Jeremy,
I'm going to answer "yes", but only because I tweaked your question a bit to "Can SEO help explainer videos reach more people?" As Moosa pointed out, (explainer) videos are just another form of content that search engines and other sites can make readily available to people at a moment when they might be most likely to consume it. As an obvious example, if Google determines that a certain video is among the best answers to a searcher's query, it will list that video more highly in their results and the searcher can click through to experience it.
A difference between video and other content, especially web page content, is that video has places in addition to traditional search engines like Google and Bing, where a searcher may go to find it--places such as youtube, vimeo, facebook, etc. As mentioned in the article you referred to, people spend a lot of time at these sites and spend substantial amounts of time watching videos.
But videos do take some amount of written content and meta data associated with them in order for search engines to associate their message with particular searches. And for even broader reach, videos need to have a reason for people to share them with others. These are the SEO-type factors that many webmasters overlook and the factors that sources such as your article seem to take for granted.will happen. The truth is that (understandably) most webmasters don't have a clue of how to associate their video with proper content/meta data and most explainer videos have little to no "share it others" value--either because tools provided by the video creation platform don't make it possible or because the creator just isn't very good at making sharable videos.
As there are now many, many companies that make explainer videos easily available today, a differentiator between those companies would be if they also promoted a service that maximizes the video's visibility for the client. Such a service would delve into the heart and soul of the question that the video is meant to answer to ensure that it is, in fact, answering the right question for the right audience; it would ensure that the right vocabulary is utilized in associated copy and meta data; it would ensure that it is uploaded to theme-appropriate location on the web; and might even provide outreach to webmasters who might be willing to repost or link to the video--all the the SEO-type things that actually make it possible for a video to reach an audience beyond those who might otherwise just have come across it by accident.