Tiffanny Junee

As someone who started her professional life being followed by a photographer thanks to a savvy publisher, I’ve always known how to separate personal Tiff from professional ‘mediated’ public Tiff.

I remember when I first started to talk Brand ME as social media strategy back at the dawn of AI-led life in Australia.

It was 2010 and the majority of commercially-savvy thought leaders used to look at me like I was leap-frogging the ethics codes of business when I perpetuated the bleeding edge of tech was a game changer.

This was when social media conference speakers would open their presentations with ‘Video is king, Context is queen’.

When the fear of missing out /not keeping up was only starting to be algorithmically induced, and the conscious overhaul of the English language in lieu of digital sales was starting.

The overused (yet rarely achieved) #Authentic #NextGen #AlwaysFree narratives era perpetuated by the new kids on the block (aka Facebook and Google) in what felt like a rising of the new guard (next geners) against the dinosaurs of Gates and Jobs.

Thanks to the reprogramming power of digital ecosystems, in 2026, Brand Me is the baseline for upstarts and start ups.

No longer do we have to sprout the value of brand curation as anyone under 35 already thinks of themselves as the product and then the participant to be served… their interests curated by the feed, the loop of need programmed and not necessarily human first.

In health and leadership communications, the story told directs the machine. But what happens when the machine leads? Enter AI Me.

For those of us that lived through the rise of the machines in Australia as engaged and observant practitioners and researchers, we know we are amidst another ‘uplift’.

While we are suitably trained into thinking if it’s not curated, AI-generated or sales & marketing oriented, it is neither ‘polished’, ‘professional’ nor primed for ‘cut through’ in the AI-first algorithm-led infotainment roundabout our daily communications have become.

In the interests of ‘keeping it real’, remembering the human behind the feed, pings, pins and DMs, I led this reflection with the human me in situ with my postgrads, but online (while it’s me behind the keys), the edges get a little bolder…

and aging gracefully has never been so easy :D