Pam Wickham, Vice President, Corporate Affairs and Communications, Raytheon Company
Over the past decade, Pam Wickham has transformed communications at Raytheon, a $23 billion defense and technology company. In 2005, she inherited a standard 20th-century organization and rebuilt it from the ground up to reflect the communications realities of the new century.
More recently, sparked by calls to action from Defense Secretary Ashton Carter to push the boundaries of innovation in defense technology, Raytheon launched its “Innovation for a Safer World” campaign. The goal was educating the public, key stakeholders and customers about cutting-edge technologies Raytheon has been developing to improve national security.
With Wickham serving as chief communications officer overseeing the campaign’s overall strategy, it launched in January 2015 on Raytheon.com and has seen over 10,000 page views to the landing page since inception. The paid native advertising targeted to The Hill achieved an additional 10,000 views since launch in June 2015, and the team expanded its campaign to the Washington Post in August.
The campaign focused on Raytheon’s brand-journalism efforts, where the company transformed its website into an editorial powerhouse that showcased feature stories about its technologies, along with compelling images and videos. These stories were then distributed to target media, along with an aggressive advertising campaign. To establish its platform, Raytheon analyzed its key competitors about what they were doing to address Secretary Carter’s calls to action, using social-media listening and analytics tools. After conducting research, Raytheon confirmed it needed to highlight its technologies, even in early development stages.