Moderating a Panel

I spent the past week in the US, and among other things I attended the 7th annual AlwaysOn Stanford Summit. I have been going to the Stanford Summit  almost every year since 2004, and for years I thought it was one of the best tech conferences out there. Unfortunately, this year was quite a disappointment. To be fair, I missed a few of the sessions, but the ones I saw were quite boring.

Here’s an example. I made quite an effort to attend the panel on advertising, titled “Is the Internet optimizing Madison Avenue out of business -- or enabling a revolution?” I was hoping to see an interesting debate between 1-2 people from the agency world, and 1-2 people from the tech world. I was hoping to get a real feeling of what is the most important and critical trends in the advertising world.

This is not what happened. The panel turned out to be a long (and quite boring) interview with 3 executives from ad startup companies, mostly promoting their own technologies. The only person that was interesting, providing a fresh point of view was John Raj, Chief Digital Officer from OMD.

As I was leaving the conference, I decided to skip Stanford next year. But in addition, I decided to share my thoughts on how to successfully moderate a panel. So, here they are:

1. Don’t interview, moderate: In the advertising panel, the moderator basically each panel member a different set of questions, that were very specific to that member. The result was a series of 4 discrete interviews, with almost 0 overlap. Instead, a moderator should bring up a common topic, and get the different perspectives from the panel member on exactly the same issue.
2. Don’t ask questions, promote an argument. The most interesting part in a panel is when panel members enter an argument (punches are even better). The worst panels are the ones where everyone is in “vilonet agreement”.
3. Don’t be nice, be controversial. Try and take the panel members out of their comfort zone. The best question in the advertising panel yesterday was targeted at Frank Addante, CEO of Rubicon Project. “In the last ad:tech conference, you said that Rubicon will be bigger than Google. what did you mean?”

I will let you know when my next panel moderation gig is happening, so you can check if I actually stand by these guidelines.