It is hard, sitting by the sidelines, to see much good coming out of Wall Street's implosion in terms of the ad economy, which is already suffering from the economic downturn and rampant anxiety among consumers.

After all, it's the financial services ad category that's at stake, the largest, when total ad spending even before Wall Street's meltdown was projected to grow just 2.0 percent this year, after falling 0.7 percent last year.

Further, there's lots of worry that other institutions may fail, following AIG, and that leaves media forecasters reluctant to predict who it will affect for ad budgets.

"We can’t quantify this yet," says Anne Austin, senior publications executive at ZenithOptimedia. "We have to wait to see it all pans out. As the ripples carry through the real economy you would expect to see some effect."

But against the worry and gloom there's a bright side to the credit crisis for the media economy.

Provided the crisis doesn't deepen--certainly a vital worry--ad spending ought to rebound as the financial services industry responds to the restructuring of the industry and shifting of assets from failing institutions like AIG and Lehman Brothers to healthy institutions.

While smaller banks and insurance companies may still fail, and the credit mess still has a long way to play out in its impact on the entire U.S. economy, the sense, at least for now, is that the worst of the collapses are behind us, that no new AIGs lurk in the shadows.

Going forward, there are solid reasons to expect a rise in ad spending in the financial service sector.

For one, major retail players, the banks and insurance companies, need to put out the message to consumers that they are healthy and conducting business as usual.

For another, competitors of those troubled giants like AIG and Merrill Lynch have every reason to pump up ad spending to steal away customers, playing on fears that sticking with those giants will put them at financial risk.

And of course the new owners of these institutions--Bank of America in the case of Merrill Lynch--will want to up spending to repair what damage they can to those brands. And themselves being healthy, they have the deep pockets to do it.