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Here we report the results of an online RCT to improve food choices and integrate exercise into daily activities of internet users. People searching for pre-specified terms were randomized to receive one of several professionally developed campaign advertisements or the \u201cstatus quo\u201d (ads that would otherwise have been served). For 1-month pre-intervention and post-intervention, their searches for health-promoting goods or services were recorded. Our results show that 48% of people who were exposed to the ads made future searches for weight loss information, compared with 32% of those in the control group\u2014a 50% increase. The advertisements varied in efficacy. However, the effectiveness of the advertisements may be greatly improved by targeting individuals based on their lifestyle preferences and\/or sociodemographic characteristics, which together explain 49% of the variation in response to the ads. These results demonstrate that online advertisements hold promise as a mechanism for changing population health behaviors. They also provide researchers powerful ways to measure and improve the effectiveness of online public health interventions. Finally, we show that corporations that use these sophisticated tools to promote unhealthy products can potentially be outbid and outmaneuvered.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1038\/s41746-018-0031-7","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2018,5,29]],"date-time":"2018-05-29T09:42:31Z","timestamp":1527586951000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/springer_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":33,"title":["The effectiveness of public health advertisements to promote health: a randomized-controlled trial on 794,000 participants"],"prefix":"10.1038","volume":"1","author":[{"given":"Elad","family":"Yom-Tov","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Jinia","family":"Shembekar","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Sarah","family":"Barclay","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Peter","family":"Muennig","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"297","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2018,6,27]]},"reference":[{"key":"31_CR1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"553","DOI":"10.1016\/j.jsams.2007.07.008","volume":"11","author":"E Atlantis","year":"2008","unstructured":"Atlantis, E., Salmon, J. & Bauman, A. 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This has been changed to \u201cThe 18\u201324 year old are over-represented in the all user treatment population, while the 50\u201364 year old are underrepresented in both tracked and all user population, <i>p<\/i>-values were <0.05 for age groups and gender.\u201d This has been corrected in the HTML and PDF version of the Article.","order":7,"name":"change_details","label":"Change Details","group":{"name":"ArticleHistory","label":"Article History"}},{"value":"E.Y.T. is an employee of Microsoft, owner of the Bing search engine. The authors declare no competing interests.","order":1,"name":"Ethics","group":{"name":"EthicsHeading","label":"Competing interests"}}],"article-number":"24"}}