British advertising and PR guru Sir Martin Sorrell told participants to this year’s Media Summit in Vienna that the single most debilitating factor for companies – including public service organisations – is "their lack of willingness to work together".

The chairman of British multinational advertising and public relations group WPP and keynote speaker at the future-focused Eurovision and Euroradio event was addressing more than 150 delegates from 26 different countries representing 66 different media organisations.

Sir Martin said:  “The better the people, the more difficult it is to get them to work together. The challenge is to get iconic, egotistical people to collaborate. The deeper you go down, the more willing people are to work together. The new entrants love learning about another aspect of their work and their life.”

Professor Jeff Jarvis, director of the Tow-Knight Centre for Enterpreneurial Journalism, told participants they ought to "consider themselves to be in the business of service, over content".  

“It’s a mistake to think that you’re in the content business. You’re in the service business, “ he said. “Service accomplishes certain things – it makes life a better place. It enables us to know people as individuals and as part of the community. Today, we have communities that aren’t just local, but worldwide.”

Mr Jarvis added that media agencies need to go beyond the idea of ‘mass media’ leading to a ‘shared experience'.

“The notion of ‘mass’ is wrong,” he said. “There are no masses, only ways of seeing people as masses.”

Mr Jarvis used Google as a real life example of an organisation that understands the power of getting to know individual on an intimate basis.

“Google knows where (someone) lives and where they work,” he said. “Gigantic, huge scary Google knows me as a person. Media outlets don’t. My newspaper and local television don’t know where I live or where I work. Public media outlets can exist with many, much smaller avenues – YouTube channels and bloggers. Even large media companies won’t be able to do everything. They will  have to specialise.”

Designed for media visionaries, strategic thinkers and leaders, the 2014 Media Summit focuses on trends that the media industry must look at today to steer their future strategies over the next ten years.