• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 11, 2014

It’s not unusual for accomplished advertising men to get their start in ways that have little to do with the ad business. After all, David Ogilvy worked as everything from a door-to-door salesman to a French chef before finding a path to Madison Avenue. John Dukakis described a similar story this morning during a keynote conversation with Content Marketing Insider Summit chief Steve Smith. Dukakis, who has been senior vice president and director of content for Boston-based Hill Holliday, began his professional life facing the jaws of death, literally. He was a child actor in Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws II.”

After rolling a clip featuring a scene with him in which the film’s star leaps out of the water in an attempt to eat him, Dukakis explained that his on-screen fear reactions were genuine, not acting.

“The reason it looks as scary as it does,” he told attendees at the summit on Kiawah Island, SC, “is it malfunctioned.” Dukakis explained that the mechanical shark’s cable “broke” and “we were quite scared.”

Dukakis, who is the son of Kitty Dukakis, and the adopted son of former governor and Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, grew up in a celebrity household, but he says he purposely steered away from politics. He took the role on “Jaws II,” thinking it would be a short “summer job,” but the film ultimately took 10 months to produce. He continued to pursue a career in acting for seven years, before pivoting into the music industry, before eventually landing at Hill Holliday, and even he sounded surprised by that progression, because he had a very unconventional background for an ad man.

“I think the lesson is that I couldn’t keep a job,” he said, adding, “I never dreamt I would be in the advertising world.”

But Dukakis said his background was the perfect training for the new Madison Avenue, which required someone who could translate the lingo of Hollywood to the advertising people. He said he now has 12 people in his branded entertainment department, and all have similar backgrounds.

“We don’t do a lot of copywriting,” he confessed, “we don’t write in 30-second spots.”

Mostly, he said, the department works on long-term projects such as Liberty Mutual’s “The Responsibility Project,” which was the first one he began working on when he joined the agency.