The ad business has certain persistent myths: Advertising agencies are fun places to work. Great, creative minds get all the credit they deserve. Madison Avenue is the center of the advertising and marketing world. And most important, size matters.

There's a long list of renegades who have challenged these beliefs - and ended up embodying them. In the mid-'90s, the founders of Razorfish (RAZF) and Agency.com set up shop in fringe New York 'hoods with the idea of creating "anti-ad agencies" - unorthodox, noncorporate environments for interactive marketing and media projects. After less than five years in business, each of these companies is pushing 1,000 employees in offices that dot the globe. They're accountable to shareholders and corporate investors. In other words, they've come to resemble the Madison Avenue firms they've worked so hard to beat.

One firm that has so far resisted the grow-at-all-costs impulse is Digital Pulp, a small New York shop that thinks big. It has positioned itself as a do-it-all marketing concern for dot-com companies. Its founders call it "marketing convergence," which means doing a little bit of everything to help Net companies get up and running - and noticed. The firm designs Web pages, builds e-commerce businesses and creates Web, radio, TV and print ads. It also does billboards, corporate fliers and direct-mail pieces.

Founded in 1996, Digital Pulp has 30 employees and only 10 clients, none of which makes up more than 15 percent of overall business. With $2.7 million in revenue last year, according to Advertising Age, Digital Pulp isn't scaring Madison Avenue quite yet. Its biggest client is DoubleClick (DCLK), for which it did its best-known work: a locally famous billboard that reads, "DoubleClick welcomes you to Silicon Alley."

But Digital Pulp is growing. Revenues in 1999 are projected at twice last year's total, and the company has added a dozen new employees. The story of Digital Pulp is more than just growth, however. It involves a common business quandary: Can a little fish survive in a big pond?

Digital Pulp is housed in an inconspicuous Manhattan neighborhood a few blocks east of the Flatiron District, a venture-capitalist enclave, and a few blocks north of Silicon Alley. The firm is closely held, with no outside investors and no immediate ambitions to go public. For the moment, the biggest employee perks it offers its youngish staff are invaluable experience and a rooftop deck with a basketball hoop.

The firm's emphasis on staying small and independent runs counter to the suddenly loud, humming economic engine that is Gotham's interactive marketing industry. Large Alley firms argue that you can't attract big clients unless you commit to a big support team. The little guy, they say, will be left to pick up discarded scraps of business.

"We don't see the little guy much because the engagements we're going after are so much larger than any 30-person shop could handle," says Jeff Dachis, CEO of Razorfish. "Scale really becomes an issue for both winning new jobs and recruiting top talent."

Dachis' view of the competitive landscape for companies like Digital Pulp is bleak: "There will be room for highly specialized, extremely talented niche players and big players. That's it."

Lee Nadler, Digital Pulp's 32-year-old president and CEO, isn't listening to the naysayers. He concedes that it will be a challenge to attract and retain quality employees. But so far, his firm is having no problem attracting clients.

"In the traditional world, agencies were chasing clients," says Nadler, who got his start a decade ago working on the Snapple and Citibank accounts at Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners. "Not to be cocky, but in the dot-com world