Advertising is already a competitive arms-race. More effective advertising means that more of a firm's spending will shift to advertising because it will have a

Advertising is already a competitive arms-race. More effective advertising means that more of a firm's spending will shift to advertising because it will have a bigger effect than more engineering or QA or anything else. (If we could make advertising less effective, we could have better products ... maybe because spending more on advertising wouldn't work as well as spending more on engineering or QA. But overall spending/cost is a bit orthogonal.)