Thematically, Love Letter to Texas picks up where “True West” left off. The minute-long spot featured a boy aboard an Amtrak Superliner peering out at a cowboy riding apace with the train. The minute-long “fever dream” (Ballew’s term) likened the West to a quest for independence and individuality. (“Being brave isn’t about being different,” intoned the narrator. “It’s about being yourself.”)
Having immersed himself in the West Texas terrain of roadside neon and empty railroad tracks, Ballew felt that “we left some meat on the bone” after the Super Bowl spot. He wanted to create “something really cool that we could do with these locations, connected to the spirit of these places.”
Fortunately, Ballew was already friends with director Jeff Nichols, whom he’d met at the Telluride Film Festival when both had works being screened. Nichols signed on, as did Sissy Spacek to narrate, and Oscar-winning musician and actor Ryan Bingham to play the lead role of Sam. Without giving too much away, Sam is “leaving his inherited destiny he was born into, roams across the desert, and stumbles into a life that’s better suited to his spirit,” Ballew said.
Much like Tecovas’ Big Game spot, the “rugged individualism of the West,” as Ballew put it, remains Love Letter’s central theme. It’s an appealing metaphor when it comes to selling cowboy boots to East Coast urbanites. Fortunately for Tecovas, the culture is moving westward already. Already worth $290 million, the cowboy boot market is growing both geographically and fiscally, on track to hit $539 million by 2035, per Future Marketing Insights.
Ballew conceded that Love Letter represented “an investment” for Tecovas. But it’s a type that other brands are making, too. With overt product placements already packing every movie—a given movie has an average of 13 of them, according to Sortlist data—enterprising brands have moved toward underwriting a film to get their cultural bona fides, and leaving the film to the filmmakers.
In 2020, for example, WeTransfer funded Riz Ahmed’s The Long Goodbye. In 2024, Saint Laurent bankrolled Emilia Pérez, by Jacque Audiard. Tecovas’ products do appear in Love Letter to Texas, but are not identified as such. A title card is the only name check that Tecovas gets.
Will it pay off? Ballew conceded that there’s no real way to measure the benefits for the brand that takes the leap of faith to support a film. “Not everyone has the guts to do that,” he said.
