Through a monthlong series called “The Message Makers: Inside PR,” NPR is taking a closer at the public relations industry. It’s delved into BP’s botched crisis communications following last year’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and profiled PR’s “gay guru.”

It’s latest installment is titled “Corporate America takes on multilingual PR”—a ripe topic for many people in the industry (see: today’s PR Daily story on managing Facebook pages in multiple languages).

So, why does the NPR story focus on marketing and advertising?

Instead of interviewing PR professionals, or dissecting public relations outreach, NPR examines the way marketers target Asian-American audiences with advertising campaigns. The story features ad campaigns from Toyota, Walmart, and McDonald’s.

NPR reports:

That's why ad campaigns hone in on Asian-Americans with the largest U.S. populations, says Jane Nakagawa, a senior vice president at InterTrend. The industry uses a strategy it calls “CKV”—“kind of our shortened version of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese,” she said.

Those groups are also desirable because they have plenty of newspapers, magazines and local radio and TV stations in their native languages. Marketers sometimes design ads for them that look the same except for the language you see or hear.

You can read (or hear) the full story here.

One commenter on the NPR website said: “This should never be called ‘public relations,’ it should only be called advertising, which is all it is: an attempt to get these people's money.”

Another commenter agreed with that statement, adding: “While public relations absolutely does try to reach audiences in their own language, using their own conventions with a research-backed approach—when you start paying for media exposure it stops being PR and starts being advertising.”

In other NPR news, Tuesday marked the 40th anniversary of its flagship program, “All Things Considered.” Scott Simon, host of NPR’s “Weekend Edition Saturday,” penned an op-ed for the Chicago Tribune in which he explains why “NPR really matters.” Good read.