Brandfolium tries to make Twitter advertising palatable

PALM DESERT, Calif.--Brandfolium's Navid is a clever yet creepy marketplace for ads on Twitter and other social services. With this service, a marketer can find an online writer who's willing to accept paid endorsements in his or her feed, put a price on the paid mention, and schedule the campaign. The site should launch shortly.

Writers open to these campaigns have to register on the service so marketers can find them.

In the launch presentation Monday at the DemoSpring conference, the company's CEO showed a geographic component of the service, too. Marketers can find, on a map, publishers in specific locations. For location-specific advertising (restaurants, for example), this could help in the targeting of ads.

I'm not opposed to advertising--it pays my mortgage, after all--but there's something a bit bloodless about the Navid process, and online writers who overdo it on accepting endorsements may find their follower counts declining. But this kind of direct social network-based advertising is inevitable, and Navid's process is both open, and, the presenter at Demo says, compliant with the FCC's new disclosure rules for bloggers.