Of the 81,000 local advertising sales reps in the U.S., 52,000 are pitching some sort of interactive advertising product or service. That makes online advertising the most-pitched by far of all media products. In fact, the battalion that's peddling digital products is bigger than the combined troops that are trying to sell newspapers, radio and TV advertising. But big questions plague the industry over how to organize and compensate sales reps in this new, multi-product environment.

This 29-page report combines the research from Borrell Associates' database of online ad revenues for more than 5,000 local media companies, its 2011 survey of 7,805 local businesses, and an end-of-year poll of 230 sales managers taken November 2011 through January 2012. The report examines the overall growth of local digital ad-sales forces and examines compensation, three prevalent forms of organizational structure, and the opinions of sales managers on their staffs' effectiveness in understanding digital products, the advertisers' needs and their company's overall goals.

Because the authors found such stark differences between companies who employed a digital-only sales force and those who didn't, the report offers heavy analysis on those issues.

But it's not a fight between online reps and traditional media reps. More often than not, they're one in the same. Nearly 86 percent of those 52,000 reps actually work for traditional media companies thirsting for a chunk of this year's estimated $18.5 billion in local online advertising. That formidable battalion has gained the respect of pureplay Internet companies such as ReachLocal, Yahoo, Google and others who've become allies with those street-level sales experts. Yahoo alone estimates that it has engaged 6,500 reps from the newspaper and TV industry to sell Yahoo display advertising in their markets.

This report also includes three appendices displaying more than 300 responses from sales managers on the questions of:

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/44b73c/assessing_local_di