24
MICHAEL MAHAN, 39
President, Dick Clark Productions
Last Year’s Rank: 25
ALLEN SHAPIRO, 68
CEO, Dick Clark Productions
Last Year’s Rank: 25
Shapiro and Mahan pack their awards shows with big moments, and the results show. The Academy of Country Music Awards (staged in front of 70,000 at AT&T Stadium in Dallas) was up 10 percent in viewership to 16 million, and the Billboard Music Awards — which premiered Taylor Swift‘s “Bad Blood” video and had the Kanye West performance that MTV’s Video Music Awards didn’t get — were at a 14-year high with 12 million viewers. “We live in an era in which you have very little time to succeed. We have to create shows that bring a younger demo to a medium that they’re spending less and less time at,” says Shapiro. (Billboard and DCP are both owned by Prometheus Global Media.)
