A helicopter for wors? Sixty60 soars while CarTrack sinks

The marketing lesson in that for me is that, from the beginning, Checkers worked on the “Go Big, or Go Home” principle.

Right from the uniform branding of the physical assets to the carefully aligned call-to-action messages – and the ability to do the extravagant TV ads – everything was designed to portray the supermarket group and Sixty60 as the big players.

Perhaps in the beginning they might not have been, but now they certainly are.

An interesting lesson there, as they say in Afrikaans, about goedkoop is duurkoop (roughly that is “penny-wise, pound foolish”)… don’t stint on the money when you’re building a brand.

Sixty60 turns convenience into a spectacle

Which is why I was not surprised at all that, going Big has now translated into a fully branded helicopter, which is the star of the latest Sixty60 ad.

The premise is simple: What if you’re a couple of okes sitting on a houseboat, somewhere off the West Coast, hankering after some wors for your braai? And what if you are not close to a Checkers? Well, you wonder if they’ll deliver… and sure enough, they will.

It’s light-hearted but taps into the end-of-year spirit… where people will be on holiday and, while they might not be very far from a Checkers, they’re in slow-down and dead-stop mode, so getting Sixty60 to do the honours makes a lot of sense.

Sure, nobody believes Checkers is actually going to send a branded bird to drop off your sosaties, but it is a reminder that Sixty60’s bikes and delivery vans are virtually everywhere else.

It’s timeous and, because of the no-expense-spared approach, will remain top of mind for many who see it. And the message will remain. Which is exactly what you want for your advertising to be effective. And this is.

Another Orchid to Checkers and Sixty60.

What made it even more smile-worthy was the deferential nod to clever ads past. Actor Neels Van Jaarsveld – he of the famous Klipdrift “met eish, ja, met eish” ads does exactly the same thing on the houseboat. Nice touch.

#OrchidsandOnions

#Orchids&Onions: Illegal billboards, brilliant billboards and a very strange unicorn

Brendan Seery  25 Nov 2025

When bad data practices ruin a brand

Not such a nice touch was the unsolicited marketing spam call I got recently from CarTrack who, as the name implies, market vehicle tracking devices and services.

They’ve clearly obtained my details in a way which tempts me to lay a complaint under the Protection of Personal Information Act (Popia).

But, sadly, not enough due diligence because – and I put this out for free to anyone else in the insurance or tracking business who wants to spam me – we have Subarus in our family… and they don’t need car trackers because they don’t get stolen. And I don’t need insurance because I’m with Outsurance.

True story and no-one paid me to say that.

However, what galled me – apart from my own stupidity in picking up a call which somehow managed to sneak past my TrueCaller app – was that when I asked the CarTrack salesman where he got my information, he said: The National Consumer Database.

There is, however, no such thing. Any information of mine would have been acquired in some other way. If it was done in a legitimate fashion, why would you have to lie about the “database”?

The salesperson put the phone down on me but, judging from the calls from CarTrack which have since been picked up by TrueCaller from that company and blocked by me, nobody thought to put my name on a “do not call, you’re wasting your time” list.

What is disturbing about this is that, if you are prepared to lie about where you got my information, how the hell can I believe you when you say you couldn’t recover my car? Do you work with the car theft mafia? Legit question.

Needless to say, dishonest marketing will always get an Onion from me.