Personal and Advertising Injury Overview

Personal and Advertising Injury Overview

A Commercial General Liability Policy has several coverages including General Aggregate, Products and Completed Operations Aggregate, Each Occurrence, Damage to Premises Rented to you, Medical Payments and Personal and Advertising Injury. 

This blog article will provide an overview of what Personal and Advertising Injury is, and why this coverage is relevant to your business. 

Personal and Advertising injury combined Personal Injury and Advertising Injury into one limit.    

Personal Injury

·         Wrongful Eviction or Entry

·         Libel

·         Slander

·         Unlawful Detainment, arrest, or imprisonment

·         Invasion of Privacy

·         Malicious Prosecution

Some Examples of Personal Injury claims are:

In a printed advertisement for your business, you make negative statements about the product quality of your biggest competitor and get sued for Libel.

A retail store security guard detains a person they think shoplifted until the police arrive. Upon the arrival of the police, the view camera footage and the detained person never stole anything.  The store gets sued for false arrest.

Advertising Injury

·         Copyright Infringement

·         Use their Image or Name without Permission

·         Copy Advertising Ideas

An example of Advertising Injury claims is:

A new café opens up and begins using a logo, however, the logo is already in use by a local restaurant, only it used different colors but the design is still the same. The new café gets sued for copyright infringement.

Exclusions

Bodily Injury and Property Damage claims are not covered under Personal and Advertising Injury because they are covered by another coverage part of your Commercial General Liability policy.

Other exclusions are:

·         Intentional Acts

·         Criminal Acts

·         Wrong Description of Price on Goods and Services

·         Knowingly Publishing False Material

·         Electronic Chat Rooms/Bulletin Boards

·         Quality of Performance of Goods – Failure to Conform to Statements

Additionally, in some classes of business, this coverage part will not be included. Businesses who are doing Advertising, Marketing, and Media, will have this coverage picked up under their professional liability policy, or Errors and Omissions policy or will need a specialized coverage form. 

This is important coverage for any business to have.  If you do not have it as part of your Commercial General Liability policy or BusinessOwner’s policy, then you should make sure that you can find a policy providing this, or have the coverage through another policy type, such as E&O.

Photo by Skylar Kang from Pexels