News Pod #35 - 5 Things Marketers Should Draw From Capital One’s Q3 Earnings Report

So the first one was just kind of the scale.

So they spent 1.6 billion this quarter, which is up 14% from the prior quarter.

It's growing faster than revenue.

That's all on marketing.

We looked at the trailing four months.

So we looked at Q4 25 through Q3 26.

And that adds up to just shy of $6.7 billion.

That's the scale of their marketing machine.

That's out to $558 million per month.

Just to kind of...

I mean, these are numbers that are just... hard to wrap your heads around.

They're much larger than I typically see when I work with lenders.

These guys are obviously at the top of the market.

But the equivalent, if they spent $558 million just on, say, subprime card accounts, and we assumed it cost $50 per account, that's kind of taking an industry average blend from What I see in the industry, that would be the equivalent of booking 11 million subprime cards a month, which is unbelievably high.

And if we assume 500 per account for like a prime card, that would still be 1.1 million accounts per month.

So that's just to calibrate the amount of money Capital One is spending per month.

Obviously, that's not all in direct spend.

We'll actually get into it in a second.

A lot of this is on branding.

But yeah, no, just really kind of humbling to see that that level of spend and their intent to continue to grow.

And that's kind of the second point here.

They gave guidance that this is going to continue to grow.

I'm going to quote Rich Fairbank.

They said, looking ahead, we expect to lean harder into marketing in 2027, driven by several factors.

We're fully pursuing our origination opportunities, and the window is open across our businesses.