Insurance for brand deals, the honest version.

The brand deal is the moment it gets real. Someone wants to pay you to put their product in front of your audience, and the email comes with a contract attached. Most creators skim it, sign it, and get on with the shoot. Then a clause in the middle turns out to matter, and by then it is too late to change.

So let's talk about brand deals specifically. Not the whole creator stack, we have a separate guide for that, but the risks that show up the moment money and a brand name are attached to your content. What a sponsored post actually exposes you to, what you are agreeing to when you sign, and the one honest gap we want you to understand before you ink anything.

The short answer

There is no law that says you need insurance to take a brand deal. But "no law" is not the same as "no risk", and brand deals carry a few that a normal post does not. They come from three places: the product you are putting your name to, the contract you are signing, and the claim a brand might bring if the campaign goes wrong.

We'll take them one at a time. And before we go further, one honesty note. Cover at careless™ is one modular policy made of opt-in Sections. There is no single magic policy that comes with everything. You pick the Sections that fit the work you actually do, which is the point.

When you sell or endorse a physical product

This is the risk creators underestimate most, because it does not feel like insurance territory until it is.

The moment you sell your own merch, launch a supplement, put your name on a skincare line, or endorse a physical product as if it is yours, you have stepped into product territory. If that product is later blamed for injuring someone or damaging their property, the person harmed can come after whoever's name is on it. A supplement that makes someone ill. A piece of merch that catches fire. A gadget you co-branded that hurts a customer. These are not abstract. They are exactly the kind of claim that lands on the creator, not just the manufacturer.

Products liability is the cover for this. It responds to claims that a physical product you sold or supplied caused injury or damage, along with the legal costs of defending it. It sits alongside Public Liability, which covers injury and damage from your activities rather than your products, and the two together are the sensible base the day you start shipping anything with your name on it.

If you want the full picture of public liability and when it kicks in, our public liability guide for the self-employed walks through it properly.

What the contract is quietly making you agree to

Here is the part most creators sign without reading, and it is the part that bites.

Brand agreements are not just "post this, get paid". They almost always contain two things worth slowing down for: an indemnity clause and an insurance requirement. Both shift risk onto you, and both are negotiable far more often than creators realise.

An indemnity clause means you are promising to cover the brand's losses if something about your involvement goes wrong. If the campaign triggers a complaint, a regulator's attention, or a third-party claim, an indemnity can make you the one who pays for it, contractually, on top of whatever insurance you do or do not hold. Read what you are indemnifying the brand against before you sign, because you are agreeing to carry it.

An insurance requirement means the brand is telling you what cover you must hold to work with them. Bigger brands and agencies routinely demand a minimum level of public liability, sometimes products liability, and increasingly professional indemnity, before they will release a contract. If the deal names a cover and a limit, that is not a suggestion. It is the figure you need in place, and not having it can cost you the deal or put you in breach the moment you sign.

The practical move is simple. Before you sign a brand deal, read the indemnity clause and the insurance schedule, and match the cover the brand demands to the cover you actually hold. If there is a gap, close it before the campaign goes live, not after a problem appears.

Disclosure: the rules you are already bound by

This is context rather than a cover, but it feeds directly into the risk, so it is worth being clear about.

The rule is that an ad has to be obviously identifiable as an ad, up front, before anyone engages with it. #ad is the label most creators reach for and it does the job, but the label is the usual way of meeting the rule rather than the rule itself.

What makes a post an ad, for the Advertising Standards Authority, is payment plus control. Payment counts whether it is money or the product itself, so being sent something free is payment. What decides it is the second half: does the brand have any say over what you post? If it does, that is an ad and it needs an ad label. A product sent with no strings, that you cover however you like, is outside that test. It does not follow that you say nothing. Consumer law expects a commercial relationship to be clear either way, so a gifted or PR product still wants an honest label saying it was gifted. Free but unlabelled is not one of the options.

Behind the ASA's code sits that consumer law, which is the half creators tend not to know about. The Competition and Markets Authority enforces it, and under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 it can fine directly rather than going to court first. The two bodies publish on this jointly, in the Influencers' guide to making clear that ads are ads, which is the thing to read rather than this paragraph.

Why does it matter here? Because a missed or buried disclosure is exactly the kind of thing a brand will point to if a campaign goes sideways and they decide your handling cost them money. The disclosure obligation is yours, the reputational fallout can be theirs, and that overlap is where the next section lives.

The honest gap: when a brand says your content cost them money

This is the big one, and we are going to be completely straight with you about it.

The risks above are about injury, damage and contracts. But there is another risk that is purely about money, and it is the one most specific to brand deals. It is a brand turning around and claiming that your content, your advice, a missed disclosure, or a deliverable that did not perform cost them money. A campaign that misfired and damaged their launch. A post that breached the ASA rules and got the brand a complaint. A deliverable that was late and blew a product window. Work that simply did not do what the contract said it would.

That is not public liability, and it is not products liability. Nobody got hurt and nothing got broken. It is a claim about financial loss caused by your professional work, and that is the territory of professional indemnity.

Here is the honest part: careless™ does not offer professional indemnity yet. It is coming, but it is not something we can quote today, so we are not going to pretend a brand-deal policy from us closes this gap, because it does not. If brand deals are a real part of your income, this is the exposure to understand before you sign, not after a brand brings a claim.

So here is what to do with that. Read up on what professional indemnity actually covers in our professional indemnity explainer, so you know exactly what the gap is, and see what the cover will include when it lands. In the meantime, weigh the indemnity clauses in your brand contracts with this gap in mind, because a contract that makes you carry the brand's losses is a much bigger deal when you do not yet have a cover that answers it.

So what do brand deals actually call for?

Most creators taking brand deals land on a short, sensible set of covers rather than the full menu:

• Public Liability, the base for injury and damage from what you do.
• Products liability, the day you sell, supply or endorse a physical product with your name on it.
• The cover the contract demands, matched to the limit the brand asks for, in place before the campaign goes live.
• Professional indemnity, when it arrives, if a brand claiming your work cost them money is a real exposure for you.

Your gear and your accounts matter too, but they are not brand-deal-specific, so we keep them where they belong. Gear that travels lives under All Risks, covered in our camera gear guide, and the full creator picture, public liability, gear, cyber and the rest, is laid out in the content creator insurance guide.

Pricing it against the contract

The sections you switch on, the work you do, and the limits the contracts you sign are asking for. Every charge is itemised before you pay: the premium, Insurance Premium Tax, the broker's policy fee and the payment processing charge.

Read the clause, then buy against it

Brand contracts are where creators find out what they were supposed to have already, usually the week before a shoot. So read the insurance clause the day the contract lands rather than the day it is due, work out which sections it is actually asking for, and put those in place. Where it asks for professional indemnity, we will tell you straight that careless™ does not offer it yet, so you can plan around that instead of discovering it at signature. Cover is arranged with Kovrilo and underwritten by established insurers. See what you can put in place today.