copies of the same model with different textures

Hi,

I getting quite mad with the material editor and the way the whole adding materials thing works. maybe it´s my fault and I still didn´t find out the proper way to do it but I tried lots of combinations and I can make it work the way I would like.

What I am trying to do is to have copies of the same model (an advert panel with no texture only imported once and cloned multiples times) with different adverts on it (that is different textures, so different materials).

The way I see it is you should be able to create multiple materials in the material editor, each one with its own texture in the difuse channel (without assingning them, just creating them from scratch) and then be able to import a model, copy it as many time as you want and assign each material to each model without affecting any of the others. maybe I am asking too much but I think that is the way it should work rather than having to export from the 3D software each panel already textured as a different .dts files.

Is there any way to do what I meant?? any reason for this is the way it is??

Thanks a lot!! Cheers!!