MESC Partners With KlugKlug for Creator Discovery and Skilling

The Media & Entertainment Skills Council (MESC) has signed a deal with influencer-marketing platform KlugKlug to identify creators and use their profile data to shape future skilling programmes, Buzzincontent reported.

The agreement puts a creator-discovery tool at the centre of a workforce-development body's planning process. KlugKlug, which specialises in searching and analysing influencer profiles across platforms, will help MESC find creators whose skills, audience patterns and content categories can inform what the council teaches — and to whom.

That is a notable shift for a sector skills council. Instead of building curricula from industry consultation alone, MESC gains access to platform-level creator data as an input. The logic is straightforward: if the council can see what kinds of creators are emerging, where they operate and what capabilities they demonstrate, its skilling programmes can respond to observed demand rather than assumed demand.

For practitioners, the deal matters on two fronts.

First, creator discovery. KlugKlug's core product allows brands and agencies to search a database of creator profiles and filter by audience, platform and performance signals. MESC will now apply that same capability to its own mapping of the creator economy. Creator marketers who work with Indian talent should expect MESC's view of the market — reflected in its certifications, courses and industry outreach — to draw on this kind of data-driven profiling.

Second, programme design. The partnership links the council's training pipeline directly to the creator economy it serves. If MESC identifies gaps — say, clusters of successful creators in specific formats or regions without formal training pathways — it can build skilling programmes around those gaps. Creators and aspiring creators in India may see new, more targeted course offerings emerge as a result.

The deal also signals how the business of creator identification has matured. Discovery platforms like KlugKlug built their businesses serving brands that needed to sort through millions of influencer profiles for campaign selection. An institutional buyer such as a skills council represents a different use case entirely: not campaign selection, but labour-market intelligence. That a government-adjacent skilling body sees value in creator data as an input to policy and training design reflects how central the creator economy has become to India's media and entertainment employment picture.

Details of the agreement's commercial terms, duration and rollout timeline were not disclosed in the report. Nor were specifics on which creator categories, platforms or regions MESC will examine first. Practitioners looking for immediate changes to the council's programme catalogue will need to watch for subsequent announcements about how the partnership translates into actual courses, certifications or creator onboarding initiatives.

What is confirmed at this stage is the deal itself: MESC has signed KlugKlug to support creator discovery and to inform the design of skilling programmes. Anything beyond that — the scale of the data sharing, the pace of programme changes, the number of creators involved — remains unspecified.

For the broader industry, the arrangement is worth watching because it tests a proposition many in the creator economy have argued for years: that creator work is a skills-based profession that belongs in formal workforce development. If MESC's KlugKlug-powered mapping produces credible, data-grounded training pathways, other sector skills councils and educational institutions could follow the same playbook. If it produces little beyond a signed memorandum, it will join a long list of creator-economy partnerships that generated headlines but no structural change.

The next concrete signal to watch is MESC's first programme announcement informed by the partnership — that will show whether creator data actually shapes what the council teaches, and how quickly.