Beeline Kazakhstan's Mountennis campaign by GForce Grey built a sloped court on a mountainside to promote the Almaty Open ATP 250, reaching 1.2 million people.
ARCHIVEBeeline Kazakhstan Builds the World's First Sloped Tennis Court to Serve the Almaty Open
Beeline Kazakhstan's Mountennis campaign is an ambient, experiential, and outdoor activation created by GForce Grey that built the world's first deliberately sloped tennis court on a mountainside near Almaty to generate public awareness for the Almaty Open ATP 250 tournament in Kazakhstan in 2025.
The campaign was published in February 2025, following an activation period that ran across October 5 and 6, 2024, coinciding with the Almaty Open ATP 250 tournament. GForce Grey conceived a two-day amateur tennis tournament played on an unconventional sloped court, designed to mirror the topography of Almaty itself. Yevgeniy Kostylev, Executive Creative Director at GForce Grey, articulated the core design rationale directly, noting that the court, like the city of Almaty itself, has been sloped and placed on a mountainside. That single structural decision transformed what could have been a conventional sponsorship activation into an original piece of environmental theatre rooted in place and identity.
In Kazakhstan, where professional tennis has historically commanded limited mainstream attention, the campaign carried a precise commercial objective. Yuliya Tushina, CEO of GForce Grey, stated publicly that the initiative aimed to draw the attention of the city's residents to this historic event, shift social indifference, get people talking about it and, as the main goal, encourage them to attend the tournament. Beeline Kazakhstan, one of the country's leading telecommunications operators, used the activation to position its mobile internet infrastructure as the connective tissue of the event, broadcasting the amateur Mountennis tournament online through its network coverage. The campaign spans the Electronics, Technology, and Sports categories and is represented by a single consolidated media asset. Clapboard Score: 78/100.
Beeline Kazakhstan operates in a competitive telecommunications market where brand differentiation increasingly depends on cultural relevance rather than product specification alone. In Kazakhstan, the telecom sector sits within a broader Asia-Pacific region that accounted for approximately 40.18% of global telecom market revenue in 2025 and was forecast to grow at 6.66% annually, according to Grand View Research. Against that backdrop, Beeline faced the specific challenge of activating a premium sports sponsorship — the Almaty Open ATP 250 — in a market where tennis participation and spectatorship remained comparatively low relative to the tournament's international standing.
The strategic insight underpinning Mountennis was direct. Passive sponsorship — logo placement, courtside banners, broadcast spots — would not move an indifferent public toward a sport they had limited emotional connection with. GForce Grey instead pursued physical participation as the mechanism for shifting that indifference, inviting Almaty residents to play tennis themselves on a court that made the game visually arresting and geographically specific. By staging the amateur event on a mountain slope, the campaign made tennis indigenous to Almaty rather than imported from the international circuit.
In the Kazakhstan telecommunications market, Beeline competes directly with Kazakhtelecom and Tele2 Kazakhstan for mobile subscriber share. Differentiation through cultural sponsorship and experiential technology demonstration — such as live streaming the Mountennis event via Beeline's own mobile internet infrastructure — positions the brand not merely as a connectivity provider but as an enabler of shared public experience. The campaign's integration of 5G and mobile internet capability into a live, participatory outdoor event reflects a broader industry shift, noted by Precedence Research, in which mobile and wireless services represented approximately 45% of global telecommunications revenue in 2025.
GForce Grey constructed a genuinely novel piece of experiential infrastructure for the Mountennis activation. The agency built a functional tennis court on a mountain slope outside Almaty, introducing an incline that made every rally a physical negotiation with gravity and terrain. The court was not a simulation or a stylised rendering — it was a playable surface positioned within a real mountain landscape, making the visual spectacle inseparable from the participatory experience.
Yevgeniy Kostylev, Executive Creative Director at GForce Grey, drove the conceptual framework that tied the court's design to Almaty's geographic identity. The decision to slope the court was not arbitrary difficulty engineering; it was a deliberate act of place-making, grounding an international tennis tournament in the specific topography of its host city. That creative logic gave the campaign coherence: the Almaty Open was not merely happening in Kazakhstan, it was of Kazakhstan, and Mountennis made that argument physically.
The two-day amateur tournament held on October 5 and 6, 2024, was broadcast live online using Beeline Kazakhstan's mobile internet network, which embedded the brand's technology proposition directly into the creative execution rather than treating it as an adjacent sponsorship message. The campaign format — classified as ambient, experiential, and out-of-home — relied on the court itself as its primary media unit. Production credits for the Mountennis campaign are attributed to GForce Grey, Almaty, with Yevgeniy Kostylev named as Executive Creative Director and Yuliya Tushina serving as CEO of the agency at the time of production. The campaign was submitted to industry platforms in February 2025, approximately three months after the live event concluded.
ARCHIVEMountennis generated documented reach of approximately 1.2 million people in Almaty, a city of roughly 2 million residents, according to reporting by Tribune Kz and Adobo Magazine. The Almaty Open ATP 250 itself drew approximately 40,000 spectators, as reported by Tribune.kz and Adobo Magazine, a figure that represents meaningful attendance for a professional tennis tournament in a market where the sport has historically attracted limited public engagement.
The campaign's industry recognition is substantive and independently verified. At the Ad Black Sea 2025 festival, Mountennis received Gold awards in four categories — Advertising Campaigns, PR Campaigns, Out of Home, and Experiential — along with a Silver award in a fifth category, according to One Club for Creativity and White Square Festival records. That breadth of recognition across both creative and effectiveness categories reflects the campaign's dual strength: conceptual originality and demonstrable public impact.
No granular performance data — such as brand lift scores, subscriber acquisition figures, or digital engagement metrics — is publicly available for the Mountennis campaign at the time of writing. The verified reach figure and attendance statistic, sourced from Tribune.kz and Adobo Magazine, provide the primary quantitative evidence of the campaign's public penetration. Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness derives from its conversion of a single experiential installation into a media event capable of generating earned coverage, social conversation, and measurable footfall at the Almaty Open itself. Clapboard Score for Mountennis stands at 78 out of 100, reflecting strong creative ambition and verified cultural impact within the Kazakhstan market.
Mountennis is an experiential campaign created by GForce Grey for Beeline Kazakhstan in 2025. The activation built the world's first sloped tennis court on a mountainside near Almaty to promote the Almaty Open ATP 250 tournament and encourage public attendance. The amateur two-day tournament was broadcast live via Beeline's mobile internet network.
GForce Grey, an Almaty-based advertising agency, created the Mountennis campaign for Beeline Kazakhstan. Yevgeniy Kostylev served as Executive Creative Director and Yuliya Tushina was CEO of GForce Grey. The agency has maintained a documented working relationship with Beeline Kazakhstan since June 2022, according to Designer Kz.
Mountennis reached approximately 1.2 million people in Almaty, a city of around 2 million residents, according to Tribune.kz and Adobo Magazine. The Almaty Open ATP 250 tournament associated with the campaign drew approximately 40,000 spectators, as reported by those same sources, indicating strong public mobilisation across Kazakhstan's largest city.
Mountennis won four Gold awards at Ad Black Sea 2025 — in Advertising Campaigns, PR Campaigns, Out of Home, and Experiential categories — plus a Silver award in a fifth category, according to One Club for Creativity and White Square Festival records. The multi-category recognition affirms the campaign's creative and strategic effectiveness across formats.
Beeline Kazakhstan broadcast the Mountennis amateur tournament live online using its own mobile internet infrastructure. This integration embedded Beeline's technology proposition directly into the experiential event rather than positioning it as a separate sponsorship message, demonstrating the network's live-streaming capability to audiences across Kazakhstan during the October 2024 activation.
Executive Creative Director Yevgeniy Kostylev designed the sloped court to reflect Almaty's own mountainside topography, making the court a physical expression of the city's geography. The design grounded an international ATP 250 tournament in local identity, transforming passive sponsorship into a participatory cultural statement specific to Kazakhstan's largest and most recognisable urban landscape.
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