Sessions: INS208: The dangers of the last session

Speaking in the last session on the last day of RIMS is not for the faint of heart, or the boring. At the start of INS208 (about the perils of online advertising), the RIMS rep who introduced the speakers stressed just how important, cutting edge and interesting the session would be. He cited how only one in 10 session ideas submitted to the RIMS conference organizers gets chosen to be developed into an actual session. Being one in 10, INS208 just had to be good, he was implying, so please stick around until 1 p.m. and the end of the session, he was pleading.

Then he left.

As can be expected, not all of the audience listened to him. Some of us fled. Those of us who stuck it out appeared to be listening all the way through. Maybe my fellow audience members have the unique talent of sleeping with their eyes open. I have tried to learn this skill, and have attended workshops in India with a yoga master who possesses complete control over all his bodily functions, but I am a failure at it.

The speakers, Martin Myers of HellerEhrman LLP and Chad Milton of Marsh, did their best to battle through the audience's unavoidable last-day malaise, and through an Internet connection that was so slow that it could have been dial-up. Maybe it was.

That was probably one of the biggest downfalls of the session. It was, after all, about online adverts, so Myers' efforts to show some examples of said online ads -- streaming video of user-generated Pepto commercials, for instance, or even just the homepage for American Apparel -- were frustrated by the crapitude of the convention center IT system.

It's a shame. The session focus was something I'd never really seen discussed before anywhere else -- how the legal and liability vagaries of the Web can and are affecting advertising in blogs, social networking sites, user-generated video and other content, and other video games. Cool stuff. (Too bad if you left the conference a day or two early.)

It turns out, though, advertisers have much of the same exposures and lack of protections that online content generators have. For instance, when a corporate Web site allows its employees or visitors to blog or post comments, they might be liable for those contents. The ISP might even be liable. Same holds true for companies that create ads from user-generated content.

And the insurance situation is similar too. CGL does not touch this stuff. But E&O underwriters are trying to.

Or as Milton put it, "The E&O underwriters are crawling all over themselves to show they understand this."

Now that I'm rehashing the PowerPoint details of the session, it does seem like some pretty heavy slogging for the last session on the last day of RIMS. To those of you in the audience with me until 1 p.m., and especially to Martin and Chad, I salute you.