Kodak is in the process of rejuvenating their brand image.With the new "It's Time to Smile" slogan, it appears that Kodak has gone the way of American automakers. Get out your rally hat.

This summer, Kodak began pushing their Facebook page. Today they have over 44,000 friends. Their wall is filled with positive messages like "My best time in my working life was working for Kodak in Australia." or "I love taking pictures to share with family and friends!" All of which comes off a little forced.

They even sponsored two  guys to drive from New Orleans to New York and spread compliments. The goal? To make people smile of course! You know what kind of advertising makes me smile? Free product samples. Wait, what's Kodak selling again?

Soon America will be asking that same question. Starting this weekend, Kodak plans to launch a massive advertising campaign. Take a look at one of the ads below.

Want to get the whole low down on how unhappy and unconnected people are?  Kodak has a 23-page study that will tell you just that. The study supposedly found that most people want to spend time with their families, but spend too much time at work instead. Essentially people want to connect, and Kodak wants to be the one to do that for them.

Hopefully this campaign will accomplish something for the company, though, because it looks like they need it.  Though, when you get down to it, flashy advertising isn't going to rejuvenate Kodak's consumer base, innovative products will. It looks like the products that Kodak is pushing alongside this campaign are a collection of digital photo frames, a mini-video capture device similar to the Flip Cam but bigger, and an HD player that lets you view photos wirelessly though your TV.  Call me crazy, but I don't think they're exactly reinventing the light bulb here.

So can Kodak turn its company around by selling smiles? Maybe they can patent the action and we'd all have to pay them royalties when we grin. Though according to their report, thw world isn't smiling enough to make that profitable.

(logo from Kodak via Facebook)