• by Aaron Baar , April 27, 2009

Fantasy and rotisserie sports leagues are a place for sports fans (who also generally happen to be consumers) to engage and interact with their favorite pastimes. As a first-year sponsor of the PGA Tour, Kodak is looking to use a fantasy golf league to deepen its partnership and bring consumers in closer to the action.

The company earlier this year started The Kodak Challenge, in which it sponsors one hole on 30 different tournaments. At the end of the tour, the golfer with the lowest score on 18 of the holes will win $1 million. Nice -- but really, the biggest winner there is a professional golfer. Enter the world of fantasy sports.

"We see the fantasy game as an extension of our sponsorship of the corporate tour," Steven Powell, director of Kodak Challenge Program Development, tells Marketing Daily. "We're giving [fans] another way to play out their affection for the spot in a natural way."

The company's latest promotion encourages golf fans to create a fantasy foursome of their own for each of the remaining 17 Kodak Challenge holes. The fantasy golfer whose foursome scores the lowest each week can win a Kodak digital camera, printer or digital picture frame. Participants are also entered into a drawing for a grand prize Disney golf vacation, for every foursome they submit, regardless of whether they win or lose, Powell says. (Someone submitting a foursome each week would accumulate 17 entries for the drawing.)

Pre-registration for the game -- officially called the Kodak Challenge Fantasy Pick 'Em -- begins later this week, with the first eligible hole being the par-3, 171-yard 13th hole at the Crowne Plaza Invitational on May 28.

Still known mostly for its film and disposable camera products, Kodak has changed with the times, Powell says. The new PGA sponsorship this year was a way for the company to communicate these changes to the public, Powell says.

"We're almost 100% digital," he says. "We felt we needed a new platform to let people know we're a new company."

In late March, Kodak launched a global marketing campaign encouraging consumers to avoid overpaying for printer ink by switching to the company's all-in-one inkjet printers. The "Print and Prosper" campaign allows consumers to use a Web site to figure out how much they may have over paid for ink and how much they would save using Kodak. According to the company, Kodak's printers and ink would save a U.S. consumer an average of $110 a year.