The SMS work that increased Cadbury's cut of a flat market: the appeal of SMS has given Cadbury a fresh marketing success. (Spotlight on: Cadbury).

It is not every day that you find the chief executive of a publicly quoted FMCG company talking excitedly about its digital marketing efforts. Digital, after all, is the sort of stuff that the marketing director usually delegates to some dangerously enthusiastic junior on the fringes of the marketing department.

The senior corporate directors may know a few dotcom-era buzz words, but the details of an SMS texting initiative isn't the sort of thing that commonly sets the boardroom buzzing.

Yet there he was last week, John Sunderland, the chief executive of Cadbury Schweppes, telling an annual results meeting that texting had done much to stem the decline in chocolate sales at Cadbury. "It gave sales a big lift at a time when the UK confectionery market has been pretty flat," he said.

Praise indeed. A defining moment in the history of digital marketing? We'll see. But at the very least this is an intriguing tale, especially as it has more than one digital strand to it.

In fact, this has become a text book example of that old business school mantra about turning a threat into an opportunity, because one of the biggest threats to confectionery sales in recent years has been the fact that children are being lured into an even more pernicious addiction.

It seems that a greater proportion of "pocket money" is being spent on top-up mobile phone cards, so children can text each other furiously at all times of the day. The fiendishly clever thing about Cadbury's SMS campaign is that it turns all this texting activity to its own benefit.

The campaign, which Was developed by Cadbury's sales promotion agency, Triangle, was executed by the market-leading text marketing specialist, Flytxt. It devised a simple strategy in which texting was bolted on as the response mechanism to a classic wrapper promotion.