Lightning joins founding directors, Tim Wise and Chris Loveys, as an executive director and has also taken a stake in the company.
His arrival reunites him with Wise and Loveys, who he formerly worked with for several years in the 90s, before leaving to set up his own company, Lightning Software.
In 2000, he sold the company to Omnicom Group-owned Agency.com and moved to France to become managing director of Agency.com Paris. He returned to London in 2001 to take up managing director's post at the London office.
Lightning left Agency.com in 2002 and had since been working on a consultancy basis advising companies such as Cisco and Wellcome Trust.
In his role at , he will be responsible for all the technology that drives the multimillion-pound website and for the development of advanced new services.
The first of these new services is a fully automated web-based email marketing system that enables the user to create, broadcast and track their own email campaign.
MarketingFile.com is based in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, and is the largest online list management website in Europe, offering more than 100m records in 150 databases provided by some 30 of the leading list-owners, including Claritas, D&B, Wegener and Equifax.
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