Built On Connections: How Supermetrics and Evan Kaeding turn relationships into results
Jomar review’s Evan Kaeding’s Talk at Web Analytics Wednesday Sept 2025
Featured talk at
24 September 2025
At Web Analytics Wednesday Copenhagen, Supermetrics’ Evan Kaeding offered more than a sponsor talk. He delivered a blueprint for how careers and companies scale the same way: by building the right connections, between people and between data.
The dual meaning behind “connections”
The evening’s thesis landed simply: connections create compounding value. In the room, that meant peers, future collaborators and potential mentors. In the stack, it meant reliable pipes that move marketing data from point A to point B, then onward to analysis and activation.
That double helix, people and pipelines, has shaped Kaeding’s career and Supermetrics’ brand story in parallel. It’s also the Brand Leadership Community’s (BLC) operating system: relationships first, multiplied by tools that make those relationships productive.
“Careers are long. Your trajectory is shaped by what you do, and who you know.”
A career that mirrors a brand
Kaeding’s path traces the Supermetrics arc. He started as a user, first in startup roles that blended sales, marketing, support and analytics; later at Wieden+Kennedy with enterprise brands such as Nike and P&G. In each context, he kept choosing the same tool to solve the same class of problem: unifying fragmented data to answer commercial questions faster.
That repetition mattered. Using Supermetrics in three very different environments gave him a product operator’s intuition, what works at startup often can scale to the enterprise if the fundamentals are sound.
Joining Supermetrics: from tools to outcomes
In 2020, he crossed the aisle to join Supermetrics, initially in Portland Oregon, then relocating to Helsinki Finland where Supermetrics is headquartered. This eventually helped Evan steer the company’s move from data collection to analysis and activation.
At Supermetrics Kaeding didn’t just change employers, he changed vantage point. He moved from working with the tools to helping customers get the most out of them, effectively going “sales side.” The shift reframed his craft: from shipping dashboards to shaping outcomes, translating technical capability into commercial value, and acting as a trusted advisor to teams wrestling with fragmented data and rising expectations.
Today he manages a global team, which means less time hands-on with individual problems, yet he maintains working with the toolset keeping his skills sharp. It’s a leadership posture that resonates with practitioners, someone who still speaks the language of the analyst while steering strategy and customer impact.
The brand story is similar. What began as a simple connector (famously born from a plugin contest and a Google T-shirt) became a global data backbone, expanding from Google Sheets to Looker Studio and into modern data platforms (Snowflake, BigQuery, S3/Azure). Today, the thesis is bigger: ‘Connect → Manage → Analyze → Activate’, with customers building on Supermetrics APIs and, increasingly, activating data across paid and owned channels.
From plumbing to performance
Two customer vignettes crystallised the evolution. Motorola used the full methodology to stand up a marketing intelligence stack that supports decision-making, not just dashboards. Levi’s represents the next step: data activation via customer profiles and media targeting, following Supermetrics’ acquisition of Relay42, a Campaign CDP, proof that the “pipes” now power outcomes.
For BLC and Web Analytics Wednesday (WAW-CPH), the resonance is obvious. The community isn’t just listening to talks; it’s forming working groups and micro-communities around tools they actually use. Supermetrics fits that culture: a pragmatic platform that senior practitioners can adopt without ripping up their stack, while still giving them a path to activation and AI-era building blocks.
Why this matters to leaders
Senior brand and analytics leaders don’t need another manifesto. They need leverage. Kaeding’s talk offered a practical prompt wrapped in inspiration:
- Choose your problems. Be explicit about whether you want to spend your time on collection, analysis, product instrumentation, experience or activation.
- Choose your people. Curate the network, vendors, peers, agencies, internal champions, you want to solve those problems with.
In BLC’s world, those choices happen in the room. Every event yields future speakers, operators and volunteers; the “right people + right connections” formula turns chance meetings into measurable progress.
“Built on connections” isn’t a slogan. It’s an operating model, for careers, communities and data.
The takeaways from Evan’s talk
Don’t boil the ocean. Make two moves:
- People: Leave each event with one deliberate follow-up, someone whose experience complements the problem you’re trying to solve. Book the 20-minute call.
- Pipes: Identify one recurring data question that still takes hours. Automate the flow end-to-end (connector → model → shareable view). Ship a small win that compounds.
Supermetrics’ rise from a plugin to a platform, and Kaeding’s shift from user to leader, underline the same truth: when the connections are strong, human and technical, the work compounds. At the time of publishing this article, Supermetrics can truly be proud of having 15,000 customers globally, 15% digital ad spend and over 400 employees globally. That’s the kind of story BLC exists to highlight, global brands and practitioners building durable value, one connection at a time.
Special Thanks!
To the Supermetrics team who added their special energy to the community at their first Web Analytics Wednesday Copenhagen.
Left to right: Evan Kaeding, Mariia Zubova, Lucas Jakobsen, Emil Bergulund, Joonas Antikainen and Sahra Kahim(Front).
Evan Kaeding
Evan Kaeding is an experienced analytics and solutions engineering leader working at the intersection of marketing, data infrastructure, and business strategy. As Global Director of Solutions Engineering at Supermetrics, he leads a global team helping organisations design scalable data solutions and unlock the value of their marketing data.
Supermetrics is a marketing data platform that connects and pipes data from hundreds of sources into the spreadsheets, BI tools, and data warehouses teams use, so they can report, analyse, and activate insights at scale.
