Online ad spending and M&A forecasts are a dime-a-dozen – but that hasn’t stopped investment research firms like Soleil-Media Metrics from continuing to make them. Laura Martin, the firm’s managing director, told Variety Tech/Ent Summit attendees that she’s seeing signs – particularly in the advertising industry – that the economic recovery being bantered about is genuine.

“With the exception of local spend lagging national, everything we see and hear coming out of companies like Disney (NYSE: DIS), Fox and Time Warner leads us to believe that this isn’t just a headfake in terms of [an ad] rebound,” she said. She suggested that the next few rounds of earnings reports would show “robust performance” from the big media companies – partly because of the return of ad spend—but also because they’d already “cut 10 to 20 percent of their costs,” and aren’t able to spend money fast enough to undo the gain.

Martin (pictured center) also said there would be so much consolidation in the media landscape, that a year from now, the market will look “nothing like it does today.” At issue are the credit markets—which are still locked up compared to two years ago. “Companies can’t sell their assets the way they could before,” Martin said. “That’s why if you’re Marvel, you sold cheap to Disney. Or you sell cheap to News Corp. or Comcast.”