Wainwright, who was previously T-Mobile’s head of future propositions, has 15 years’ experience in developing market research strategies for telco and retail operators, including five years with Tesco, where headed insight and marketing planning for home entertainment.

Leading Future’s media insight and reporting to Future’s strategic planning and development director Richard Spilsbury, Wainwright will build the UK-based market research unit, developing audience and retail insights. Future sells 2.9 million magazines each month and attracts 34 million monthly unique visitors to its websites, digital editions and bespoke tablet apps for TechRadar, T3, Total Film and BikeRadar.

Spilsbury said: “We are delighted to bring someone of Simon’s calibre and experience in to lead the market research team, with a renewed focus on driving audience insight for our brands and our commercial partners. At Future, we cultivate passionate and affluent audiences, many of them hard to reach via other media platforms. Simon knows our products, our markets, and our audiences ? and will drive our insight agenda to the next level.”

Wainwright added: “The potential of this role blends my passion for media, sport and technology with the need to deliver compelling insight stories on our customers and the market as a whole… to develop our insight capabilities and to make it a key asset for Future as we expand our markets and our products.”