advertising and religion share a belief in transformation, but most religions believe that this requires sacrifice

For some reason one of the creepiest things for me is marketers for products calling themselves "Evangelists" such as Ben "the PC guy" Rupdolph. What cemented the weirdness of mixing the religious and marketing themes for me was my experience at a training session when I worked for Bell Mobility. Bell was sponsoring the Winter Olympics and had some singer who did some inspirational song for Bell, so we all watched her video and then had a few speeches which tried to tie the themes of the song to Bell products. It was so eerily reminiscent of a church service: you had the "worship", a "sermon", and then a time for breaking bread together before we learned how to better "evangelize" the "good news" of Bell's products and services.

Ads have long promised us a better relationship via a product: buy this and you will be loved. But more recently they have gone beyond that proposition to promise us a relationship with the product itself: buy this and it will love you.