Prof. Dr. Thorsten Hennig-Thurau serves as Academic Director of the XRLab@MCM. He holds the Chair for Marketing & Media Research at the Marketing Center and oversees the university’s M.B.A. in Marketing program. He is consistently ranked as one of Germany’s leading business scholar; the Stanford study in PLOS lists him among the Top 100 most impactful marketing scholars globally. Professor Hennig-Thurau’s academic work focuses on the consequences of digitalization for businesses and consumers; his excitement for digital disruption goes back as far as the mid-1990s. He ran the Digitalization Think:Lab (a joint initiative with Roland Berger), edited special issues and authored several publications. His work on digital marketing include the seminal articles on electronic word of mouth, empirical evidence for revenue cannibalization caused by digital file sharing and the “Twitter effect” of social media, as well as the development of the “pinball framework” of digital marketing. Professor Hennig-Thurau has been honored with a number of awards, including a Lifetime Award for Published Scholarly Contributions from the UCLA and the JAMS Sheth Foundation Best Paper Award in both 2015 and 2018. He also is the author of a number of books, with his most recent one being “Entertainment Science”, in which he shows how combining intuition with data analytics and practical theory enhances entertainment success in the digital age (with Mark B. Houston, Springer Nature 2019).