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It is often mentioned how Apple prepared a massive campaign to launch its iPod in 2001, and Apple’s ingenious marketing strategy is also cited as the most common reason why the iPod succeeded on the market. Even Jobs’ official biography is misleading in this regard.

The reason for the iPod’s success was its undeniable quality compared to the existing competition; on the contrary, marketing support was relatively weak at the beginning. It improved significantly when Steve Jobs came to the conclusion that the iPad had truly become a revolutionary product in the range and decided to accelerate its promotion with a strong advertising campaign. It was this campaign that became legendary.

For the launch of the iPod in October 2001, Apple prepared a single TV commercial in which a young man plays a song on his iBook and keeps hitting the volume up button until the speaker plays the song Take California by Propellerheads loud enough. He likes the music, he experiences it, he downloads it to his iPod with a single drag of the mouse, and it is clear that the iPod is the central message of the commercial. The young man gets up, walks to the middle of the room, and starts dancing to the beat of the music. The one-minute commercial was broadcast only to a limited extent, mainly because Apple did not know until the last minute whether it would actually succeed in launching the iPod on the market, and also because it had poured most of its marketing resources in 2001 into the Think Different campaign. In mid-2002, Apple launched a new advertising strategy called Switch, in which two characters named Mac and PC talked about how they use Mac and PC to meet their needs. Even in 2002, advertising support for the iPod was very limited.

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Caption: The first advertising campaign for iPods featured the now legendary Silhouettes.

The most famous iPod campaign, called Silhouette, didn’t come until September 2003, almost two years after the iPod went on sale, and it’s often cited as a turning point, but incorrectly, as if it ran right after the iPod’s launch. It didn’t. This was logical, as Apple’s annual advertising expenditure at the time was around $200 million, and the company needed to focus on reviving sales of its computers. Only when these had stabilized and the new iMac was successful could it afford to promote another product. In addition, it wasn’t until 2003 that it introduced the iTunes Store (in April) and then the Windows version of the iPod in October. By that time, it already had its channels for reaching core Mac users in the form of Mac magazines from May 2001 and Apple Stores.

Apple also anticipated Sony’s aggressive support for its redesigned Walkman and feared the rise of competing digital music retailers.

An important reason that prompted Jobs to increase the advertising budget for the iPod in 2003 was that he realized how successful the iPod was in attracting new customers to Mac computers. Users who became familiar with the iPod tended to buy an iMac rather than a Windows computer. So Jobs took $75 million from the Mac marketing budget to promote the iPod. Apple spent $20 million in 2004 on a TV commercial featuring U2’s Vertigo music video alone. However, the marketing investment paid off. Not only did iPod sales increase, but so did Mac sales. In 2004, the iPod accounted for nearly a quarter (23%) of Apple’s revenue.

It can therefore be said that today’s claim that Apple unconditionally believed in the success of the iPod is more of an exaggerated corporate legend, and we have reason to believe that the company itself was genuinely and pleasantly surprised by the iPod’s success. To its credit and the credit of its share price, it quickly found its bearings and made the most of a very surprising result.

Other MP3 player manufacturers attempted to imitate Apple’s marketing campaign. For example, at the end of 2004, a year after the launch of the Silhouette campaign, Creative Labs invested $100 million in marketing support for its Zen line of MP3 players. Microsoft invested a similar amount in 2006 to launch its unsuccessful Zune player, and before that, Sony invested in its confused Walkman line. In these cases, the money invested was not even recouped.

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