Leanne Worthington

Know what the business needs and what the customer feels, and the words will follow.

Leanne runs brand and communications at Fuel, which in practice makes her the person clients offload to when there’s more coming at them than any one human should reasonably have to hold. Campaigns, websites, messaging matrices stretching across customers, sales teams and global partners, launch messaging that has to align a dozen internal people before it dares go anywhere near the outside world. She works with every team in the studio, which suits her nicely, because the genuinely interesting problems never have the decency to stay in one discipline. What she’s really doing is building a bridge between the difficult place a client is standing in and the place they’d very much rather be, then walking them across it without letting go of their hand.

She came at it sideways, starting in media buying and planning, then account and project management, before finally getting round to the job she’d wanted since a year eight English lesson. Six years then took her from junior copywriter to head of copy, writing for medical brands, legal brands, tech brands, and beauty brands, building monthly physical newspapers from nothing, running content retainers, brand guidelines and social strategies. Those early years on the commercial side turned out to be the most useful training she could have had, because they taught her what a business actually needs from its words. Every line has a job to do, whether that’s shortening a sales cycle, holding a price point, giving a partner something they can confidently repeat or simply getting somebody to click. She’s never been interested in writing that reads beautifully and achieves nothing.

Experience & Expertise.

Everyone loves the shiny bit, the campaign, the website going live, the event. Most of what makes those land happens somewhere nobody’s watching. It’s the hours locked in a room chasing a direction everyone can genuinely get behind rather than merely tolerate. It’s the pile of documents that needs to become something that converts, ideally yesterday. It’s the launch messaging holding a global team steady in the background while the world sees only the finished thing. She thrives on making complicated things simple, which is considerably harder than making them shorter, and she’s at her happiest when someone hands over the mess and trusts her to sort it out. Underneath all of it sits a straightforward question she keeps coming back to, which is what this is meant to do for the business, and whether it’s doing it.

She’s a visual thinker in a words job and pretty clear eyed about what that’s worth at the moment. AI will have a decent stab at a paragraph if you feed it well enough. What it won’t do is sit across a table and listen to someone’s frustrations over coffee, flick through the papers that have just been dumped on the desk, or feel what a customer feels at their most fed up and what you’re promising them at their most hopeful. It also won’t understand why a board is nervous, what a sales team is up against or where the commercial risk really sits. That in between, human, slightly chaotic work is – she’d tell you – is the best part of the job.