What is “pay-per-face” or “pay-per-look”? Well it’s a way for adver­tis­ers to charge you for very spe­cif­ic and tar­get­ed views of con­tent. Mia­mi-based AdMo­bi­lize (jobs at AdMo­bi­lize), is expand­ing its con­cept of “Google Ana­lyt­ics for the real world.” The com­pa­ny has released a sec­ond ver­sion of its AdBea­con device and accom­pa­ny­ing soft­ware. This is after test­ing the pre­vi­ous ver­sion in 30 com­pa­nies over nine coun­tries. They’ve recent­ly announced an acqui­si­tion of a new $1.6 mil­lion in funding.

CEO and founder Rodol­fo Sac­co­man says the small device now has GPS, a 5‑megapixel cam­era, a Lin­ux com­put­er board, and “advanced facial detec­tion.” The AdBea­con is a detec­tor of real-world cus­tomers. You put the device on the wall or counter top close to a dig­i­tal bill­board or dis­play ad, and set it to Wi-Fi for access. On your desk­top, you or a store man­ag­er can scru­ti­nize what’s hap­pen­ing the same way you would when look­ing at web ana­lyt­ics for a website.

You want to find out why visitors/customers do what they do, who they are, and what they may pre­fer. For instance, you may want to know why one side of a store aisle gets more cus­tomers than anoth­er, or how many peo­ple have actu­al­ly seen that ad on a dig­i­tal bill­board. Anoth­er fea­ture of the AdBea­con is how long some­one stares at an ad or “dwell time”, Sac­co­man says the cam­era plus facial detec­tion deter­mines which way a per­son is look­ing, and for how long.

The soft­ware can deter­mine what in the store is being looked at by the direc­tion of the gaze. That allows you to know how many peo­ple looked at that new “sale” sign, and the dura­tion of aware­ness. If you inte­grate the con­tent with a man­age­ment sys­tem you can boost your analy­sis of the adver­tise­ment. AdMo­bi­lize is cur­rent­ly work­ing towards an inte­gra­tion with lead­ing CMS’s. Since AdBea­con can per­ceive all the peo­ple with­in the view­ing space you can eas­i­ly deter­mine your peak traf­fic times. It’s also designed to track the age of cus­tomers, their gen­der, their emo­tion, as well as their ethnicity.

They claim the sys­tem can deter­mine gen­der and age with about 90 per­cent accu­ra­cy, plus or minus five years. The mar­ket for this type of prod­uct is mom-and-pop stores, large retail­ers, air­ports, and dig­i­tal bill­boards. Ver­i­zon is offer­ing AdBea­con as part of its small busi­ness con­nec­tiv­i­ty pro­gram. The cost of this ser­vice is $100/month for one device and sup­port­ing soft­ware, with dis­counts for more units.

Anoth­er com­pa­ny called Retail­Next (jobs at Retail­Next) is a plat­form that uses “a lot of Wi-Fi to obtain data” about stores’ cus­tomers, where­as AdBea­con uses algo­rithms and a cam­era. Sac­co­man also not­ed that the Lon­don-based Qui­v­i­di “has been doing a good job,” but they employ a vari­ety of equip­ment, where­as AdBea­con is one small unit. Sac­co­man makes clear that his device is a “plug and mea­sure device” that can be set up in a few min­utes. The new fund­ing will be spent on sales and prod­uct devel­op­ment. Since the company’s incep­tion in 2012 they’ve raised a total of $4.5 million.

How many of you young devel­op­ers want to get into some­thing that is going to be big time? Pay-Per-Face, burn this term into your brains! It’s going to be the future of mar­ket­ing, oh yeah and surveillance.