Aiming to connect brands with the top 10% of bloggers in the web’s most lucrative sectors Tailsweep is on a mission to change the online advertising landscape in the UK.

By offering advertisers more insight into the buzz their online campaigns have created, the company’s UK Sales Director Dan Britcher and Operations Manager Duncan Chamberlain are optimistic Tailsweep can emulate its Swedish success in Britain.

I recently interviewed Dan to find out just how they differentiate themselves from Glam and how they can ensure advertisers appear next to quality content.

Glam has been adopted by many fashion and lifestyle publishers in the UK, is this a market Tailsweep is after too?
Dan: Yes. Our experience from Sweden tells us that this is an area that fashion and luxury brands have to engage with.

We differ to Glam in our business model and the fact that we are not an ad network in its traditional sense.

We are experts in blogs and there is a need to educate fashion brands about how to engage with consumers in this area. If brands understand this area it will reap significant returns.

To ensure quality for your advertisers, your publishers must be creating quality content. How do you make sure this happens?

Tailsweep only represents bloggers who are publishing high quality content in the first place.

We make a qualitative and quantitative assessment of their sites – strong editorial, site architecture, content structure, in/ outbound links, RSS, Page Views and Unique Users and then we invite them to join our platform on a non-exclusive basis.

A brand safe environment is obviously important for advertisers but at the same time they have to appreciate that editorial integrity is sacrosanct and not something to be influenced.

There is still a perception that the blogosphere is somewhat like the Wild West which is far from the reality. Our blog partners are publishing platforms of equal/greater influence than many of the major media publishers and we need to work to preserve that integrity and our role is to educate brands about this space.

Tailsweep would never even try to influence content. If a brand has a compelling product, service or marketing initiative and it is newsworthy our bloggers will pick up on it anyway.

Is Tailsweep only after independent bloggers and networks, or would you partner with a large media title?

We are looking for partnerships with independent bloggers and networks with strong blog platforms.

If we seek the scale of ad networks then we dilute our entire proposition.

We don’t have the ambition to work with as many fashion bloggers as we can, just the best ones.