Josh Flagg and his sister Dana Marineau are highly successful in their respective fields. Josh is one of the top five real estate agents in Los Angeles.
While his sister Dana is the Chief Marketing Officer of Rakuten Rewards and Rakuten Advertising., Dana is an exceptional marketing executive with over 20 years of experience in the field.
Rakuten is one of the giant shopping windows with over 3500 store brands, enhancing the shopping experience for people by providing cash back, deals and rewards.
The cash-back and shopping rewards company was founded as Ebates, later acquired by the Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten for $ 1 billion.
Josh Flagg’s Only Sister Dana Marineau Has Her Own Identity
Josh Flagg and his sister Dana Marineau have created their separate names in respective fields. The realtor’s older sister has been changing the game at Rakuten Rewards as their chief marketing expert.
Dana, an award-winning marketing executive, is an expert in managing large teams and diverse brands and developing groundbreaking, innovative campaigns across various platforms.
Passionate about innovative and inspirational marketing campaigns, Dana strives to break new ground, bring stories to life and inspire customers as a strong leader and a creative problem solver.
Dana has been working as a Chief Marketing Officer at Rakuten Rewards, strengthening Rakuten’s consumer recognition as the leading cash-back portal and launching new innovative shopper loyalty programs for the last two years.
Previously, Dana served as the Vice President of Brand, Creative, and Communications at Credit Karma, leading a cross-functional team of 70+ across Advertising, Brand Strategy and Consumer Media Relations, Social, Digital Marketing, Email, and Events.
The brand, best known for just free credit scores, transformed after Dana joined, giving free access to robust financial solutions, including savings, tax filing, personal loans, auto insurance, and credit cards, to its 100 million members.
Dana spent 15 years of her life at Electronic Arts, leading global advertising, design, and creative for video game brands, including FIFA, Madden NFL, Need for Speed, and Battlefield.
She climbed through the ranks joining as a Senior Manager in 2001 and ending up as the Vice President of The Global Creative Team. While speaking to Medium, she claimed her first boss at EA inspired her during the early years of her marketing career.
Under her leadership, she evolved EA from a traditional consumer packaged goods orientation to an entertainment brand covering both digital and physical elements.
Her commitment to positive leadership and groundbreaking creative work has consistently produced significant revenue growth, market-leading brands, and recognition from the advertising community, including 11 Cannes Lions, 13 Effies, and 11 Clios.
Rakuten CMO Dana Marineau Dreamt of Becoming An Anchor
Rakuten’s CMO might be among the successful marketing execs in the US, but marketing wasn’t what Josh’s sister Dana wanted to take off her career with.
While speaking with The Drum, the CMO revealed that her childhood dream was to become an anchor.
Watching female anchors such as Connie Chung and Barbara Walters deliver news inspired her greatly. She even begged her parents to stay up late watching the news broadcasts.
Dana followed her dreams into college, pursuing journalism. But, once she started taking the classes, she realized it might not be for her. The main issue she realized was her hatred of being in front of the camera.
She then clarified why she wanted to go into journalism; she said, ” I realized that what attracted me to journalism was storytelling and crafting a narrative that shapes how people understand and interpret the world.”
Upon reaching such a realization, things turned around for Dana. She then took writing and marketing classes and saw marketing as the proper venue for her love of storytelling and a great career path moving forward.
Dana graduated from Duke University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and studied public policy.
Josh Flagg’s Sister Dana Joined Rakuten During Covid-19 Pandemic
Stepping into a new leadership position amid the pandemic made Dana’s time at Rakuten challenging. She was roped in as Rakuten’s chief marketing exec in June 2022.
Dana, who approached for an extroverted managerial style, had to introduce herself to the new team over Zoom. Leading a new group was tough when she could not physically meet and talk to everyone.
“It has been an amazing learning experience for me – leading and motivating a large remote team, completely virtually and without face-to-face connections to build from. I had to establish connections with everyone on the team or risk losing their trust and interest.” Dana mentioned it in The Drum.
Like every other company, Rakuten was forced to create a fully remote infrastructure to operate during the pandemic. Developing and maintaining a strong culture was among the top priorities of Rakuten so that the team’s sense of community would remain intact.
Dana, while speaking to Soon Yu for Forbes, said, “It’s straightforward for a sense of community to be lost when there are no in-person interactions or “watercooler moments.” She took it upon herself to bring her work community together in such times.
She hosted weekly ‘Coffee with Dana’ Zoom events where people from different teams and working groups were invited over a cup of coffee to chat about anything that may be happening in their lives.
Offices began opening once the pandemic started to ease; however, collaboration between those in the office and others working remotely was another tough job for Dana. Once back in the office, she also started ‘Coffee with Dana’ in person.
Furthermore, they engaged in a fun weekly Slack conversation called Quaran-Theme, and everyone got invited to share something about themselves over a theme. On the in-person side, they hosted a summer barbecue and two fall happy hours.
She also said, “There are days when I feel that, on top of my Marketing responsibilities, I have also taken on the role of Chief Culture Officer.” for Forbes.
CMO Dana Marineau’s Goals For Rakuten
Dana Marineau has stepped into her role as a CMO, furthering Rakuten’s goals for the company’s future. She continues to lead her team to make the online shopping experience more dynamic.
Rakuten, from the beginning, set out to provide an accessible, seamless online shopping destination where people could find everything they needed, plus discover new brands.
In an interview with Forbes, Dana said, “For example, we hope people shopping at Macy’s through Rakuten will also discover that we have high Cash Back rates at Nike, and then find their favorite wine at wine.com, which also offers Cash Back.”
They introduced a new feature called Personalized Rewards, which allows merchants to pair their customer data with their first-party data to create targeted, hyper-personalized Cash Back offers.
Dana built an incredible in-house creative team during the pandemic while working remotely. They launched a new Rakuten Brings the Cha-Ching campaign to refresh its visual brand identity and update its brand voice.
Dana sees Rakuten continuing to innovate on both sides of the business in the upcoming years. They aim to have different ways to receive and utilize rewards and cashback and provide new opportunities to connect and target customers for the merchants.
Josh Flagg’s Parents Are Michael And Cindy Flagg
Michael and Cindy Flagg are the parents of the realtor Josh Flaggs and Dana Marineau. The siblings grew up with their parents in Los Angeles, California.
Dana is an elder sister to 37-year-old Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles fame Josh Flaggs. They both attended Brentwood School in LA, but Josh later left for Beverly Hills High School.
Their mom Cindy Platt Flagg is a retired lawyer. Josh and Dana are grandchildren of Jewish leader and philanthropist Herman Platt and great-grandchildren of Benjamin Platt, owner of the Platt Music Corporation chain of stores.
While their father, Michael, worked in women’s clothes manufacturing. Michael’s father, Edith Flagg, a fashion designer and executive, were one of the first to introduce polyester as a fashion textile in the United States.
While speaking to The Drum, Dana mentioned that both of her parents are retired. Also, her parents do not understand her job in marketing. It wasn’t something they thought about much while they were both working.
She said,” If you asked them, they might say I get to make cool TV commercials, and I enjoy managing people. I guess both of those things are true, too.”
Josh’s sister Dana currently lives in San Fransisco with her husband and two sons working as the CMO at Rakuten Rewards while Josh continues selling luxury homes in LA.