3/4/12 – Celebrating its many years of exponential success and growth, the technology company Apple launched its 25 Billion Apps Countdown Promotion (the “Promotion”). The promotion featured a contest, giving the 25billionth downloader of any app on the Apple App store a total sum of 10,000 dollars of credit usable in the iTunes Store, App Store, or iBook store.
The contest for the promotion ended on March 4th, 2012. The winner has not been announced yet, and the Apple website predicted that the winner would be announced ten days from the end of the contest.
This type of promotion is not the first for Apple. In the past, the company has released similar promotions for certain events. Examples include the one billionth download, which occurred only nine months after the release of the App store as well as the ten billionth download, which took place on January 22, 2011. Both winners of these contests also received similar prizes as the lucky winner in this promotion; they were awarded the same 10,000 dollars in addition to actual Apple devices such as iPods, TimeCapsules (storage devices made by Apple), and MacBook Pros. The 25 billion-downloader will receive 10,000 dollars worth of credit to use in the App store.
In the past few years, Apple has experienced significant increases in stock value as well as company size. Thanks to the advent of both the App store as well as the various devices such as the iPod Touch, iPad, and iPhone, the growth of Apple seems to never cease. Promotions like this as well as those from the past have only augmented their publicity and success.
Jane Chen, a junior at Westlake High School as well as an avid use of Apple products including an iPod touch, shed some light on how these promotions affected her. “I mean, I regularly buy Apps on the App store, but this contest just gave me another good reason to download more,” she stated. “If I’m the lucky person who gets the 10,000 dollars, I’d be able to get basically anything I want on the store.”
She also mentioned, “I do admit, that I tried to time my purchase so that I would win.”
Apple is not the only company to have held such promotion events. Various automobile companies, technology companies, as well as social media networks have used these types of “generous promotions” in order to attract attention, publicity, and users. For Apple, this strategy seems to be working very well.
