Huge only in the sense that a billion dollars is a lot regular people...Apple spends a fraction of what its competitors spend. Plus up until 2011 I think they spent about half of what they spend now.
Apple spends less than Microsoft, but it is almost entirely on a single product (the iPhone). Product for product, Apple's marketing budget is immensely larger than other similar companies.
And the iPhone is a bigger business than ALL of Microsoft's offerings combined
Per Vanity Fair:
"Exhibit A: today the iPhone brings in more revenue than the entirety of Microsoft.
No, really.
One Apple product, something that didn’t exist five years ago, has higher sales than everything Microsoft has to offer. More than Windows, Office, Xbox, Bing, Windows Phone, and every other product that Microsoft has created since 1975. In the quarter ended March 31, 2012, iPhone had sales of $22.7 billion; Microsoft Corporation, $17.4 billion."
FWIW, because of your comment about "before 2011", I was purposely looking at data from 2008, to help control for that (when the iPhone wasn't yet that popular as the original device kind of sucked; the 3G had just come out, however, as had the App Store, so things were already on an uptick).
Looking at data from 2007, it seems like Apple was spending a third what Microsoft was on marketing, and had half the revenue; arguably then, Apple was spending 33% less than Microsoft on advertising per revenue, not really "a fraction".
However, you seem to be correct about now: I pulled some 10Q's from this year, and it seems Microsoft is spending $3.4b/Q for $17b/Q in sales ($6b/Q profit) while Apple is spending Apple is spending peanuts (although I honestly couldn't find the data I needed to verify this from the 10Q) for about $35b/Q in sales ($9b/Q profit).
While looking into that further (as I was especially bothered that I couldn't find the exact advertising numbers), I then came across this article, which looks at yearly data and comes to the same conclusion.
