DEMO: BrandFolium offers online marketplace for social networking ads

BrandFolium is one of 65 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.

Two-year-old BrandFolium will turn on its Navid (pronounced nah-VEED) website today at DEMO, calling it an online connection between advertisers and publishers of social networking sites.

The Navid marketplace works pretty much like the way advertisers and publishers have worked together for decades. An advertiser looks for publishers whose readership closely matches the advertiser’s target market. The advertiser provides some information on Navid as to what target audience it’s looking for. Then the site’s Match-Mapping engine serves up several possible options. The advertiser can then contact a publisher and engage in a two-way conversation in a little text window (140 characters max, of course) to discuss terms of the contract, negotiate a price, decide when and where the ads will run and seal the deal.

The social media market is currently buzzing about what Twitter’s advertising model may be, and while BrandFolium wants to get a piece of the Twitter market, it’s also thinking beyond Twitter, said co-founder Guillaume Dumortier, in Sunnyvale, Calif.

“A lot of rumors have come out” about Twitter, Dumortier said. “We’re starting with Twitter but we’re going to add more social networks.”

The company also wants to arrange geolocation-based advertising deals tied to the Foursquare mobile application, delivering ads to nearby restaurants based on the customer’s proximity to them.

Forrester forecasts “interactive marketing” spending to reach $55 billion by 2014, or 21 percent of all marketing spending. That’s not just on social media sites, though, but also search, e-mail and mobile marketing.

BrandFolium has raised more than $500,000 from angel investors in Finland, France and the UK, Dumortier said.