Last month, Beyoncé’s team invited Bozoma Saint John to Dubai for the grand opening of the Atlantis The Royal hotel. The starring attraction was a performance by Queen B herself, but the event also coincided with Saint John’s 46th birthday, which she celebrated with champagne toasts, fireworks displays and walks on the red carpet wearing an emerald-green custom gown from Da Shoné by DaSh.

Though it’s been more than a year since she left her last job as chief marketing officer at Netflix, Saint John couldn’t quite turn off her branding brain. “I’m like, ‘Now, see, where are the hashtags, where are the @’s?’” she said after arriving in her hotel room and reading the weekend itinerary. “Somebody needs to give me some sort of deck that tells me what to do, what to say, what to capture, so that all of the content that’s going to be generated in the weekend will be funneled and everybody can see it.”

Only later, after the event had garnered headlines worldwide (albeit not all of them positive), did Saint John offer a revised assessment: “Clearly they did not need my help. Beyoncé is enough of a machine on her own that they don’t need additional marketing.”