It is the question that keeps marketing directors awake at , right next to the anxiety about bounce rates and the weird clicking sound the radiator makes. We spend months, sometimes years, polishing a “voice.” We agonize over the exact hex code of a button. We debate whether our brand is “playful but professional” or “minimalist but warm.” And then, we go out and buy a face for that brand from a library that sells the exact same face to twenty-five thousand other people.
Sarah sat at her desk last Tuesday-this is a true story, or close enough to one that the names don’t matter-and she felt that sudden, sharp drop in her stomach. She was scrolling through a competitor’s blog, a scrappy little startup that didn’t even have a series A yet, and there he was. The guy. The “Approachable Tech Founder” image that lived on her own company’s homepage. He was wearing the same blue flannel shirt. He had the same thoughtfully groomed beard. He was holding the same ceramic mug.
We’ve grown numb to the strangeness of this arrangement. We call it “stock,” but we should call it “visual rent.” When you license an image