2nd September 2026 – (Hong Kong) Hong Kong-born advertising legend Kitty Lun has died suddenly at 71 after collapsing while swimming at a Fo Tan housing estate pool on Monday, ending a career that spanned classic agency leadership and a late chapter at Meta.
Lun, was swimming at about 5.00pm on 31st August at the Ville de Cascade pool when she appeared to faint in the water. Other swimmers alerted staff; a lifeguard pulled her out and began resuscitation. Paramedics found her still unconscious and took her to Prince of Wales Hospital, where she was pronounced dead after emergency treatment.
A former colleague posted an online tribute on Tuesday, calling her a towering industry figure and saying few Hong Kong creatives who emerged in the late 1980s reached her level while remaining so active and influential. Lun’s last role was head of Meta’s Creative Shop for Greater China, previously Facebook’s Creative Shop, a platform-side creative unit she joined in 2016 after decades in traditional agencies.
She graduated from the Hong Kong Baptist College communication programme and won Hong Kong Baptist University’s Outstanding Communicator award in public relations and advertising in 2008, followed by an Outstanding Alumni Award in 2018. After a master’s in advertising at Syracuse University in New York, she rose through Leo Burnett, McCann and Euro RSCG as executive creative director and president. As chairman and chief executive of Lowe China, she drove sharp growth in Hong Kong and mainland business, making Lowe China’s most awarded Chinese agency in 2014 and 2015.
Lun was Hong Kong’s most prolific public-service advertising writer in the 1990s, dubbed the mother of public service advertising. Her campaigns included Life has no Take 2 for the Fight Youth Crime drive and Hong Kong wins because of the ICAC. She won multiple Top Ten Outstanding Female Advertising Professional honours, a New York Festivals lifetime achievement award in 2005 and Ad Age’s Woman to Watch in China in 2013. In 2014 her Human Traffic Sign project won a Cannes Lions gold and more than 100 creative awards worldwide, topping the Gunn Report as the most honoured work of 2014-15. She also served on juries and as jury chair at festivals around the world, and published the memoir Advertising Without Lipstick in 2013.