Digital Marketing Videos

OpenX’s Erika Loberg: Attention Should Measure ‘Real Human Engagement,’ Not Just Screen Presence

OpenX’s chief product officer Erika Loberg explained that the next evolution in connected‑TV (CTV) advertising is shifting the attention metric from a retrospective, post‑campaign gauge to a real‑time, pre‑bid signal that reflects genuine human engagement with the screen. Traditional viewability only confirms an ad’s presence on a display; OpenX argues that true attention requires a viewer actually watching. By leveraging TVision’s person‑level engagement data and predictive modeling, the company can assign an attention score to each impression before the auction, allowing buyers to prioritize inventory that is more likely to be seen. Loberg highlighted that this approach revalues inventory, enabling smarter bid prioritization and supply‑side curation within OpenX Select’s premium publisher pool. She noted that “attention allows you to have smarter bid prioritization and more efficiently spend your budgets,” and that balancing high‑attention inventory with scale is achieved through real‑time optimization. If adopted widely, the attention‑driven pre‑bid model could reshape CTV buying by rewarding quality over sheer volume, driving higher brand recall and ROI. Loberg also signaled that future innovations will fuse attention with identity graphs and contextual signals, ushering in a more holistic, data‑rich advertising ecosystem.