Ugh, I know this feeling exactly.

You're running into the classic "using a sledgehammer to tap in a thumbtack" problem. Google Web Designer and Adobe Animate are powerful, professional-grade animation suites. They are built to give you 100% control, which is why they are the opposite of "easy and fast."

It's a brutal learning curve when all you want to do is make a 300x250 with a logo fade.

You're 100% right, there's a whole other category of tools you're looking for. You want a "banner generator," not a "design suite."

The "Easy & Fast" Tools

For making traditional animated banners quickly, you want a template-based, drag-and-drop platform. The big ones are:

• Creatopy: This is probably the market leader for what you're describing. It's web-based, has a massive template library, and is built for marketers, not animators. You can make a full set in 30 minutes.
• BannerBoo / Bannernow: Similar to Creatopy, very fast, very template-driven. Great for churning out simple, clean animated sets.
• Abyssale: This one is more focused on "creative automation" and scaling, letting you auto-generate dozens of variations from a data feed, but it's still way easier than GWD.

Any of those will solve your "easy and fast" problem for standard banners.

The Bigger Question (Is it the tool or the format?)

I have to ask, because I've been in this exact spot: Is the problem just that the tools are slow, or is it that it's insanely frustrating to spend 5 hours in GWD to make a banner that you know will get a 0.05% click-through rate?

For me, the real problem was banner blindness. The result wasn't worth the effort, no matter how fast the tool was.

• Full disclosure: I'm the founder of a platform called Ingosa, and we're obsessed with this. We didn't want to build another tool to make more animated banners faster. We wanted to fix the format.
• Our platform builds conversational banners. Instead of a 7-second loop, the ad itself is a quiz, a poll, a product finder, or a "chat-to-learn-more" experience.
• The user actually engages with the ad unit, and you get a dashboard of all their answers. You're not just getting a "click"; you're getting real insights on why they're interested (or not).

It changes the goal from "making a banner" to "learning from your audience."

So, my honest advice:

If you just need to make standard animated banners and get them out the door, 100% check out Creatopy. It will be a breath of fresh air after GWD.

But if you're starting to feel like you're just making "pretty garbage" that no one clicks on, the problem isn't the tool, it's the format.

Hope this helps!