Creston half year revenues up 5% as Serviceplan partnership announced

When currency fluctuations were taken into consideration, this equated to a 6% increase. Pre-tax profits were up 6% to £3.8m (compared with £3.6m in H1 2014 ).

It cited digital and online revenue up 4% in absolute terms and continues to be more than 50% of the group’s revenue.

These results follow its recent rebranding of the group as Creston Unlimited, which means that the group no longer operates on a divisional basis; as a result communications and insight is now reported as one, rather than two separate operations.

As such, communications and insight accounted for 72% of group revenue with revenue of £27m while health made up the remaining 28% with £10.3m revenue.

However, Creston’s financial director Kathryn Herrick said Insight had a strong first half in relation to revenue and profit compared to the same period last year, and the full year forecast for Insight is in line with estimates.

Barrie Brien, group chief executive of Creston, said: “The Group has enjoyed good growth over the six months resulting in increased year-on-year revenue and headline profit, plus the addition of some major new clients. A new executive management team has overseen a busy first half and some major cornerstones of the new strategy, including the repositioning of Creston as an integrated agency group of specialists under the Unlimited brand.”

He also cited a new partnership with German-owned international marketing communications group Serviceplan which has more than 30 offices worldwide including 16 in Europe.

The two have partnered previously, to win CRM assignments for Danone in Germany and the Middle East as well as on BMW Motorrad, but this formalises the partnership so that they jointly pitch for pan-European and US work.