The ads seem to say, "this could be you." All it takes is a trip to the store and a couple of bucks for a pack.
Like all myths, the stories these ads tell have a moral to them. The lesson they teach is: your life can be better with these products or, put another way, you can be a better person with these products. This is the consumer ideology and, just like every religion has some "golden rule" that pervades all of its lessons, consumerism too has its own golden rule, the consumer ideology. All of its lessons seem to be based upon this underlying assumption that more is better, that we need the things we're being sold, and that somehow buying them will make us happier and better people.
Of course the medium for these lessons are the ads themselves. Advertising nearly always has some emotional appeal to them. Instead of catering to our intellect and giving us rational reasons why we should consume the products they flaunt, rather they cater to our emotions. What better way to stimulate our imaginations? This is almost directly analogous to the emotional appeal traditionally found in sermons. Especially before our society has become so secular and scientific, sermons were heavily driven by emotion.
One heavy emotion that we're susceptible to is fear. Fear tactics are used in advertising just as they are in sermons. For example, the Dial soap ads use the slogan, "aren't you glad you use Dial? Don't you wish everyone did?" This slogan seems to assume that the consumer already uses their product which can't possibly be the case because if it were, why would they need to advertise? Thus they seem to be implying that if you aren't using Dial, you'd sure better redeem yourself quickly before they find out! Similar fear tactics are also used in religious sermons. One extreme example of such sermons are those presented by Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), like Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, in which he says, for example, that sinners "deserve to be cast into hell; so that divine justice never stands in the way, it makes no objection against God's using his power at any moment to destroy them.