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First day: CWS old meets new

The Road to Omaha leads to a different address now. A lot of people were sorry to see it move, but old friends and new found their way just fine Saturday to the housewarming party that was the College World Series' first day in its new home, downtown Omaha's TD Ameritrade Park.

There, they encountered many of the old familiar things that make people love this event, numerous new reasons to love it and a few glitches that chapped their hides like a slide burn.

“History Happens Here,” says the new NCAA slogan for this event. Here's some of that history that happened on Day One at the house that Omaha built for the College World Series.

The day began inauspiciously. By 8:30 a.m., a rain shower that had been forecast to last one hour had been going for 2½ hours. Intrepid tailgaters Pete Isham, Jerod Johnson and Frank Ucman were dampened but undaunted.

Having arrived around 6:30 a.m., they were among the first dozen tailgaters to pull into Lot D north of the Qwest Center Omaha. They found a great spot to put up their shade tent: a strip of grass between trees.

Soon, they were cooking with gas, literally — eggs and sausage on the tailgate grill. Soon there would be warm bellies, and warm feelings for the new locale for these Bellevue boys (now in their early 30s) who cut their CWS teeth at Rosenblatt Stadium. They've been tailgating and attending the CWS for 11 years.

“I remember going to games with my dad when I was a little kid, and he would take a cooler of beer into the wooden bleachers and we'd run around under the bleachers,” Johnson said.

He misses those old days, and the old residential neighborhood. But the guys are embracing the new.

For one thing — and a lot of tailgaters in Lot D said this — the tailgating is better, and the MECA security people are downright hospitable, they said. Plus, there's no denying the beauty of the new diamond.

“We were all anti-moving-it-from-Rosenblatt in the first place,” Isham said. “But now you can see that it's all for the better. Gotta move forward. … But let's hope the levees don't break.”

By 10:35 a.m., the sun was finally showing its face on TD Ameritrade's day to shine. Phyllis and Les Lawless were beaming as they cut through the Omaha Baseball Village, a party and vendor area next to the Old Mattress Factory. The air smelled of pecans roasting at the Nut Hutte Tent and Italian sausage from Lo Sole Mio's booth.

TD Ameritrade Holds Creative Pitch on $300 Million Account ...

TD Ameritrade has launched an agency review, and is out talking to shops about creative duties on its nearly $300 million account, industry executives say. The longtime incumbent shop for creative work is WPP's Ogilvy.

"We work with a number of agencies, and reviewing our agency partners is part of our normal operating practices," a spokeswoman for the company told Ad Age. "We are doing a review of Ogilvy right now, but again that's just part of our normal procedure."

According to representatives for Ogilvy, the agency plans to defend the business.

TD Ameritrade Holding Co. spent $334 million on measured media, with the bulk -- $287 million -- devoted to marketing the company's brokerage business, according to Kantar Media data. Much of that work is direct and online marketing initiatives.

Ogilvy was responsible for the popular ad campaign that broke a decade ago called "Let's Light This Candle" for Ameritrade in which a young office geek is asked by his older boss to help him learn how to trade online.

In 2006, Ameritrade acquired TD Waterhouse from the TD Financial Group, creating the TD Ameritrade brand. In fiscal year 2010 it had net revenue of $2.6 billion and it places an average of 379,000 trades a day, according to the company.

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