The fact they were associated with real twitter accounts seems sketchy.
“This @baristabar ad is giving me the coffee shakes. Looks so good!”
“I wish I could make fancy lattes like in the @barristabar commercial,”
“What is the song in the new @baristabar commercial? I love it!”
This would be like a Google commercial featuring "blowski, Google User" in one part. There's no real harm to you, and you are a Google user (I assume), but you've been publicized in a massive way that you never consented to. People do not appreciate being thrust into the limelight suddenly and without warning.
This isn't a huge outrage, but it does suggest some process failure on Twitter's part. You never, ever, ever, ever, ever mock up designs with real user data. This looks like what happened here - someone thoughtlessly used the username and profile pic in a mockup, which eventually made its way to PR without verification.
There are some poor processes in Twitter's design department, evidently. Hopefully they'll learn from this. Never mock up designs with real data. Twitter should have a reserve of handles/profiles they actually own for marketing uses.
- the 'Twitter Teacher' who appears in the sign up flow used to work at Twitter;
- and, the profiles used in the verification flow are also employees (http://dashes.com/anil/2013/03/what-its-like-being-verified-...).
I agree that this was unprofessional though and hope the offenders learn from the mistake.
Agreed, but 'deeply unprofessional' should not imply hysteria. Worst case scenario, someone thinks their friend likes a coffee shop that does not exist.