Lets addresses three major challenges in local advertising, specifically in the digital realm. The first challenge is the price and quality of existing banners, with examples provided to illustrate common issues such as small images and unclear messaging. The second challenge pertains to landing pages, emphasizing the importance of optimization and a clear call to action. The third challenge revolves around the overwhelming complexity of available tools and formats, leading to inaction from advertisers and sales reps.

Despite successful sales of online ads in their job market portal, there was a lack of transparency on digital performance for the sales team and advertisers. To address this, SÜWE implemented "Smart Job Board" from Smartico, which provided automatically generated dashboards for each job ad, showcasing performance values in an intuitive and clear manner.

Smart marketplaces play a pivotal role in the platform strategy of local publishers by enabling local merchants to engage in local e-commerce, offering relevant and shopable content for readers, generating subscription revenues through advertisers, and providing an intuitive sales product that excites sales teams.

We believe that in the current age of e-commerce and subscription revenues, as well as the need to transform local advertorials and advertisers into a digital-first approach. To address this, we have developed a marketplace called "Smart Marketplace" that enables publishers to build unlimited vertical marketplaces.

The challenge faced by local publishers like News Verlag was selling classic online banner advertising as a new sales process and product for advertisers and sales teams, especially considering low budgets and a lack of experience with digital services.

Tagesspiegel has incorporated digitalization into its magazines through "Smart Magazines," offering advertisers and readers a high-quality digital extension of their publications. This cross-media approach attracted a major sports company as the magazine's main sponsor, which was previously not possible with the print-only format.

We discuss a regional publishing group's hesitation to bring their successful local advertorials online. They wanted an intuitive product for their media consultants to sell and for advertisers to buy, with interactive HTML pages, separate landing pages, and comprehensive campaign management.

Dennis Rößler, Managing Director of Funke's Hamburg marketer "Mediahafen," is focused on reviving local advertisers through scalable cross-media offers. Rößler believes that the current crisis presents an opportunity for regional publishers to position themselves as problem solvers for advertisers. To achieve this, Mediahafen has introduced "Smart Ads" in Hamburg, offering a fixed price per ad that includes a banner set, landing page, targeted ad impressions, and a comprehensive reporting dashboard.