Jenny Back on the Block

I’ve been following pop culture, and more specifically following celebrities who endorse products or are avid about a certain cause.  When I first began searching for updates on this I had a hard time finding a good article specifically on celebrities and their products/ causes they endorse.  There are a lot of actual advertisements out there with celebrities like Jennifer Aniston posing with her Smartwater or Derek Jeter with a Gilette razor however what interests me is the story behind the advertisement.  Looking online at the New York Times and Huffingtonpost I had a hard time finding articles that go behind the scenes of a celebrity’s relationship with the product or cause he or she supports.  I’m curious to see if there is good information out there that is readily available and reliable for people like me who are interested or if deals and relationships between celebrity and product are kept within closed doors of their business world.  After a little more searching online, I went to Vanity Fair and read their cover story or Jennifer Lopez titled, “Jenny Back on the Block.”  Though this article is not directly related to specific products or causes she supports, I was able to find paragraphs where the interviewer, Lisa Robinson, talks about Jen career wise.  For example Robinson explains, “The day before my visit to her house, I watched Jennifer at work on a street in Los Feliz, near Dodger Stadium, where Ron Howard was directing a public-service announcement for the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.” This definitely caught my attention because it is not a product like perfume, or face wash, that she was supporting, though she does, but rather for the Boys and Girls Club of America.  It seems like nowadays big celebrities have built up their resumes wanting to add one thing: community service.  Though most are able to successfully achieve this, their luxurious lifestyles are still in main focus.  Reading the article on Jennifer Lopez is the perfect example of this.  In the opening paragraph Robinson takes a very materialistic approach describing, “She’s furiously texting on her white BlackBerry Torch. She’s wearing a black, beige, white, and jade Diane von Furstenberg romper, and her hair is pulled off her face into a bun. On her feet are black, rhinestone-studded flip-flops, but the diamonds that adorn her ears and fingers are real.”  The mixture between doing good while living the high life is something that definitely interests me in the pop culture realm.  Noted that Robinson was not writing solely on Jen’s “good community acts,” however in the media today there is definitely a notable struggle between celebrity lifestyles and the actions that they make to maybe try to denounce their big house and fancy car.  Going forward, I think I would like to do some more investigating on celebrities and the products/causes they endorse but I think I will need to readjust my sources depending on what I am able to find on a given day.  So far I have found that it is easy to find the actual advertisements but they information behind is a little trickier to locate.