It's funny. It's quirky. It's sleepy, perhaps squeaky. Cute -- as in the world of baby animals and charming cartoons -- has come out with a vengeance recently, adding a soft, syrupy stripe to everything from software to running shoes to carbon emissions. Aided by the immense popularity of websites that serve up all things cute, like icanhascheezburger.com (ICHC) and cutethingsfallingasleep.org, online ad campaigns with cuddly appeal are gaining eyeballs.

Antidote to a downturn
Cute is almost universally appealing -- after all, it tends to produce feelings of good cheer and comfort. But cute is enjoying a particularly high level of popularity right now. Sites that feature animals in cute poses, like cuteoverload.com, are getting millions of hits a month and have garnered mass media attention.

In a no-holds-barred tribute to these sites, a video ad produced for the Samsung Ultra Touch phone  features various baby animals mimicking human activities on sets built to scale. It even includes an "evil hedgehog" scene that shows, in the background, cutesy lingo created on ICHC.

Meanwhile, the ad's strong cute factor earned it a free spot on ICHC's competitor site cuteoverload.com.

Nick Malis, founder of cutethingsfallingasleep.org and the spin-off cutethingslaughing.com, said his original site suddenly took off in December, about the time the economic crisis was deepening. Since then, it has become the 15th most-searched term on Google and currently attracts a quarter million hits a day.

"The world is kind of screwed up right now... and people want to see cute, happy stuff when things are scary," said Malis, who started the site in 2006 as a collection of YouTube videos he found showing animals and babies falling asleep. Malis has landed on so many television shows recently -- including "The Today Show" and CNN -- that he's now a self-proclaimed expert on "cute."

Cute has even become a world of its own, evidenced by the slightly snarky, cliquey icanhascheezburger.com. Something of a cult site for cat lovers, ICHC has its own grammatically hybridized language and inside jokes. The site claims to have millions of users per month. "Our fans (aka 'Chzfrenz') savor their escape to ICHC everyday," the site notes.