Ahmedabad: In 2020, Ashish Durgapal, a Lucknow native, founded “Pedaling Lucknow,” a community to promote cycling as a lifestyle. Over six years, the group grew to more than 300 cyclists, built through “designing posters, creating content, managing events, convincing brands to collaborate,” as Durgapal describes it.“I was learning marketing long before I ever studied it,” says Durgapal, one of 22 students in the first batch of the Content and Creator Economy (CCE) course at MICA. A computer science graduate, he adds, “The course will help me understand the contours of the digital creators’ world and content marketing, which is today’s buzzword.”Billed as the first course of its kind on content creators and social media influencers, CCE was launched in response to market demand, says Prof Falguni Vasavada-Oza, who chairs the programme.“There has been a boom in the content creation economy – it is not only a buzzword due to scores of high-profile podcasts or web-only shows headlined by some of the biggest names today, but also a serious business, with endorsements going for lakhs. Anybody with a camera, an internet connection and an interesting story can take on the web today, and that prompted us to design a course around four roles,” she says. “It includes social media marketing, content creation, influencer marketing, and talent management.”The orange economy – creative and cultural industries – gained wider attention after this year’s Union Budget named it a core pillar of economic growth, projecting a need for two million professionals by 2030. Special allocations were also made to support its growth.The first cohort ranges from content creators with hundreds of followers to event management experts and branding professionals, Vasavada-Oza says. “For the latter, it is an area of interest as the rules of the game have changed.”Arya Shukla joined to build on her experience growing an Instagram community of 6,000 through original writing, digital art and storytelling. “I want to work on how AI is reshaping marketing while ensuring that human insight and storytelling remain at the heart of every brand,” she says.Vani Kapur, a Kathak dancer, has worked on campaigns, television shows and advertisement productions. “In a world where content is everywhere, I hope to create work that is meaningful, original, and rooted in powerful storytelling,” she says.
