Ad Age is marking Hispanic Heritage Month 2024 with our Honoring Creative Excellence package, in which members of the Hispanic community revisit pivotal projects or turning points in their careers. (Read the introduction and all the essays here.) Today, Raul Montes, creative director at Omelet, writes about how learning English as a second language was good for his creative career.
Omelet’s Raul Montes on bending language as an ESL kid in advertising
When I was a kid, my favorite saying was, “Don’t judge a book when it’s covered,” which made sense to me. You really shouldn’t.
But I was an ESL kid (English as a second language) in L.A., so I didn’t know all the idioms right away, especially when part of long sentences, and then even more especiallier when having to say things out loud. It was tricky saying things in the correctly order; just trying to complete sentences was always like a dip in the deep end of the pool.
Because of these language hurdles, naturally I was a quiet kid at school. I would not raise my hand in class. It’s like they say, “You can’t always eat your cake and eat it, too.”
Eventually, the more I heard, the more comfortable I became opening my mouth, but my foundation was set. I was the master of short bursts, quick jokes, hit ’em with something chistoso (or funny), then close that mouth quick. The English RAM of my head was always a jumblotron.
So what does this have to do with advertising?
Well, advertising also has an interesting relationship with language. It’s all about concise, punchy phrases and even deliberately incorrect and unexpected wordplay. The more experience I have in this industry, the more my style of wordology seems like a normal, valid thing.
The “Unbӧring” tagline for Ikea was a revelation.
It was a short, impactful burst of a single, creatively ingenious word. “Unbӧring” said more about Ikea than any real word could. And years later, the simplicity of the two words “Live Más” for Taco Bell spoke to me in multiple languages with multiple interpretations. There was more meaning in those words than in any long sentence I’d ever wrangled.
This industry flipped the script for me on that.
Sometimes the words need to not make sense, to make sense.
For instance, with Google Stadia, we realized the only way to explain an unimaginable gaming product—seamless high-resolution cloud gaming—was to talk about it in unimagined, nonsensical ways: “Unthink the Things You Think Are Things” invited gamers to let go of their preconceptions and enter a world where even language was turned on its head.
So did this revelation lead me into life as a copywriter?
Of course not. I became an art director.
A picture is still worth a thousand pictures.
But now, as a creative director, I pitch, I present, and I am always eager to solutionize on any project with any client, no matter how long their sentences are.