The reshuffle means St Ives' segmental reporting will no longer be split into marketing and print services and will instead be separated into Strategic Marketing, Marketing Activation, and Books.

Marketing Activation comprises St Ives' marketing services print businesses (Service Graphics, SP Group and SIMS) plus Tactical Solutions, while Books represents St Ives' book printing business Clays, which recently secured a sole supplier contract with Penguin Random House.

St Ives' new Strategic Marketing division comprises: data businesses Occam and Response One; digital businesses Amaze, Branded3 and Realise; and consulting businesses Incite, Pragma and the group's latest acquisition Hive.

The new structure was announced alongside this morning's interim results for the 26 weeks to 30 January 2015, which included a 15% increase in underlying pre-tax profit to £14.9m and a 6% increase in turnover to £175m.

Strategic Marketing contributed £50.7m (H1 2014: £40.3m) or 29% of group turnover and 44% of the group underlying operating profit, beating the previously stated target of 40% of underlying operating profit to come from Marketing Services (Strategic Marketing plus Tactical Solutions).

St Ives chief executive Matt Armitage said that the group's revised target was for 50% of underlying operating profit to come from Strategic Marketing.

Of the three sub-divisions that make up Strategic Marketing, Digital and Consulting posted strong revenue growth of 60% and 75% respectively, to £17.9m and £16.1m. However, Data turnover fell 16% to £16.7m as a result of a "significant one-off software sale within Occam in the previous half-year and a change in work mix in Response One".

Armitage said: "The one-off software sale is what it is – we had the benefit last year and it hasn't repeated – and the mix change is not something that was planned, we just had lower pass-through costs in the first half in Response One than in the previous half-year.

"Those costs can be software, they can be third-party data that we're buying, it can be research and reports we buy for clients – that does affect the mix, so in the first half it's resulted in revenue coming down but the margin increasing quite significantly.

"Those businesses are doing well - they operate in growth markets, that said they are competitive markets so they are performing in line with expectations."

Armitage highlighted investment in the launch of a new cloud-based data management product called Accelero at Occam and in the launch of digitally-led CRM practice AmazeOne, a joint venture between Amaze and Occam, as growth opportunities for its data businesses.

He added that St Ives was interested in acquiring "businesses specifically focused on data analytics and media analytics" but that it had yet to find "the right one".

Marketing Activation contributed £88m (H1 2014: £88.2m) or 50% of group revenue and 31% of underlying operating profit despite ongoing pressure in the grocery retail sector, which adversely affected SP Group and Tactical Solutions.

Armitage said: "We've got significant growth in the Service Graphics business and our SIMS outsourcing business and that's offsetting pressure that we're feeling within SP and Tactical Solutions.

"That pressure is coming from the turmoil that everyone is aware of in the retail market. We've pulled those businesses together under a single management structure, we're looking to broaden the proposition [and] we're also looking to continue to develop our data solutions within the Tactical business so we can differentiate ourselves versus the competition.

"There's no denying it: they are very competitive markets. Our strategy is differentiation through proposition, differentiation through data and technology development."

Tactical Solutions was also the subject of a £1.5m impairment charge arising from a £296,000 goodwill impairment and £1.2m charge relating to customer relationship assets, which Armitage said was due to a higher level of churn in the field marketing business.

Other one-off charges that affected the group's reported pre-tax profit included a £3.1m charge relating to an increase in the value of the deferred consideration in respect of the Realise and Hive, as a result of both businesses performing better than expected, and a one-off benefit of £1.1m last year on the sale of St Ives Bradford.

Together with a £766,000 increase in amortisation of acquired intangibles, these factors led to non-underlying costs increasing from £6.7m in H1 2014 to £12.6m in H1 2015, resulting in a 63% drop in reported pre-tax profit to £2.3m (H1 2014: £6.2m).

St Ives' Books division, consisting of Clays, posted interim revenues of £36.2m and underlying operating profit of £4.2m (H1 2014: £36.3m and £4.2m), while recent contract wins such as Penguin Random House have helped secure approximately 80% of the division's workload for at least the next three years.

Clays' digital print investment plans are expected to be finalised over the coming months.

Meanwhile, the group's pension deficit has ballooned to £33.1m at 30 January 2015 versus £9.8m at 1 August 2014. Armitage said that the change was the result of volatility in the AA corporate bond yield that St Ives is required to use as the discount rate when calculating the present value of the future liability of its retirement benefit obligations.

"A lot of volatility is caused by QE and when we measured the liability at the end of January corporate bond yields were at their lowest for about 15 years, so that's caused the accounting deficit to increase," said Armitage. "Since then the yield has bounced to an extent; if we remeasured now we would see the deficit come down again so it's not something we're particularly concerned about."