Red Bull's Crashed Ice event, with St. Paul's Cathedral as a backdrop, drew 140,000 people to downtown Saint Paul. (Photo by Jeremy Jordan)
Red Bull finds Saint Paul, Minn., so dynamic it has brought its Crashed Ice extreme sports event to downtown for four years running. That city is its only tour stop in the U.S. and, this year, it drew 140,000 people in four days.
“It think of Red Bull as an event company that happens to make energy drinks,” said Adam Johnson, VP of marketing and media relations, Visit Saint Paul. He believes St. Paul has come out of the shadows of its twin city, Minneapolis, for several reasons – Xcel Energy Center, one of the crown jewels of National Hockey League venues in the U.S. and an anchor venue for St. Paul; the new Concert Hall at the Ordway Performing Arts Center; and CHS Field, a minor league ballpark which opens in May.
Xcel Energy Center is 15 years old now but still very much state of the art and intentionally so, Johnson said. “They just unveiled a new $6-million scoreboard. Musicians say it’s one of the best venues they’ve ever played in.”
Visit Saint Paul promotes Xcel Energy Center heavily, whether it’s hosting Minnesota Wild hockey or Maroon 5 because “any event night brings a buzz to downtown,” Johnson said.
“In March, we opened a new Concert Hall at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts,” Johnson continued. The $42-million concert hall is “just beautiful and will attract new events.”
May 21 is opening day for the St. Paul Saints minor league baseball club, the debut performance for the 7,200-capacity CHS Field. The ball club is part-owned by actor and comedian Bill Murray, which brings a lot of cachet to the sporting park already.
“They had been playing in our industrial midway area and now have a brand new ballpark in Lower Town, our sexiest up-and-coming neighborhood of St. Paul,” Johnson said. The Saints will play 40 games there, but it’s a community field, set to host high school and college ball and Hamlin College Division III home games.
“And it will be a beautiful venue for smaller, 7,200-8,000-person outdoor concerts,” Johnson said, not to mention corporate meetings, Grillfest in May and other amateur sports. Visit Saint Paul will promote it heavily for sports and from a leisure perspective.
But Xcel Energy Center remains the anchor venue. The arena “is 15 years old now, but people still think of it as a new building,” said Jack Larson, GM there for the Minnesota Wild’s Minnesota Sports & Entertainment. “The ownership group has made a concentrated effort to keep the building new and relative and has committed the resources financially to keep it that way.”
The new video board “lights up the whole building,” Larson said, noting that is the biggest annual capital improvement ever for Xcel Energy Center.
Larson has always faced significant competition from the multiarena Twin Cities, but notes the Wild has a lot of season-ticketholders in the southern and western suburbs of Minneapolis. For hockey in particular, but also for all events, there is no dividing line.
Xcel Energy Center will host the 2016 National Figure Skating Championships and has a very healthy sports market. “In March, we do three high school tournaments. In 2016, we also have the Big Ten Hockey Championship and an NCAA regional. This year, we had girls’ hockey, then boys’ wrestling, then boys hockey, which was four straight days of two sessions per day, with over 130,000 people attending, all on live TV.”
Year round, the arena hosts 125-140 events a year. The major variance is concerts, which can be as many as 35, as few as 20.
GETTING AROUND TOWN
Last year, Saint Paul and Minneapolis opened the Green Line, light rail transit, which connects the Twin Cities. While Johnson calls it a leisurely 47-minute stroll between the two cities, being able to hop on the Green Line and travel between Minneapolis and Saint Paul is a great asset.
“It goes right down that ethnically rich university avenue corridor,” Johnson said. “There are lots of restaurants between the two cities, where you’re not officially in either one. Ridership is through the roof since it opened. We work with Meet Minneapolis to promote it.”
Visit Saint Paul also works with events like Crashed Ice to promote the city, offering fans free Green Line and bus rides for instance. “A lot of folks are coming from Minneapolis on the Green Line when we have events like that and I’m hoping they come back,” Johnson said.
Crashed Ice has grown from 95,000 attendees four years ago to this year’s record crowd. Red Bull builds a quarter-mile, downhill, winding track, which starts at St. Paul Cathedral. “It blows your mind what they do,” Johnson said. The race pits four contestants (combatants really) at a time, Thursday-Saturday. Thursday features the Europeans, with the top 40 qualifying by racing the clock. On Friday, Americans have a go, narrowed down to their top 40. Saturday is the championship so they go down four people at a time and the top two go back up. They all keep going down till they crown a winner, second, third and fourth place in the last run
“It’s really a spectacle to see,” Johnson said, hoping Saint Paul is a destination for Crashed Ice again next year. “Events like that bring new people to the city. It’s an international spectacle of downhill ice sport.”
And it means the bars and restaurants are crowded all weekend and the production team fills up St. Paul hotels in the dead of winter. The wrap party was a street event last year. “They utilize our entire city and space,” Johnson said.
If a company as well known as Red Bull has an affinity for St. Paul, others take a second look, he added. St. Paul does subsidize Red Bull to mitigate some of their costs, but it’s “miniscule compared to what some cities pay to advertise their cities,” he added.
PUTTING THE WORD OUT
Visit Saint Paul has new leadership, Terry Mattson, who joined as president and CEO after a very successful stint in Duluth, Minn.
He brought some great ideas, including publication of a new Visitors Guide. Since 2008, Saint Paul had partnered with Minneapolis on a joint Visitors Guide.
They also launched a #MySaintPaul campaign in March. For 31 days, people posted favorite images of Saint Paul in what became a scrolling poster board on social media, promoting the city. “We’re trying to flex our social media muscles because it’s such an easy way to communicate,” Johnson said.
Visit Saint Paul operates with 17 full-time employees, and they stretch their capabilities to the utmost.
For instance, for the last three years, they have produced the Saint Paul Summer Road Trip campaign, sending a Ford Transit Connect vehicle on the road for three months, hitting hot spots in the “drive market,” which is defined as locations within 311 miles of Saint Paul.
One very productive stop last year was the Minnesota State Fair, which is located in the Saint Paul suburb of Lauderdale. Johnson said Visit Saint Paul took a six-day bite out of the fair, setting up their Road Trip attraction and handing out gifts, brochures and a chance for the big prize. Participants line up for a chance to spin the wheel for a prize, he said. They also have a drawing at the end of the Road Trip for four nights in Saint Paul, a $4,000 package.
The 2014 Saint Paul Summer Road Trip resulted in:
• Onsite visits at various festivals and events
for 33 days throughout the summer.
• Distribution of 25,000 Saint Paul Road Trip
can koozies.
• A 69-percent increase in Visit Saint Paul’s
email list.
• 7,696 entries for the grand prize giveaway
(up 432 percent from last year).
• And requests for more than 837 visitor
guides.
“Instead of waiting for people to get to Saint Paul, we take this visitor information on the road to events similar to what we have here,” Johnson said. “If they like the blues festival in Fargo, they might like ours in St. Paul.” The Minnesota State Fair was the most successful activation of the Summer Road Trip, he said.
Soon, Visit Saint Paul will have yet another feather in its cap. The city’s biggest convention center hotel has been a Crowne Plaza for seven to eight years. It’s now 95 percent renovated into the state’s first Intercontinental Hotel.
That will draw Saint Paul even farther out of the shadows as a destination on its own.
Interviewed for this story: Adam Johnson, (651) 265-4904; Jack Larson, (651)265-4869