Marketing
After college, Saint John worked at the advertising agencies Arnold Worldwide and Spike Lee's Spike DDB. She also worked at the fashion brand Ashley Stewart, where she was vice president of marketing.[13]
Saint John joined PepsiCo as a senior marketing manager in 2005.[14] She later led PepsiCo's foray into music festival-based marketing as head of music and entertainment marketing.[13] She remained with the company for almost a decade before joining Beats Music in 2014, when Jimmy Iovine of Beats recruited Saint John based on her experience in music marketing.[15] Saint John moved from New York to Los Angeles to lead marketing for the company.[16]
Beats was purchased shortly thereafter by Apple,[13] and Saint John became the head of global consumer marketing for iTunes and Apple Music, commuting between Los Angeles and Apple's Cupertino headquarters several times a week.[6] Journalists described Saint John's presentation of the redesigned Apple Music onstage during the 2016 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference as her breakthrough moment, with a captivating "passion" and persona that captivated both local and online audiences.[6][17][18][19] Biz Carson of Business Insider said that her appearance helped to emphasize Apple's complete rebuild of its Apple Music software.[6]
On June 6, 2017, Saint John became chief brand officer at Uber.[13]
In June 2018, Saint John left Uber to join Endeavor as chief marketing officer.[21][22][23] She said of her choice to leave: "When I got to Uber, I was honest in my desire to go and change essentially what I thought was a challenging environment, especially for women and for people of colour... What I discovered was a lot of people who had a desire to do better, honestly, but couldn't get out of their own way... At some point, it became too overwhelming for me... It became a good lesson for all of us: You don't need to be the savior, you can save yourself too."[24] While at Endeavor, Saint John helped lead a "crisis" branding project for Papa John's Pizza after the company's founder, John Schnatter, used racist language in a conference call.[25][26]
Netflix named Saint John its new chief marketing officer on June 30, 2020, making her the third CMO for the company in 2019–2020. She was the first Black C-level executive at Netflix.[27] Saint John replaced Jackie Lee-Joe, who left the company for personal reasons. Saint John started the new role in August 2020[28] and departed in March 2022.[29]
Writing and podcasting
In May 2020, Saint John launched a limited-series iHeart Media podcast alongside journalist Katie Couric, Back to Biz with Katie and Boz. The podcast began with the focus of how small and large businesses across the country began to reopen throughout the coronavirus pandemic, but after the murder of George Floyd expanded to focus also on systemic racism and criminal justice reform.[30]
Saint John wrote a memoir titled The Urgent Life, in which she describes her work as a marketing executive, losing her husband, and becoming a single parent. The book's publication date was February 21, 2023, by Viking Press.[31][32]
