Uber, but for cats: Uber Kittens hits Australia for one day only

It started with ice cream and moved on to personal rides with Ricky Lee to promote a partnership with Spotify, now Uber is taking the next logical progression in guerilla marketing with a full-blown kitten offensive.

For 4 hours between noon and 4 p.m. today, Uber will be delivering kittens to customers in Sydney, Perth, Geelong and Melbourne, and Brisbane and the Gold Coast, all via requests made through its smartphone app.

For a donation of AU$40, all of which is sent on to Sydney's Cat Protection Society, Uber will drop off a kitten to play with for a quarter of an hour, as well as -- yes we're actually saying this -- what they call an #UBERKittens gift bag.

They're also offering the opportunity to adopt the kitten, though "successful requesters" will be subjected to what Uber has called "screening questions for kitten safety". So you need to make sure you're not allergic to cats and that your boss or landlord is fine with a cat rocking up for 15 minutes.

You need to request the cat via the Uber app, and at the time of writing (before the four hour window had even opened) there were no cats available in Sydney, while Gold Coast requests were being met with the message "All kittens are being snuggled".

Uber's oddball campaigns have not all gone smoothly in the past. Customers complained after a Gelato Messina promotion for free ice cream delivery saw credit cards repeatedly hit with unexplained "authorisation" charges, leading some Uber users to call the promotion a "scam".