Ask Craig Leipold

Majority owner of the Minnesota Wild

Your questions, his answers.

Last spring, Leipold took over a National Hockey League franchise with a winning record and a frequently sold-out arena. What are the challenges in this situation? “To keep it just as good as it is,” Leipold says. “We need to create some more revenue streams” because player salaries are rising faster than I can raise ticket prices, he adds.

So Leipold is pushing for a new Wild practice facility, proposed as part of the Cleveland Circle development on land across West Seventh Street from the Xcel Energy Center. “This facility could have a restaurant in it, it could be used for small concerts, it could be open to the public,” he says. About half of NHL teams have dedicated practice facilities, Leipold says, and it’s a way to create “new sponsorship opportunities. That’s probably the biggest thing we’re looking at right now.”

What other changes does Leipold have in mind? In a mid-September interview, he answered TCB readers’ questions about that.

—Denise Logeland

We’re excited to have you as the new owner-leader of the Wild. What type of enhancements will you be implementing at the X to make the hockey experience even better for the fans? —Mark Jenson

CL Within the confines of the arena, we’re looking at—within the next couple years—a new scoreboard. The scoreboard we have right now is eight years old. There’s a new-generation technology, and that’s something that we think would enhance the fan experience tremendously. There are probably eight NHL teams that have this now. It’s a complete high-def screen up on the scoreboards, so you walk in and it’s like the difference between black-and-white TV and a high-def TV. The replay, the things that you can do to entertain the fans during time-outs and intermissions are really pretty unique. But that’s not something we’re doing right now. It’s a major expenditure, and it takes months just to put these things in.

Also, we’re constantly refreshing things in the concourses with Wildside catering—making new foods. But quite honestly, we had two very unique things happen this summer. Number one, I came on board and so I’m learning the business. The second thing is the Republican National Convention, and it has been all-encompassing for our people. I would say probably our fans will see more things change for next season than they will this season. But some changes have been made, and I think our fans will enjoy them.

What is your management team working on to insure a great culture for the Minnesota Wild hockey organization? And how important to your efforts to bring a Stanley Cup to Minnesota are the right culture and environment? —Michael Beach

CL Whenever I talk about my role publicly, I say my role is being the chief cultural officer of this business. I’m trying to develop a winning culture, not just on the ice, but hiring winners who expect to win no matter what they do, whether it’s having the best food, whether it’s having the best experience in section 101—whatever it is.

To get the best employees available on the market, we need to keep developing the kind of culture where people want to come to work. That transcends to our players. We need to develop a culture in the lockerroom and with our players’ families and spouses so that they understand this is a great market to live in, to work in, to play hockey in. The fact that we had 321 consecutive sellouts speaks volumes for the fan experience and for the kind of market we play in.

And I think we have to be active in the community—the hospitals, the schools, the charities for at-risk youth, for children. We want to be part of that so that when people think of the Wild, it’s not just as a business, but it’s also as we give in the community.

What’s your favorite rivalry or team to watch the Wild play against? —Jay Nelson

CL Whenever you have a player that moves to another team, their biggest rivalry becomes the team that they came from. I came from the Nashville Predators, and I would be lying to you if I were to say it was Vancouver or Calgary (which, by the way, are great competitors of ours.) It could be anyone in our division. Certainly Colorado has taken that on for me since we lost to Colorado in the playoffs. But when it comes to teams that I really want to beat, the Nashville Predators would be that team.

Craig Kringle: While he wants the Wild to be an important presence in the community, Leipold knows that as a Wisconsin resident, he faces a challenge making his own presence felt in St. Paul. Part of his solution is Danish pastry: “When I come in from Racine every week, I bring a stack of kringles” to pass around the office and to other St. Paul contacts. “I spread them out all over the place and that means ‘Craig’s in town.’”

Ask Ze Frank

2001: One day, Ze Frank is employed as an art director at an interactive agency and creates a party invitation to e-mail to his friends; the next day, his “How to Dance Properly” invite video goes viral (watch it at zefrank.com) and Frank is an Internet phenom who gains a huge following for his online performance art–comedy show The Show.

The Show has since ended and these days, Frank is a new-media and marketing consultant who’s worked with MSN, Absolut, and others. He’s also a scheduled keynoter at the October 1 Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association summit (mimasummit.org) sponsored by Twin Cities Business.

What could companies learn from your experience with the viral invite?

That whole period of time didn’t yield concrete lessons as much as it opened up a lot of questions. I guess the big question was what opportunities and possibilities does this new kind of media distribution space afford that weren’t there before? You know, it’s not just a question of scale and ease. I mean, obviously it’s a lot easier and cheaper to reach more people. But I think the question is about whether there’s something new here, and for me the thing that became clear very early on was that there was this sort of emotional proximity between myself and this audience, and that it didn’t really serve me very well to think in terms of traditional audience categories and demographics and things like that when all this rich information was coming back to me, and the opportunity to actually converse with people.

You believe it’s still early in the Internet experiment, but are there any conclusions you believe we already can draw about doing business there?

There is a real expectation that I would call a ‘conversational expectation’: People are used to being able to give feedback, they’re used to expecting to get some sort of a response. There’s an enormous amount of—what’s the wonderful word that was used for it? It’s basically a surplus energy that allows things like Wikipedia to be created. Really, what you’re talking about is a lot of people who are excited to actually take part in something, participate in the formulation of a brand idea or in the creation of a space and share information.

You know, not all of it is explicitly about the content. The idea of user-generated content focuses on the content that’s being made, and what I think is actually more interesting is just the act of participating and the bond that comes out of being involved.

It sounds like that’s what you think businesses are missing—just at a very raw level, the desire for the interaction, the desire for the exchange.

Yeah, exactly, and it’s a real challenge, because it requires coming up with metaphors and coming up with ways of thinking of ROI that we just haven’t thought of yet, and that are harder to measure. But also, it requires a different strategy when thinking about things like advertising and marketing and customer care. Traditionally, a fair amount of resources have gone into planning, into messaging the message, into creating very, very robust platforms or experiences and then rolling them out. And now you have a different paradigm that’s coming around, which is that there’s so much that happens as soon as you release anything—you get all this feedback that’s coming back, you get unexpected usage patterns, you get requests for new things, you get crises.

So really, there’s this shift to the management of things that’s happening right now, and there’s certainly a temptation to offload that work back to the advertising company, back to the marketing company. But, you know, the brands themselves have a lot to gain from that experience, that real-time conversation.

Ask Ze Frank

Ask Ze Frank, online entertainer and consultant...

~ what trends are developing at the intersection of technology, creativity, and marketing

~ how to turn a relationship with an online audience into a collaboration

~ why humor and play are vital to engaging people

~ how to monetize online offerings

~ or whatever your burning questions are.

Click here to submit your questions by August 19 for a Q&A with Frank that will appear online and in the October issue of TCB. Include your full name, daytime phone number, and name of the company or city you're writing from.

Frank's "How to Dance Properly" video (a party invitation he sent to 17 friends back in 2001) quickly turned into a Web phenomenon and led to his daily interactive program The Show, which had an avid following of 25,000 to 30,000 viewers until he ended it last year and signed a deal with the Dreamworks studio. As a new media and marketing consultant, he's worked with MSN, Absolut Vodka, and National Geographic. He'll be a keynote speaker at the October 1 Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association Summit, sponsored by Twin Cities Business.