• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, October 15, 2014

Women’s interest publisher Meredith Corp. is launching a new native advertising platform called “Buzz” for its digital properties, beginning with the Web site for Fitness magazine. Buzz is the first of a series of new performance-based advertising products that Meredith plans to introduce across tens of its Web sites in the near future.

The Buzz platform integrates marketers’ native ads into contextually relevant content areas that are endemic to Meredith brands, including the food, home, parenting and lifestyle categories. The service offers in-stream and premium native ad placements, which can lead readers to branded content, including articles, videos, slideshows, delivering fitness and workout tips, DIY instructions, and recipes, to name a few examples. 

The native ad units are distinguished by light gray shading, as well as text alerting the reader that a sponsor has provided the content. 

Buzz debuts as part of the relaunch of the Fitness Web site, which now incorporates responsive design and mobile-friendly format, including infinite-scrolling category pages, embedded social sharing options and a new vertical scrolling feature to navigate slideshows. More than half of the traffic to Fitnessmagazine.com now comes from mobile, according to Fitness magazine senior digital director Amanda Wolfe.

Andy Wilson, Meredith’s senior vice president and chief digital officer, stated: “This relaunch not only gives consumers a mobile-first experience, but it also allows us to develop richer integrated opportunities for our advertisers to drive better performance and viewability to meet their goals.”

As part of the relaunch, Fitness is also introducing an array of custom content, including a video round-up of the best fitness advice from over the years, quizzes and infographics. The social-media component includes more prominent social modules to facilitate sharing via Facebook, Twitter,and Pinterest, among other social platforms.