Since October 2001, more than 300 million iPods of one kind or another have been sold worldwide and more than 10 billion songs have been sold via iTunes.Īn iPod silhouette ad with the tagline: “10,000 songs in your pocket. And a big part of the reason for this phenomenal rise was the sale of iPod music players and iTunes music. 35 on the Fortune 500 list, three notches above Microsoft, with annual revenues of $65.2 billion and annual profits of $14 billion. Reynolds Tobacco and the Pepsi Bottling Group, and well below companies such as IBM(#8), Hewlett Packard(#19), Intel(#41), and Microsoft (#79). Still, for that year, Apple had earnings of $786 million on nearly $8 billion in revenue. And this advertising, in some ways, helped Apple move its business to another level, sending it in into the superstar stratosphere of the world’s most elite and profitable companies.Īnother silhouette ad from Apple, this one touting 'The new iPod - The best just got better.' In the year 2000, before the iPod player and the iTunes music store were a part of its business, Apple was having some hard times, as it had reported declining fourth-quarter revenues and profits as an economic slowdown hit computer sales. The distinctive marketing art used in these ads also helped Apple to sell tens of millions of iPods and also billions of songs through Apple’s iTunes music store. The silhouette ads were particularly notable for the evocative effect they had on culture, fashion, and “hipness”– reaching Apple customers and well beyond. The dancing iPod silhouettes permeated the culture of their day and left their mark on the advertising industry as well. Initiated first with the iPod digital music player, the ads – which soon appeared globally in print, on TV, the web, and in various outdoor venues – proved to be one of the most effective marketing campaigns of the early 21st century. created a number of enduring cultural images with their Apple products and marketing campaigns. And perhaps none of these is more visually memorable than the “dancing silhouettes” used in the 2003 – 2008 iPod and iTunes advertising campaigns.

In the opening decade of the 21st century, Steve Jobs and Apple, Inc.

Apple 'silhouette'-style advertising for the iPod digital music player, circa 2003-2005.

Logo Art for ipod instal