It's totally reflexive. It was an experiment in how far you can take an absurd idea using all the devices of advertising and propaganda used to infiltrate a society. What Fairey did was create a marketing campaign without a product - a somewhat radical demonstration of the superiority image has over product in today's consumer market. There's nothing to buy but more ads for Giant. Where once it was the goal of the marketeer to convince people of the efficacy and utility of a certain product, now it is commonly accepted that the product, as in the case of Giant, is secondary to the lifestyle image it is deemed to represent.
Solid products are merely incidental to information movement.
Let's look more closely at how this works. Recently, I was contacted about putting an ad banner for TD Bank on the website of my small magazine on underground culture in Canada. I politely declined, then asked the fellow if he would mind meeting with me to answer a few questions. Surprisingly, my caller was eager to talk. We set up a meeting, at which point I asked him what the TD cyber-campaign was all about.