It would be great if the Comms team had the people resources to create specific campaigns around code pushes and what have you?

Oh, yes. And they'd still need the deploy they're campaigning about not to have any glaring problems that everyone will notice first and jump on (especially not avoidable ones). Even if there had been a specific campaign around this one, most of the team's hard work would have gone down the drain the minute the changes went live and the obvious problems caught everyone's attention. Hopefully this won't result in people thinking that skins=hot mess for years.