.”

“Images of the Metro Mayor with his dog appear to be used as a personal brand or motif, appearing prominently in several articles featuring the Metro Mayor but, importantly, in the context of political campaigning platforms such as “votedan.uk” and the X/ Twitter profile “@votedannorris”.”

“In light of these factors, it is difficult to come to any conclusion other than that the effect of the decision taken on or around April 24 2023 was, in reality, to incur expenditure of £10,000 of public funds not just to launch the Birthday Fares BSIP fares package initiative, but to promote (or seek to affect public support for) the Metro Mayor personally, and this is the conclusion which both the Interim Monitoring Officer and the Section 73 officer have reached. In their view, this amounts to a breach of the code.”

You couldn't make this up could you? If you propose to blow £10,000 on plastering a bus with promotional decals, isn't it a good idea to run the mock ups of how it will look past a few people for their opinions? I used to work as a finished artworker in the packaging industry and nothing ever got produced without mock ups being subjected to some very close and critical scrutiny. In this instance with the bus decals, it would appear that the most basic checks were simply not undertaken before the decals were produced and applied to the bus in question. That's just unprofessional, full stop...

Then there's the staggering level of hubris involved in thinking that plastering massive images of yourself on the side of a bus is going to make the public think you're doing a great job. Images so large they distracted attention away from the considerably more important messages about the free travel initiative and the driver recruitment campaign. How far up your own arse do you have to be to think that this is even remotely a good idea and will not backfire in any way? We thought Marvin Rees, the soon to be departing mayor of Bristol was the master of bullshit but, Dan Norris s certainly giving him a run for his money with this...