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Baublitz Advertising's three-panel card announces the agency's ISO 9000 registration.
Quality is, presumably, every professional's Job One. But what is easily measured in the making of a car is much more subjectively measured in the creative fields.
Nevertheless, Baublitz Advertising in York, Pa., set its sights on quality standards as a means of gaining a competitive advantage, and in September became, apparently, the first advertising agency in the United States to earn so-called ISO 9001 quality certification.
"We saw (standardization of quality) going on in the industry with our clients," which primarily are home building products distributors and manufacturers, real estate firms and banks, said Baublitz president James Groff.
ISO registration "adds accountability and concreteness to a business that has not been known for it," he added.
The ISO 9000 series of certifications are a system of standards against which individual companies and firms can compare the way they do business, be it manufacturing an item or creating an ad campaign. It was developed by the International Organization for Standardization in Geneva, a federation of national standards bodies from some 100 countries.
Its certification program establishes requirements for quality assurance systems. ISO first was adopted by the European Community and recently gained popularity in the United States.
In the ISO certification process, a firm compares its systems for making products to a set of standards created by the international organization. The standards are broadly worded, in order to apply, theoretically, to all industries, and they...