Today there was a red dot over my Dropbox icon, with no obvious explanation. After Web searching, I found out that this means a notification is available. I had to search in Dropbox to find how to read the notifications, then I found that it was advertising for the paid Dropbox plans.
My suggestions are two:
1. Allow a click on the red dot (and something appropriate on the keyboard) to read notifications so we don't have to hunt down how to read them.
2. Stop advertising through notifications. A notification might be something important, but when it turns out just to be representative of the usual corporate greed, that is very uncomfortable.