My perspective is as a digital ad producer. In most scenarios, I’m contracted by ad agencies to take their ideas and bring them to life. They take care of strategy, messaging and design. I bring motion graphics expertise. I often refine their designs since banner ads don’t get as much love as they deserve, but I don’t typically design from scratch. Sometimes they want A/B versions to test, sometimes not.
They give me PSDs of the layout (typically showing 3 frames of the ad progression) and we hold a kick-off meeting to discuss their vision. I deliver zipped HTML5 packages to them. Their media people are the ones who upload to the ad serving platform. The actual link and tracking tags get added at that point.
I’ve never been asked to create ads that are animated gifs because the designers at agencies usually know how to do that. I come from a web development background, but none of that SEO/SEM experience plays into what I do now. Nor does PPC or content marketing.