Ad Audience Class Action Litigation

Bloomberg reports that the US Supreme Court rejected Meta Platforms’ ( META , Financial ) plea to end a class action lawsuit alleging the company had misrepresented its advertising audience. This result preserves a previous appeals court decision allowing advertisers to seek damages jointly.

The lawsuit alleges that Meta presented a key statistic — the number of people reached — instead of the number of accounts, thereby misleading millions of marketers. Advertisers argue that this approach overestimated possible audience sizes.

Meta claims that its Ads Manager interface shows quite clearly how reach estimates work and that advertisers are too diversified to be lumped into a single complaint. The case, Meta v. DZ Reserve, 24-384, will remain in federal court in San Francisco. The ruling represents a major turning point in the legal process, as advertisers now have the ability to collectively demand reimbursement for any distortion of ad analytics.