I went to OCTANE OC’s “Digital Advertising” event yesterday and had the opportunity to meet a lot of super interesting advertising execs including Ryan Steelberg of Brand Affinity.

My key takeway of the night was the importance of multichannel advertising. The VP of Interactive Media from the OC Register even talked about the Register’s plan on changing to become a service provider of advertising across platforms, whether it is print, online, or billboards, rather than their old model, which was selling adspace in its newspapers. The Register recognizes that it is losing ground to digital advertising and has decided to partner up with Yahoo Search as a publishing partner. Instead of selling squares of newspaper ads, now they are moving online essentially profiting from Yahoo CPC. In order for the Register to be successful with this business model, they are relying on the power of their brand, which to me is a very weak strategy.

Steelberg had a lot of really interesting things to say about the landscape of digital advertising and Brand Affinity’s new plans on partnering with athlete endorsers. Makes sense. There’s so much clutter now, advertisers need a way to differentiate themselves. Signal vs. Noise. Their signaling strategy is to couple celebrity sports athletes with brands, localized to the city that the user is from. The publishers essentially use clickstream information to find out where the user is from and then feed them an ad that has a picture of an athelete from the city they are from. For example, if you were browsing a social media site and you are from Los Angeles, you’ll get served a McDonalds ad with a picture of Kobe Bryant or Derek Fisher on it.

Interesting things happening in digital advertising…