Tweet Dreams Are Made Of This

You've probably seen Apple's current ad campaign where they show people holding up oversized tweets.  The narrator then tells them how their problems will be solved by getting an iPad. Some of them are kind of entertaining, though they're no "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" or "1984".

But I noticed that the tweets they hold up have actual Twitter handles on them.  So I thought I'd look them up. I figured they would be too smart to just use random names that might belong to real people.  They'd probably create Twitter accounts for each of the characters in the ads, to make sure no one else takes those names. And Apple is an inventive enough company that they might do something fun with the concept,  like have fake Twitter feeds for each of these characters.

What I found was quite surprising:

• These are all real people, and the Tweets are real.  But...
• The people in the ads are not just actors, but in most cases they're totally different from the actual people. For instance, the gothy teenager who hates everything is actually an African-American woman who doesn't seem particularly nihilistic. 

So I'm wondering what exactly the point of this campaign is.  I can understand you might want to involve real people, that will get you viral guerilla marketing tactics to access key influencers and other buzzwords. But if you're not going to use the actual people, why not just make up the Tweets as well.  Instead of trying to associate your product with some random kvetch, why not give yourself a nice convenient set up. @who_needs_MSOffice says, "I wish my tablet weighed 0.17 grams less." "You're in luck..."

So really, using real Tweets is just a creativity exercise for the ad creators. They say sometimes you need to give yourself arbitrary constraints to get the creative juices flowing; taking a bunch of Tweets as the starting point is just their way of seeking inspiration.