Marketing, PR and creative agency insurance UK

What agencies get wrong

The first thing is assuming that a basic professional indemnity wording covers rights. Many do not, or cover them only partially. Copyright and trade mark infringement, breach of confidence, defamation and misuse of private information are media risks, and they need to be named in the wording rather than hoped for. An agency whose whole output is licensed material assembled for clients has an intellectual property exposure as its primary risk, not a secondary one.

The second is signing client contracts without reading the liability clause. Large clients routinely propose uncapped liability, indemnities for third-party IP claims, and warranties that all materials are original and cleared. Agencies sign them because the account matters. The result is a contractual exposure that may exceed both the PI limit and what the policy covers, since liability assumed by contract is frequently excluded unless the insurer has agreed it.

The third is limit-setting by habit. A £1 million limit is the market default because it is the market default, not because it reflects the loss. On a national campaign, the cost of pulling and re-running creative is not proportionate to your fee — it is proportionate to the client’s media spend.

The covers that matter for a creative business

Professional indemnity. The core cover: it responds when a client alleges your work caused them financial loss. In this sector that means a misprinted phone number across a print run, a media booking placed against the wrong slot, a website launched with a broken checkout, a campaign that missed a launch date, a strategy deliverable the client says was not what was scoped. Look for a wording that includes defence costs and that does not exclude liability arising from delay.

Intellectual property and media liability. Cover for infringement of copyright, trade marks, design rights and moral rights, and for defamation, malicious falsehood and breach of confidence. This is where agency claims concentrate. Stock library licences with territory or duration limits, model and property releases, music synchronisation rights, fonts licensed for print but used in an app, and third-party footage are all routine sources of claims. Generative AI has added a genuinely unsettled layer here: whether AI-assisted output infringes, and who owns it, is not fully resolved in UK law, and some wordings are beginning to address it explicitly. Ask what yours says rather than assuming silence means cover.

Defamation. PR and communications work carries a specific exposure. Under the Defamation Act 2013 a statement is not defamatory unless its publication has caused or is likely to cause serious harm to reputation, and a body trading for profit must show serious financial loss — a real threshold, but not one that prevents a claim being brought and defended at cost. Media liability funds that defence.

Cyber and client data. Agencies hold client marketing databases, campaign assets under embargo and, increasingly, first-party consumer data. A breach is both a data incident and a client relationship event. Our commercial cyber guide sets out what these policies fund.

Employers’ and public liability, and kit. Employers’ liability is compulsory once you employ staff, at a statutory minimum of £5 million. Public liability matters more than desk-based businesses expect once you run events, shoots and activations on third-party sites, and hired-in equipment cover belongs in any programme that involves production.

Contract performance and the disputes that follow

A large share of agency disputes are not really about negligence. They are about scope: what was agreed, what was delivered, what was chargeable, and who moved the deadline. Professional indemnity responds to a claim for financial loss caused by your professional failure — it does not pay a disputed invoice, and it does not cover the cost of redoing work the client simply did not like.

What reduces this exposure is documentary rather than insurable: a written scope, change control that is used, sign-off recorded at each stage, and clearance records for every third-party asset. Underwriters ask about all four, and the same records are what defend the claim if one arrives.

The underwriting questions this sector gets asked

Expect to be asked for the split of fee income across services — strategy, creative, production, media buying, digital build, PR — because they carry very different risk profiles, and media buying in particular introduces exposure that scales with client spend rather than your fee. Also: your largest client as a percentage of turnover; whether you contract on your own terms or the client’s; your rights clearance procedure and who is responsible for it; whether you work for regulated sectors such as financial services, health or gambling, where advertising content carries additional compliance exposure; whether you have US or other overseas clients; and whether any work is subcontracted, and on what terms.

What a broker does differently here

We read the client contracts and set the programme against them rather than against a generic agency template. That means checking whether your PI limit meets the caps and indemnities you have actually agreed, whether IP and media liability are genuinely inside the wording rather than assumed, and whether the retroactive date still reaches back to the campaigns that could still generate a claim. We also look at where liability is created unnecessarily — warranties that all material is original when you licensed it, indemnities that survive termination — because the cheapest risk transfer is usually a redrafted clause.

Apex is Bristol-based and FCA-regulated. If your agency also builds and hosts client systems, the technology exposures on our managed service provider page are worth reading alongside this, and our professional indemnity wiki entry covers the mechanics of claims-made cover.

Frequently asked questions

Does professional indemnity cover copyright infringement?

Only if the wording says so. Intellectual property infringement is a media risk rather than a classic negligence risk, and some professional indemnity policies exclude or limit it. For an agency it should be an explicit insuring clause covering copyright, trade marks, design rights and moral rights, ideally alongside defamation and breach of confidence. Check the wording, not the broker summary.

What limit should an agency carry?

There is no single answer, but fee income is the wrong anchor. The relevant measure is what a failure could cost the client: on a national campaign, reprint and re-run costs track their media spend, not your invoice. Start from the liability caps in your largest client contracts, because those set a floor you have already agreed to, then consider the worst realistic campaign you handle.

Are we covered for using AI-generated images or copy?

It depends on the wording, and the underlying law is not settled. Questions about whether AI-assisted output can infringe existing rights, and who owns what it produces, are still working through the UK courts and policy process. Some insurers now address AI expressly, others are silent. Ask your broker to confirm the position in writing, and keep records of prompts, tools and licences for the same reason you keep stock library receipts.

Does insurance help if a client refuses to pay?

No. Professional indemnity responds to a claim that your work caused the client financial loss; it is not a debt recovery product and it does not fund a fee dispute. What helps is contractual: a clear scope, change control that is documented, staged sign-off and payment terms you enforce. Those records are also what defends a professional indemnity claim if the dispute escalates into one.

Apex Insurance Brokers Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN 724952). This page is general information, not advice on a specific policy.