Yahoo! and the Ad Council launched the 2010 “Create for a Cause” contest to recognize the best in digital advertising for public service campaigns. The winning campaign will appear on Yahoo!’s sign-in page with nearly one in ten Americans visiting every day.

The second annual “Create for a Cause” competition will be open from October 11 to December 3 to advertising agencies looking to showcase their most creative digital campaigns for nonprofit and federal government agency clients. For the first time, all agencies are invited to submit entries, including those not affiliated directly with the Ad Council. The winning campaign will be announced January 5.

In developing submissions for “Create for a Cause,” agencies can create new campaigns, tweak existing ones, or use initiatives already in the marketplace. Agencies in the U.S. that have an existing or upcoming campaign with the Ad Council or are working with a 501(c) organization or a federal government agency are eligible to enter.

Yahoo!’s social responsibility department, Yahoo! for Good, is focused on empowering people to make a positive impact by leveraging Yahoo!’s audience, products and employees. Their efforts are closely aligned to Yahoo!’s business, so any cause-related effort is also benefiting its business.

A committee of well-known advertising figures—Peggy Conlon, president and CEO of the Ad Council; Rob Rasmussen, chief creative officer at Tribal DDB; Nick Parish, North American editor of Contagious Magazine are among them—will judge the campaigns and choose the one they feel has the greatest creative impact.

In 2009, the first year of the contest, the winning “Create for a Cause” campaign was the U.S. Army’s High School Dropout Prevention program, known as “Boost Up,” developed by Publicis New York. The campaign was awarded $750,000 in Yahoo! Mail ad inventory and earned the distinction as the first to run in the Yahoo! Mail “tandem” ad unit.