New ad agency on scene: Cote & D’Ambrosio

Rhode Island’s small communications relations community got a little bigger this month with the arrival of Cote & D’Ambrosio, a full-service advertising and public relations company. If the names sound familiar, they are.

Eric Cote, Gov. Lincoln Almond’s press secretary from June 1996 until last May, is vacating his current post as spokesman for the potential development of the former Navy base at Quonset/Davisville Friday. Cote begins teaming full time then with Ken D’Ambrosio, whom he described as a “former Madison Avenue whiz in the ad world.”

D’Ambrosio, of North Kingstown, worked 22 years in New York City as a creative director, film producer, commercial photographer and author, gathering three Clio and more than 25 Andy awards along the way. The Army and AT&T, for which D’Ambrosio helped develop the long-running campaigns “be all that you can be” and “reach out and touch someone,” are among his portfolio of national clients.

For the last six years, D’Ambrosio, 56, has been in semi-retirement, taking on the occasional freelance job and teaching visual communications to graduate and undergraduate students at the Rhode Island School of Design.

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Cote and D’Ambrosio met while on the job for the state Economic Development Corporation. Cote, who remained on Almond’s payroll as an “executive assistant,” has served as the point man on the Quonset/Davisville stakeholders process, expected to come to an end early this month. He also developed and implemented a communications plan for the existing commerce park there. D’Ambrosio worked freelance on several in-house advertising projects for the EDC. (Providence’s Duffy & Shanley is the EDC’s agency of record.)

“It’s a great marriage,” D’Ambrosio said of his new partner, adding “we’re a new name but a couple of old guys.”

Cote, 34, will head the public relations arm of the firm, putting years of political press release writing to use for its clients. Cote joined the Almond administration in January 1996 as the first director of the governor’s Washington, D.C., office. Before that, he worked as press secretary for a couple of Republican members of Congress and also former Mayor Michael A. Traficante of Cranston. From 1987 to 1988, Cote headed up Sen. Bob Dole’s failed candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in Rhode Island.

Cote isn’t a complete stranger to the advertising industry. Upon graduating from the University of Rhode Island in 1986, he worked briefly for the East Greenwich shop of Ducharme Associates.

So why would Cote leave a plum, $79,643-a-year government job for the private sector?

“I think the timing is ideal right now. The stakeholders process is wrapping up and we’ve really put Quonset/Davisville on solid footing as far as a good communications plan,” he said. “There’s less of a need for an intensive on-the-ground presence.

“Now is an opportune time for me to move into this new venture in the private sector,” he said. Besides, “I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart.”

Almond knew of Cote’s impending departure at the time of his re-election last November. Cote said he does not expect to be replaced at Quonset.

From now on, “the EDC will “take care of whatever Quonset communications needs there are,” Cote said.

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