The power of online strategies consist in pushing a great convergence of the different channels. The opinion that emarketing is the only way to measure the targeted audience is no longer valid as the future will exist of the cross-media interactions, where emarketing will be still maybe the only way to measure, but what it will measure is in fact the impact of other channels. So, I'm reluctant just to position emarketing as a channel as a whole next to the traditional channels. But this is no news, i admit.

There are indeed dangers to e-marketing like mentioned. Marketeers might get sucked into metrics like views, clicks and conversions while awareness, (spontaneous or aided) recall and likelihood to buy are the more classical and proved-to-be declaring parameters of an effective campaign. You have a point when you say that e-marketing campaigns can be measured precisely, but what are the standards? We can measure, but we can't benchmark optimally yet.

I think that Lotte says it correctly. The difference between e-marketing and real world marketing, is its direct relation between marketeer and receiver. That also means you will need to treat the receiver differently, more like someone you are talking to. Probably why viral marketing is working great on internet, where in the real world it would die at the fringes of a group and would need much more effort to succeed.
But e-marketing makes easy to see how many people are reading your message. You can instantly see how effective your campaign is.
That also means there is a danger. Marketeers could start marketing, just because of the marketing. Instead of looking at the cold hard facts of more sales, or more requests for information or more people knowing your brand, marketeers might start saying, that because more people clicked their banner, or more people opened their mail, the brand-name will be stronger.
So in the end there is no difference between marketing on or off line, you still need to justify your marketing activities by more sales, more contacts or a better known brand.

I agree with Michel, e-marketing makes it possible to target a very specific audience.

Another difference to me is that e-marketing allows much more interaction opportunities. The target group, your public, the people you want to reach, can participate and be active themselves.

Good question! It's probably closer to each other than one might think.

In my opinion however, classical marketing communication (TV, radio, DM, ...) has a very wide reach (or potential), while e-marketing offers more targeting opportunities. The reach decreases, but you hit your target more in-depth.

In what ways do you think e-marketing is vastly different classical marketing?