Google Pixel team burns Apple on Twitter — from an iPhone

Surely, surely, this is now being taught in every marketing class in the world. Marketing 101 has got to include the commandment that if you are going to promote a product, you don't do it using a rival's one.

It's not like that's a difficult message to teach, but then it could be done shorter. if you're marketing anything but iPhones, don't use iPhones to do it.

Google Pixel's marketers latched on to how Apple — hopefully inadvertently - used the #TakeNote hashtag popularized by the Utah Jazz NBA team. As then spotted by Twitter user Ian Zelbo, Google pounced.

Apple taking that hashtag is awkward — as Utah Jazz originally tweeted, before removing the comment — and perhaps Google does have something for NBA fans. That would make its tweet both fair game against Apple, and potentially useful to customers.

But instead, it was tweeted from an iPhone and for the thousandth time, the message becomes that everyone prefers iPhone, even the makers of a rival smartphone.

Seriously, everyone. As long ago as 2013, T-Mobile's CEO gushed about the Samsung Note 3 on Twitter - from an iPhone. And Huawei employees got demoted and their salary cut $728 per month for one tweet promoting the company via an iPhone.

In 2018, Samsung sued a Russian "brand ambassador" for $1.6 million after she used an iPhone X instead of whatever Samsung junk she was paid to push.

Then there's Microsoft's Joe Belfiore, who in 2016 tweeted from an iPhone instead of a Microsoft Windows phone. He claimed he had an excuse, though.

Oprah Winfrey didn't. But then she was never so foolish as to promote a rival phone via an iPhone. No, in 2012, she put her stature and recommendation behind a promo tweet for the Microsoft Surface — sent from her iPad.

Forget Marketing 101. Twitter should sell an app that just looks for the words "Twitter for iPhone" and makes PR people confirm they want to be that daft.