“We’re excited to see a lot of the tablet manufacturers truly recognise that marketing their tablets toward video games, robots and all of that is not necessarily the best way to scale,” Schimel said.

Meredith has worked with Pinterest to find a big traffic boost to some of its magazines, Schimel says.

Watch the video above for more. Or read about the paidContent 2012 panel in which Schimel joined Barnes & Noble - digital newsstand and emerging content GM Jonathan Shar and Adobe’s digital publishing group business development director Nick Bogaty.

Liz Schimel, EVP and Chief Digital Officer, Meredith National Media Group

The biggest challenge for a media company like Meredith is shifting the focus from customer acquisition to customer engagement across platforms, Meredith chief digital officer Liz Schimel said at paidContent 2012 this morning.

Part of that means making the brands available on the right platforms, but not all of them. “We get approached by a lot of companies and say no,” Schimel said. “HP knocked on the door, and we said no, we’re not going to do that one.” Most of Meredith’s readers are “mass-market women,” so if a platform or device is “too male-centric or too niche, we don’t do it.”

Nick Bogaty, Adobe’s director of business development for the digital publishing group, says Adobe’s main goal in the next five years is to “enable publishers to continue to drive paid circulation and make this an attractive platform for advertisers. … That’s the key thing we’re trying to solve as a technology provider.” Adobe recently worked with Wenner Media to create the first iPad edition of “Us Weekly.” The company noticed a lot of people left copies of the celebrity gossip magazine on planes, and other people picked them up. So Adobe built “pass-along” features into Us Weekly’s digital edition. Readers can share a web version of the digital magazine — and their friends can sample it before hitting a paywall.

Barnes & Noble’s Jonathan Shar, GM of digital newsstand and emerging content, says more consumers want ”an edition that’s customized for a platform,” taking factors like screen size into account. Barnes & Noble has found that the best way to do that is often through PDFs with additional features — like adjustable type size — layered on top to customize a digital edition for a Nook tablet or Nook iPhone app.

Check out the rest of our coverage of paidContent 2012. Full archived video on livestream (registration required).

Meredith, the publisher of Better Homes and Gardens and Family Circle, was an early believer in the need to create its own marketing agency in the face of industry-wide print advertising declines.

Lately, its competitors have been ramping up their marketing businesses as well. Most notably, Hearst Magazines expanded its reach into more general marketing programs thanks to its April acquisition of interactive shop iCrossing. The purchase was seen as a way to match Meredith’s growing stake in mobile marketer The Hyperfactory at the time.

In August, Meredith lost Jack Griffin, who was considered one of the primary drivers of its marketing business, to Time Inc., where he was tapped to replace Ann Moore, who retired as CEO last month.

Schimel has held a number of high-profile posts over the past few years. She was hired by Nokia (NYSE: NOK) more than two years ago to lead its mobile music unit as part of the entertainment and communities group. Before that, she was VP of business development for multimedia services at the original AT&T (NYSE: T) Wireless (before it became Cingular and then AT&T Mobility).

Her other stops along the way included a stint as SVP, online content development at Comcast Interactive Media (NSDQ: CMCSA) as well as BMG Online and BMG Entertainment.