Together with the online industry forum Advertising Health, Wellmark is teaming up with One Minute Briefs to run a healthcare advertising competition.

One Minute Briefs is a Twitter-based advertising competition. A brief is set each weekday, inviting people to submit an ad in response.

All submissions are retweeted to the One Minute Briefs followers (who currently number around 7,000) and are posted on their website – so it is an excellent way for junior creatives, in particular, to share their ideas with a global creative community.

Mostly, the One Minute Briefs topics are speculative, but some are live briefs for charities, not-for-profit organisations or small businesses. Anyone is welcome to submit entries, the only ‘rule’ being that the ad (or at least the idea) should be completed in less than a minute.

Clearly, this concept is not meant to rival or undermine the work of agencies; it is primarily a fun way of sharing ideas and encouraging creativity. Nevertheless, the winners are usually very good, sometimes outstanding and occasionally award-winning in their own right.

As a supporter of and regular contributor to One Minute Briefs, I’m collaborating with them to set some healthcare-related briefs. I think this is a great opportunity to promote healthcare advertising in the broader creative community, give industry exposure to aspiring (and established) creatives, and perhaps even educate people about some important public health issues.

The first brief will be tomorrow, Thursday 20 November (about 7pm AEST), with the winners to be featured here on the Wellmark blog and on the Advertising Health website.

You can find out more about One Minute Briefs here. Even better, follow their Twitter feed tomorrow, see the entries as they happen – and get involved.

By Ryan Wallman, Head of Copy at Wellmark. Ryan tweets about healthcare communications and pharma marketing @wellmark_health.